The internet is packed with articles on how to achieve “work-life” balance.

The internet is stuffed with articles on how work life impacts family life – usually negatively.

The internet is bare-shelved and dusty on the question, “How does home life impact work life?”

Every supervisor and employer knows that it does. We usually notice this when there are challenges: The Monday Flu, actual illnesses in the family, distracted employees, covering employees’ absences due to family leave.

We often don’t clearly see the benefits of a healthy home life on work. But they exist and they are powerful and substantive. Particularly for leaders.

(If you don’t have close family, it is possible that many of these benefits can be achieved from other long-term relationships with people you share a high-level of closeness to.)

Home Life Is a Leadership Laboratory

Our home lives are leadership laboratories. In these laboratories we have endless opportunities to test and refine our answers to these two questions:

Questions 1 – Who Am I? Leadership comes from within. It isn’t an external set of skills. We lead out of who we are. So, self-development is leadership development.

Questions 2 – How Do I Relate to Others? Leadership is also, always, a relationship. A relationship between the leader and those influenced or led. So, learning to relate well is leadership development.

At home I can’t escape who I am. My values, my priorities, my perceptions – they show up. They pop out. It’s too hard, for most people, to perpetually manage a façade. For most of us, who we really are in celebration or defeat, when relaxed or stressed, in our ups or our downs, emerges at home.

And that is good.

Family life is a limitless set of opportunities to develop and improve on my answers to the two questions above.

Ten Ways Your Leadership Is Improved by Your Family Life (In no particular order):

1. Conflict Resolution: Conflict exists any time there is a disagreement over something important to two or more people. It’s common in families. Yet, conflict doesn’t have to be negative, destructive or bad. In fact, it can be an opportunity.

How we choose to relate to conflict is what makes the difference. Families are a great place to practice. Choosing not to be conflict avoidant requires that we learn to be authentic and to respectfully advance our own interests. Choosing not to be controlling or dominating means that we learn to listen more effectively and to regard the interests of others.

2. Managing Multiple Demands & Responsibilities: Family life provides ample opportunities to improve our ability to manage and delegate. Juggling multiple schedules, personalities, skills, developmental and maturity levels, budgets, goals and obligations isn’t easy.

However, it is an opportunity to learn to develop the attitudes and systems that allow us to accomplish more with the same (or even less) effort.

3. Emotional Intelligence & Empathy: One of the most critical soft skills for leaders is the ability to interact effectively with others well on an emotional level. Research demonstrates that leaders who are highly “emotionally intelligent” are able to accomplish more on their teams and their departments or companies are more profitable.

Practicing listening skills with a spouse or children, learning to hear what is meant behind what is said, learning to respond well, to anticipate needs, to defuse anger or frustration, to encourage and support are all skills that are too often in short supply on the job site or in the board room.

4. Selflessness: Not the most popular word running around. However, a selfish person is a difficult person to be around. A selfish leader is difficult to trust. Families provide excellent (and endless) opportunities to practice doing things that you’d rather not do for the benefit of others.

Leaders who can learn to do what they’d rather not do for the benefit of followers, teams or organizations have already, automatically, been given an edge.

5. Managing What You Can’t Control: I once read research (conducted on male managers) found that men who were fathers tended to be the most effective managers. This benefit only seemed to kick in when their children were in their adolescent years.

It was theorized that this was because these managers had, essentially, learned to live out the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” They had learned to stay on course even when they couldn’t control everything or everyone.

6. Patience: Waiting for my 2-year old to, “Do it myself” until he finally gives up and lets me buckle him in. Cleaning up for the 5^th time that evening. Picking up the pieces of whatever was most recently broken. Rereading the credit card bill. Going back for whatever was forgotten. Again. Opportunities to practice Patience.

Patience. The ability to wait and the ability to withhold reaction. Patience with employees, patience with customers, patience with programs, processes and systems. There are few places where more patience isn’t of value at work.

7. Situational Leadership: It is common for leaders to say, “Well, that is my leadership style. They’ll have to get used to it.” Situational leadership is a concept made famous by Ken Blanchard. Essentially it challenges the concept that a leader can afford to have a rigid or unadaptable “leadership style.” If leaders want to bring out the best performance, they need to adapt their leadership to the maturity, motivation and skills of those lead.

In family life, there is never just one way to be a spouse, a partner or a parent. Learning when to be flexible and when not to yield. When to be tender and when to be firm. When to coach and teach and when to insist and require.

8. Social Connections: Families introduce you to others. I’m an introvert so I like to let other people to the heavy social lifting. But even for extroverts, families develop their own social networks – My wife’s friends and professional relationships. The parents of my children’s friends. In-laws. School. Sports. Church. Clubs. Connections.

All new people, new perspectives, new opportunities to get to know people who we might learn from grow from, do business with, partner with or in other ways find a mutual benefit with.

9. Creativity: Families offer opportunities for creativity. The uniqueness of the challenges that can emerge, the differences of perspectives that can exist, the wild imaginations of children, the opportunity to be exposed to music or entertainment or books or other people you might not normally gravitate towards are all opportunities for ideas and innovation.

10. Stability and Self-Care: Families, particularly if we are willing to invest in developing them, can be places of great stability and security. A place where we can relax, take the game-face off, be encouraged and be accepted for something other than work-related performance. Family, can become a place of healing and restoration.

Can You Afford Not to Invest in Your Family?

Entrepreneurs who develop a supportive relationship with their spouses are far more likely to be successful then those who don’t.

Executives who learn to build healthy home lives will experience increased personal, physical health – decreases in stress-related illnesses. They’ll be more focused and creative at work.

Managers who learn how to be effective parents and supportive spouses will intrinsically learn skills that will help them be successful in getting the best out of their teams or departments.

Which one of the ten work-place benefits above have you experienced from your family life? What is one way that you can invest in your family so you can benefit, at work, in a new way?