The Manage IT Newsletter - Restoring your balance and managing your energy for top personal and business results:

This focuses on steps IT professionals can take to increase their personal career value and enjoyment of life by restoring their work-life balance and improving on their energy management practices.

Welcome to the July 2004 issue of the "Manage IT Newsletter." This monthly publication is a part mentoring and part coaching tool dedicated to helping IT managers enjoy a richer career experience so they can reach their full potential.

In this information-packed issue we will look at the how you can improve your work-life balance as well as your personal energy management in order to increase your enjoyment of life as well as your market value. I thank the following experts for their contribution to the ideas presented in this issue: Bruce Van Horn, the CEO of Yogaforbusiness.com, and Drs. Krista Kurth and Suzanne Adele Schmidt, co-owners of Renewal Resources.

I thrust you will find the advice in this issue valuable to both your personal life and your career. Please do share this newsletter with your network, friends and colleagues. If you are an IT executive or HR professional, pass a copy of this newsletter on to your IT managers. A FREE subscription is available by sending a blank email to: ManageITNewsletter-on@zines.webvalence.com

If, at any time, you wish to be removed from this list, simply send a blank email to: ManageITNewsletter-off@zines.webvalence.com

With warmest regards,
Joe Santana,
Co-author Manage IT
www.joesantana.com
***************************In this Issue ****************************
* Focus Topic: Improve your vitality and improve your worth
* IT Management News & Trends: Articles on work-life balance and energy management
* Tip Sheet: Seven ways to restore your balance and your personal energy management
* Closing Comments and Announcements
*********************************************************************

--------------------------- Focus Topic -----------------------------
Improve your vitality and improve your worth

Go into the offices of any company in one of many developed countries today and you are very likely to hear everyone from managers to staff members talking about logging marathon work hours. In IT especially, you will find that hyper-activity is standard operation. For these people going out to lunch, having dinner with families and taking vacations have become practices of a distant past. Many of the people I speak with feel the collective strain of neglected homes, families, friends and activities they vaguely remember enjoying. These people are all practicing a new breed of stoic self-sacrificing "workaholism."

So, what can drive someone just like you to forgo healthy habits, give up family, friends and pleasurable activities that renew them? Why would you ignore signals of fatigue and burnout while continuing to push beyond the point of pain? According to Bruce Van Horn, the CEO of Yogaforbusiness.com (www.Yogaforbusiness.com) and author of "Firm Footing in a Changing Marketplace," one primary reason is fear. Other experts point out that habit and workplace cultures that support workaholic practices also serve as powerful driving forces.

The fear, habits and culture elements that drive hyperactivity

Despite the prevalent belief that people who work this way do so because they want to or because they believe it is the most productive way to operate, there is ample evidence to the contrary. If you are quietly plugging away unhappily and realizing that this is not the best way to get results, you are not alone. For example, more than 20% of the participants in Investors in People's survey responded that overwork stress was the single biggest barrier to their output. Furthermore, most of the professionals that I spoke to around the world (over 26 countries) considered themselves to be "running on empty". This ongoing, relentless pace results in errors and rework - in other words lower productivity and higher frustration.

When you ask these people, why they do this, common responses are:

* Because I have to or I will lose my job to someone who is willing to do whatever it takes." In other words, these employees have concluded that their managers are measuring the value of their contribution based on the frenzy of their activity as opposed to the real total quality of their output.

* Other people may not be in the grip of job loss fear, but they simply cannot imagine working any other way. "I often find it hard to walk out of the office at 6pm even after my work is done when I look around and see most of my colleagues still in the office until way past 8pm," states one anonymous commentator.

* Still another tells me that they've worked from 7am to 8pm six days per week and mornings on Sunday for so long that it just feels wrong to work fewer hours.

When we look at recent business history, it's easy to spot the elements that have spawned this work frenzy. Economic slowdowns, the collapse of the Internet bubble, the rise in offshore outsourcing, increased global competition, "service commoditization" - all recent trends resulting in continuous corporate and individual employee turbulence. Many managers have responded to these growing competitive pressures by pouring more hours into their jobs and demanding more hard work and activity from their team members. One senior manager I recently heard about, told his team in a speech intended to whip them up to a new level of hard work that, "They could sleep when they retired."

So what are the messages to you as employees:

* Life and business have gotten tougher

* You've got to work longer hours and at a faster pace

* Skip meals and breaks

* Skip vacations

* Spend less time with family and friends

* Pass over the invitation to play tennis or golf with friends.

* Be manic and make the workplace, your place of worship, your home and your hobby.

