Leaders get pulled between two supposedly opposing goals: engage people harder or protect their work-life balance. A September 2020 meta-analysis in Human Resource Development Review synthesized 37 studies and found engagement and work-life balance are not opposites at all, they are reciprocal. High engagement raises work-life balance; high work-life balance raises engagement. The leadership task is not choosing one. It is designing the conditions that let both compound.

Today's employers have a love-hate relationship with technologically facilitated work. In 2017, the popular business press declared that the permanent telecommuter had officially gone extinct. Yet that same year, the Society for Human Resource Management reported that organizations offering some form of telecommuting arrangement had grown from 20% in 1996 to more than 60%. High-profile reversals at Yahoo and IBM made headlines, while quietly, more than 70% of employers contin