Chapter 9: Keep Your Balance

Overview

After six years in the Manhattan office of a large advertising company, Kipp Erikson was promoted to a senior position at the firm s Canadian unit. He expected the move from New York to Toronto to be a breeze . After all, Canadians and Americans are pretty much alike. Although Canada is officially bilingual, everyone in Toronto spoke English. And the city was safe and reputed to have good restaurants and cultural events.

Kipp moved right away, rented an apartment in downtown Toronto, and dove into the new job with his usual energy. His wife, Irene, an accomplished freelance interior designer, put their co-op apartment up for sale and started preparing their two children, Katherine, 10, and Elizabeth, 7, for a mid-school-year move. Kipp and Irene had talked about postponing moving the children until the end of the school year, four months away, but decided that it was too long to have the family separated.

The first hints of trouble in the new job were subtle. Every time he tried to get something done, Kipp felt like he was wading through molasses. As a lifelong New Yorker accustomed to telling things the way they were, he also found his new colleagues irritatingly polite and conflict averse. (For their part, they were taken aback by a brashness that bordered on insensitivity.) At every opportunity, Kipp complained to Irene that his colleagues refused to engage in hardheaded discussion about the tough issues. And he couldn t find the kind of go-to people he had relied on to get things done in New York.

Four weeks after Kipp started the job, Irene joined him in Toronto to look for a new house and school and to scope out prospects for continuing her freelance design work. Kipp was frustrated with the job and irritable. Irene s unhappiness quickly mounted when she couldn t find a school to her liking. The children had been happily enrolled in an excellent private school. They were displeased about moving and had been making Irene s life miserable. She had calmed them with stories about the adventure of moving to a new country and promises that she would find them a great new school. Dispirited, she told Kipp that she thought they should leave the kids where they were until the end of the year; he agreed.

With Kipp commuting between Toronto and New York, and Irene under pressure as a working single parent, events quickly took a toll on their relationship. Although Irene visited Toronto for a couple of weekends and continued looking into schools , it became clear that her heart was not in the move. Weekends often were stressful, with the children both happy to see Kipp and unhappy about the move. Kipp often arrived back in the office on Mondays tired and unable to concentrate, aggravating his difficulties getting traction and connecting with his colleagues and team. He knew his work performance was suffering, which further increased his stress level.

Eventually he decided to force the issue. Through connections at the company, he found a good school and identified some promising housing prospects. But when he pressed Irene to get going on selling their apartment, the result was the worst fight of their marriage . When it became clear that their relationship was being jeopardized, Kipp quit and returned to New York to look for a new job.

The life of a leader is always a balancing act, but never more so than during a transition. The uncertainty and ambiguity can be crippling. You don t even know what you don t know. You haven t had a chance to build a support network. If you have moved, as Kipp Erikson did, you re also in transition personally . If you have a family, they too are in transition. Amid all this turmoil, you are expected to get acclimated quickly and begin to effect positive change in your new organization. For all these reasons, keeping your balance is a key transition challenge.

Are you focusing on the right things in the right way? Are you maintaining your energy and keeping your perspective? Are you and your family getting the support you need? As Ron Heifetz put it in Leadership Without Easy Answers, The myth of leadership is the myth of the lone warrior: the solitary individual whose heroism and brilliance enable him to lead the way. . . . [But] even if the weight of carrying people s hopes and pains may fall mainly , for a time, on one person s shoulders, leadership cannot be exercised alone. The lone warrior model of leadership is heroic suicide. ^[1] So don t try to go it alone.

^[1] See Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1994), 251.