Executive Summary: An effective leader has balance. Balance in the decisions they make, balance in what they commit their energies to, and balance in their life. Balance comes from the decisions one makes and the value the place on those decisions.

Have you ever wondered why there may be an internal pressure that builds around the decisions you make or need to make? Maybe that is because you put too much pressure and weight in the wrong place when it comes to making decisions. Effective managerial-leaders decisions may be made in a quiet manner, they typically have loud impact.

When making decisions that may have professional implication in ones’ life, consider the personal applications to those decisions? Here is a model that may assist in illustrating that all decisions we make can be attributed to one of nine areas of your life. Imagine a pie-chart diagram. In that diagram there are nine pie-shaped wedges. In no order of importance, just label in clock-wise direction one wedge at a time with the following labels or categories:

1. Personal
2. Financial
3. Community
4. Professional
5. Inspirational
6. Spiritual
7. Health
8. Education
9. Social

Now these wedges or categories represent the areas in which we invest time and energy each day. These are where you set goals, plan, prioritize, and commit or not yourself. Within the nine if you factored out of every twenty-four hour cycle the time you sleep, recognize which wedges on average you actually spend the most time within?

For most people it is not a matter of right versus wrong, like versus dislike, the reality is that the wedge we invest the majority of our waking time in is: Professional!

If you are not clear on each wedge or category as it comes to making decisions and how you approach them, one ineffective or bad decision in one area can dramatically and critically influence the next. It can become a cascading ripple of one bad decision compounding the next bad decision. To focus one what really matters in making any decision and in each of the nine pie-wedged categories, either independent of one another or in concert with one another, consider two benchmarking questions for each wedge or category.

View each wedge now as if it were a measuring scale, with the center of the circle a “zero score” and the outer perimeter of the pie-chart circular diagram a “ten score” and with this scoring model, now score each of the nine wedges or categories as follows:

1. MEASUREMENT QUESTION ONE – How well do I feel I do this category in general terms, right now in my life. So for example in scoring PROFESSIONAL if you felt pretty good about where you are in your career, business, or professional life right now then you would score outward on the scale around eight, nine, or ten. Conversely if you did not feel good about where you are in your career, business, or profession right now, then you might score yourself five, four, or a three on the scale.

2. MEASUREMENT QUESTION TWO – How important to me is this category is a much more important question. Here is where balance is achieved and thus the real guide post to the decisions you commit to comes from this score. Now go back to each of the same nine wedges or categories and now put as an over-lay a second score and that would be for how important is that category to you though in your life right now!

Benchmarking what you commit to for personal professional balance comes from recognizing that if you score high on how well you do something, yet it is not important to you, you are out of balance and committing too much time to causes that others prescribe to and for you. Conversely if you score low on how well you do something and it is important to you, you would also be out of balance.

Balance comes from first recognizing what is important to you, and then committing energies, resources, and talents to those wedges or categories. When people are out of balance they are not 100 percent present, nor engaged in their work, their organization, their community, or with themselves!

So is it time to get you and your team into balance?