On Setting Healthy Boundaries as a Leader

by Alexa Le

Photo Credit: Unsplash

I often compare leadership to a puzzle. There is an abundance of different pieces, each playing a quintessential role in the journey to become a great leader. Strength, communication, passion, and many more; however, I feel as though one piece we tend to neglect is boundaries.

While not often talked about, setting healthy boundaries is a key skill that a leader must possess for not only the well-being of those who work under said leader, but for the leader’s well-being as well.

In fact, you can look at the ability to set healthy boundaries as a subset in the larger skill of communication. When you set boundaries, you define what you are comfortable with and what you are not, or what someone with a specific job is expected to do. It’s something that many people, not just leaders, are surprisingly shy about. It’s surprising because I personally believe that this is such a necessary part of having healthy relationships with the people around you. 

I’ll give you an example (on a smaller scale). When I was first establishing my club at my high school with my co-president, we were tasked with building a team of board members. Everyone knows that having a strong support system is crucial for success, and that was our main focus. However, that also meant re-evaluating the board members who had been selected by the previous presidents, and one in particular did not seem especially passionate about our mission. Instead of working with the rest of the team, this board member lacked initiative and failed to complete his duties. He expected that we, as leaders, would merely pick up his slack and fulfill what he was supposed to do. Thus, my co-president and I scheduled a meeting with him to set boundaries and expectations. We had to emphasize that we were not okay with his inability to perform his responsibilities, a line that we thought we had drawn at the beginning but one that was evidently crossed. After the meeting, he became a much more productive and contributing member of the board. And in retrospect, all of this could have been avoided by setting clearer boundaries in the first place. 

An important nuance that must be highlighted to understand why so many leaders are reluctant to set these boundaries in the first place has to do with the desire of many leaders to be well-liked by their employees. No one enjoys being seen as uptight or overly controlling, even if setting boundaries is nothing more than an aspect of that leadership. 

But leadership is about making the hard decisions, which is what makes it so difficult and nuanced in the first place. While setting boundaries might be, and often times is, uncomfortable, it will make the road ahead much smoother and direct for all parties involved.