The result is people who either from fear and/or habit supported by a corporate culture of overwork do nothing but work most of the time to the exclusion of rest and any semblance of a personal life. In essence by pouring all of the extra personal and staff hours taken out of their collective lives and rest time into their work, the managers in these organizations believe they and their teams are being more productive and effectively fighting the competition. The problem is that according to the facts and experts these practices do not result in increased productivity for organizations. In fact you will find that the truth is quite the opposite.
The business and personal case for building and supporting balance and energy management

There are clearly hard dollar costs incurred by companies as a result of overwork. According to studies by the National Institute of Occupational Health, American industries incur losses of more than $300 billion a year comprised among other things of absenteeism, employee turnover, and workers' compensation benefits directly resulting from the prevailing practices of overwork. Furthermore, experts, such as Dr. Krista Kurth and Dr. Suzanne Adele Schmidt, co-authors of "Running on Plenty at Work," and co-owners of Renewal Resources (www.renewalatwork.com), tell us that even when employees show up to work, their exhaustion is silently bleeding away corporate profit. "If people push through when they are tired, research shows it can take them up to five times longer to get something done as opposed to how the same person performs when they are at their full energy level," states Kurth. To drive her point home, Kurth shared with me the story of a young woman that put in a sixteen-hour day in order to meet her boss's deadline for a presentation. The next morning when she arrived at the office she discovered to her horror that in her "zombiefied," sleep deprived state she had sent him the wrong presentation. The net results for this overworked lady was a big delay in producing the desired end result.

Another, "softer," yet equally important loss in organizations where people are overworking is the toll on creativity. Organizations that are populated by folks that are running around in a frenzy are simply not going to be the places where people frequently come up with competitive advantage producing ideas. As pointed out by author Tom DeMarco in his 2002 book titled "Slack," without "slack there is no room for creativity". Van Horn agrees with this and cites reduction of creativity as one of the biggest losses due to overwork stress. "We need to be human beings not human doers. Human doers risk turning their businesses into mindless commodity operations, with negative long-term consequences to the company and its competitiveness," states Van Horn. Unfortunately, as Van Horn points out, our accounting systems are not designed to capture these types of loss or costs on the balance sheet. Common sense, however, clearly tells us that there is a loss of value to the company when its people are not effectively and frequently producing new competitive ideas.

Finally, on a personal level, it is prudent for you to strive for optimal balance and energy management. Your value to employer/company is ultimately predicated on the results you produce. Clearly evidence shows that prolonged work-life imbalance and/or poor energy management results in loss of personal productivity. In fact, a consistent pattern of self-abuse over an extended period of time can and does lead to severe health problems that my put your life as well as career in jeopardy.
So the bottom-line is simply this: these marathon work efforts do not profit employers, stockholders or you. What they actually do is cost companies money and reduce your overall productivity, creativity and value to your organization. So what can you do to achieve more balance, increase your energy and in the process increase your happiness and effectiveness? I invite you to go to this months tip sheet for seven suggestions that you can put to work right away. http://www.joesantana.com/tip18.htm

-------------------- IT Management News and Trends ------------------
This month, we offer you three select articles that look at ways that you can help you assess and increase your current work-life balance.

A web site containing a collection of work-life balance resources.
http://164.36.164.20/work-lifebalance/index.html

Is your work-life in balance? Take the quiz below and then read the article that follows "Ten tips for getting your work/life balance."
http://www.quintcareers.com/work-life_balance_quiz.html

An article titled "Ten tips for getting your work/life balance.
http://www.quintcareers.com/work-life_balance_tips.html

--------------------------- Tip Sheet -------------------------------
For seven things you can do to increase your work-life balance and improve your energy management, go to July 04 tip sheet at http://www.joesantana.com/freenewsandtips.htm

----------------- Closing Thoughts and Announcements ----------------

WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT PROS AROUND THE WORLD THINK?
Join to the IT Professional World Wide network at http://itpww1-network.ryze.com (Membership continues to grow at a phenomenal rate and it is still free). Many members are using this network to find mentors, discover job opportunities, and find candidates for open positions and much more.

WANT TO LEARN WHAT TO OUTSOURCE FOR TOP RETURN ON INVESTMENT?
Get your copy of the audio program titled "Doing more with less through IT Outsourcing," at http://store.mixonic.com/joesantana

WANT TO HELP YOUR FRIENDS LOOKING FOR ADVICE ON HOW TO FIGHT BURNOUT AND ACHIEVE PEAK PERFORMANCE
Have them visit www.joesantana.com and sign up for the free TIPS DRIVING PEAK PERFORMANCE EMAIL SEMINAR. Delivered over seven days, this program is packed with advice that can immediately be put to use by a rookie or a veteran IT manager. (HR pros will also find it a rich source of ideas they can use to coach IT managers).

NEED HELP QUICKLY BUILDING A PIPELINE OF CANDIDATES.
Contact EmployeeROI www.employeeroi.com/1-888-654-8845

I hope you enjoyed this issue of the IT Managers Newsletter. As always, your feedback on topics that interest you is always appreciated.

JS