Victor’s 10 Reflections on Leadership - 9 Know your boundaries and honor them fully
Steve Rosvold 00:05
Welcome to CFO talk. I’m your host, Steve Rosvold, Chief Learning Officer at CFO.University.
Joining us from Wichita, Kansas today is Victor Ojeleye. Your ninth observation is about your boundaries and how to honor them fully. I’d like to understand what you mean by that and how you use it?
Victor Ojeleye 00:29
This is a focus on myself. It is a self-care topic. And this one is about sharing energy between work and community. As committed as I am to work, it absorbs a lot of my energy. But my community is important too and also absorbs a lot of my energy.
What are the boundaries of connectivity? Where am I connected to work. We all have the work cell phone, we have our computer, we’ve got email. And so one of the things that I’ve actually done is, I have left work email off of my personal iPad. That’s the one place at home where I can do family, I can do leisure, I can do personal business. And I won’t get an email from work to distract me. This has helped me reshape and construct my own boundary, in a sense, my right to have that wall up, that, hey, this is a safe space, it’s not going to set off an alarm that says, in my mind, I’ve got to get something done.
So, when you see an email, or the badge on your phone, you’ve got 10 unread emails, you feel a need to do something. So turning that off and creating that quiet space is part of my self care.
The second kind of mechanism I’ve done is with my weekends. We all get 52 or so weekends a year. A friend helped me position my view on weekends as 52 vacations a year, use them wisely. And so, it’s interesting, what I’ve tried to do is shift the way I work to a pace that allows my weekends to be vacations. I go really hard on Monday through Friday, and that might mean six to six or six to eight o’clock. And it’s going to ebb and flow depending on the projects. But that way I can protect the weekend and honor that time, that’s for myself, or my family, or whatever hobbies I’m doing. And then also honoring my commitments.
There have been times when I’ve had community service events or dinners with large companies in town, and I’ve said, ‘ Sorry, I made a commitment on coaching basketball tonight, I can’t go’ . And there was one such event where we had a conflict, I hadn’t looked at the calendar, and I said, Hey, it’s more important for me to invest in these youth, than go to the event. And then same thing, you know, it’s just honoring the commitments around. If you have to leave for work to pick up your kids. If you have, you know, childcare if you’ve got a mom or dad you’re taking care of, we all have different things. It’s just that reminder that we’ve got to set the boundaries. Work will always be there, something I’m really still struggling to figure out how to set these ground rules.
Actually, the iPad thing was a challenge from a friend who knows, I like tech, but they said, Hey, try it, try this for a month, don’t don’t install outlook on your iPad and see how it goes. And I’ve been doing it for six months. So it’s been awesome to have that. And then if I know, I’m going to work, I also found that the work I would do is much better, because I know that I will use my work computer, it’ll be a targeted effort, high quality effort, and then there’s not a mix between me trying to be connected right on, you know, on my personal iPad, and it’s a work email. So creating those boundaries. I have targeting very focused work within discrete timelines and it seems to be working.
Steve Rosvold 03:56
That whole topic between work life balance or work life integration, or whatever people want to call it is whole CFO Talk in itself. You have an excellent method to consciously establish your boundaries. Some of us get in the habit of doing and not reflecting on all the impact around us. That can mushroom into something you never thought you would be a part of. So, having those boundaries and consciously thinking about them is really helpful.
That wraps up this video short taken from our longer interview with Victor, Reflections on Leadership. CFO.University is a community of member scholars, companies and trusted advisors committed to the professional development of chief financial officers. Learn more about us at CFO.University.
Until next time, Enjoy. Learn. Engage
Find Victor’s other Reflections on Leadership HERE
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