How do you create boundaries?
Creating boundaries that work is tricky. There are a lot of moving pieces that go into setting boundaries in our life. One of the biggest problems in setting boundaries is understanding what it means to set a boundary in the first place.
Telling someone else what they may or may not do is not setting boundaries. The only boundary you can set is one that governs your behavior.
Boundaries can look like “I won’t” statements. I won’t eat shellfish. I won’t drive after dark.
But most boundaries can usually be expressed as “if…then” statements. If you email me after 5pm, then I won’t reply until the next morning. Or if you insult my partner, then this visit is over and we’ll be leaving. If you try to pressure me to eat shellfish, then I won’t eat meals with you. For this type of boundary, what you’re actually defining is a relationship between an action and a consequence.
So what does it mean to violate someone’s boundaries?
It’s gotten messy, we can’t lie. Most people use the phrase to mean when the first half of the if-statement happens. Then it’s time to enact the consequences. For others, any time someone else does something they don’t like or that makes them uncomfortable, they feel their boundaries have been violated. There’s a lot of emotional weight on the word violation. It carries an implication of maliciousness or desire to cause harm from the other party.
It’s important to remember that what may feel like a violation to you may not have been intended to be so by the other person. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enact your consequences. Or that you don’t have the right to be hurt. But we need to maintain empathy, even for people who are crossing our boundaries. Healthy consequences are about protecting your own mental and physical well-being. They are not about punishing or hurting the other person or enacting revenge.
Boundaries in the workplace
At a workplace, it’s important to remember that everyone has their own boundaries and a good leader helps their team members navigate, negotiate, and communicate their needs. As a leader, it’s crucial to recognize that your team may not have the privilege to enact consequences necessary to protect their boundaries, and enacting those consequences will fall to you instead. Protecting your team members from boundary-crossing behaviour might look like moving someone’s workspace, putting an employee on a PIP, or even firing someone.
That said, the word “boundaries” can’t be evoked as a means to control other people. Good leadership investigates conflict and determines if consequences are due on either or both sides. A team member claiming, “it violates my boundaries for Casey to eat pickles for lunch because I think pickles are disgusting,” is showing a misunderstanding of what boundaries are, however a team member informing leadership that “Casey has been violating my boundaries by repeatedly pushing into my personal space during meetings” is something that requires leadership attention to protect both the employee and the stability of the team.
How can you create boundaries that work?
Not all conflict is a violation of boundaries, and not all boundaries can reasonably be protected in a workplace, but that doesn’t mean that boundary setting is something leadership can or should ignore. Communication, as it so often is, is the crux of supporting a person’s boundary setting. Share your expectations as their leader, listen to their expectations as a team member, negotiate areas where expectations or preferences are in conflict, and support the instances where consequences need to be enacted with other team members.
Creating boundaries that work means being willing to communicate, listen, negotiate, and support your boundaries and the boundaries of others.
We wrote a whole chapter in our book about setting (and keeping) boundaries – learn more HERE.
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