If you are a CEO, founder or senior leader in a season where work has quietly taken over everything else, Mark McClain would tell you this isn’t a failure. But it is a warning.
McClain, the CEO of SailPoint, doesn’t buy the glossy version of work-life balance, the one where everything stays neatly aligned, week after week, like a perfectly tuned machine. He believes that idea sets leaders up to feel guilty for doing exactly what leadership often requires.
What he believes in instead is something far more honest.
“It’s kind of a temporary healthy imbalance,” McClain told me on a recent episode of the Corporate Competitor Podcast. “They’re never perfectly balanced, right? But you want that imbalance to be fairly healthy and constantly readjusting it…and by definition, it’s temporary.”
That one word “temporary” is where McClain draws the line between a demanding season and a dangerous pattern. Because intense work is part of leadership. So are family pressures, health challenges and crises you didn’t schedule.
McClain uses a metaphor he’s leaned on for years to explain it: your life is a wheel. Each spoke represents a dimension that matters: Health, family, friendships, hobbies, faith, career and more. When one spoke weakens, the wheel doesn’t glide forward. It clunks. And most leaders don’t hear the clunking at first.
That’s why McClain regularly grades the major areas of his life on a one-to-ten scale. Not to chase perfection, but to spot drift early. As he put it, “If we correct early, then it’s not so hard to get back on track.”
Small slippage is manageable. Long-ignored slippage isn’t.
To be clear, McClain’s message isn’t “work less.” It’s “stop pretending the wheel will fix itself.” Leadership requires boundaries in both directions: choosing what you will do, like exercise, quiet time and being fully present with the people who matter most; and choosing what you won’t keep doing, like mindless scrolling, energy-draining habits or letting small slips turn into permanent decline.
The SailPoint Technologies founder talks about this and more on our podcast:
• Culture is key. A career in business won’t always yield fruit, McClain says. Still, it’s important to create a culture to combat those lean times. “I think in the world of business, culture is what you are when bad things happen,” he says. “If you don’t value people, that will show up in the long-run.”
• Know your values. When hiring new employees, McClain says he looks for humility, hunger and emotional intelligence. “Humility is not thinking less of yourself than you should; it’s just thinking of yourself less,” the CEO offers. “Hunger is just like…do you! [And] emotional intelligence is huge. You’ve got to learn how to play well with others.”
• The 90/10 rule. At work, McClain says, balance remains key. It’s crucial to focus on the task at hand, he notes, but it’s also important to keep an eye to the future. So, the CEO says, spend 90 percent of your time on your job. But spend the other 10 percent on your career. You’ll thank yourself later.
