Boundaries at Work: Small Group Workbook

Key Topic: Taking Ownership of Your Work Environment Through Strategic Boundaries Related Topics: Emotional climate, attention and focus, role clarity, leadership, team culture, performance Audience: Small groups, church staff teams, workplace ministry groups, professional development groups Use Case: 60-90 minute group session Difficulty Level: Entry-level Tags: boundaries, work, workplace, leadership, emotional-climate, attention, focus, prioritization, role-clarity, ownership, responsibility, performance, team-culture Source: Boundaries at Work (Dr. Henry Cloud video transcript)

Session Overview and Goals

This session explores how to take ownership of your work life through three critical boundaries: emotional climate, attention and focus, and role clarity. By the end of this session, participants will:

1. Understand the concept of being "ridiculously in charge" of their work domain
2. Recognize how they may be creating or allowing negative dynamics at work
3. Have practical strategies for improving the three boundary areas
4. Identify specific next steps for their own work situation

Teaching Summary

You Are Ridiculously In Charge

Most of us don't feel in charge of our work environment. We feel subject to it — affected by bad morale, negative coworkers, overwhelming demands, and unclear expectations. We point fingers outward: "It's the culture here," "It's my boss," "It's just how things are."

But here's what Dr. Cloud discovered in working with a leader who was complaining about everything going wrong in his organization. After asking "Why is that?" multiple times — why is morale bad, why did you bring in that person, why did you make that decision — the leader finally realized the uncomfortable truth: "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?"

This is the starting point for work boundaries: recognizing that within your domain — whatever you have control of, whether that's your cubicle, a project, a team, or an entire company — you are either creating the conditions or allowing them to exist. This isn't about blame. It's about agency. Once you see it, you can do something about it.

Boundary #1: Emotional Climate

Performance thrives in a positive emotional climate. It drops in a negative one.

Dr. Cloud describes a fascinating study with math students who had perfect SAT scores. They divided them into two groups: those who had positive relationships with their fathers around performance (encouraging, supportive) and those who had critical or negative relationships with their fathers around performance. They had both groups do calculus problems under pressure while hooked up to brain scans.

Throughout the test, they would flash the student's father's name on the screen — so quickly the conscious mind didn't see it, but the brain registered it.

In the positive-father group, when the name appeared, the performance areas of their brains spiked. They got better.

In the negative-father group, when the name appeared, their brains shut down.

We internalize our relationships. The emotional climate we work in — whether characterized by support or criticism, encouragement or fear — directly affects our brain's ability to perform.

The good news? Positive relationships in the present can override old negative patterns. And if you're in charge of any space at work, you can create boundaries around emotional climate. You can decide that your team won't operate with yelling, shaming, or chronic negativity. You can address critical behavior directly. You can build a culture where people perform because they feel safe, not scared.

Boundary #2: Attention and Focus

The human brain cannot multitask. Not really.

We use the term "multitasking" because computers run multiple programs at once. But even computers don't truly multitask — they have a processor that switches between tasks incredibly fast, creating the illusion of simultaneity.

Your brain works the same way, except it's much slower at switching. Every time you switch tasks — from the email to the document to the conversation — you pay a cognitive cost. You lose focus. You make mistakes. Things take longer.

Dr. Cloud gives a simple example: Try singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" while someone gives you a phone number to remember. You can't do both. Your brain has to attend to one or the other.

What does this mean for work? Three things:

1. Attend to what's important. Identify your actual priorities — not everything that's urgent, but what truly matters for results.

2. Inhibit everything else. This is hard. It means saying no, closing tabs, turning off notifications, and protecting your focus.

3. Keep priorities in front of you. The main thing has to stay the main thing. Post-it notes, daily reminders, whatever it takes to keep you focused on what actually drives results.

When leaders fail at this, the whole organization suffers. If a CEO goes to a retreat, identifies the "main thing" for the next quarter, and then emails everyone about 46 different things the next day with equal urgency, they've destroyed their own prioritization. If everything is important, nothing is.

Boundary #3: Control and Role Clarity

The third boundary is about defining who controls what.

Everyone needs to know: What do I have control of? What outcome am I driving? What's my role?

When this is clear, people thrive. When it's ambiguous, people either do too little ("not my job") or too much (overwhelm and resentment). Neither pattern leads to excellence.

Dr. Cloud illustrates this with a flight attendant story. He's on a plane with terrible service — grumpy staff, negative energy, awful experience. And he thinks: somewhere on this plane could be the person who purchases all the travel for a Fortune 500 company. The airline is spending hundreds of millions on marketing to win that person's business. And this flight attendant has full control over what those four hours feel like for that customer.

If the flight attendant understood — "This is my role, this is what I control, this is how I drive success" — everything changes. The same is true in every position. When people know what they own and are free to own it (not micromanaged), performance soars.

Discussion Questions

Opening Questions — Getting Into the Topic

1. When you hear the phrase "ridiculously in charge," what's your gut reaction? Does it feel empowering, overwhelming, or something else?

2. How would you define your "domain" at work right now? What do you actually have control of?

Going Deeper — Exploring the Three Boundaries

3. Think about the emotional climate of your workplace. On a scale of 1-10, how positive is it? What specific behaviors or patterns contribute to that rating?

4. Have you ever experienced the shutdown that comes from working in a critical or negative environment? What was that like?

5. Dr. Cloud says we internalize our relationships. How might old messages from authority figures (parents, teachers, bosses) still be affecting your performance today? [Leader note: Allow silence here — this is a reflective question.]

6. Be honest: how much do you actually multitask? What's your relationship with notifications, tabs, and task-switching?

7. What's your "main thing" at work right now? Could you articulate it if someone asked?

8. In your current role, how clear are you on what you own versus what belongs to someone else? Where is there ambiguity?

Application Questions — Moving Toward Action

9. If you were to take Dr. Cloud's teaching seriously, what's one thing you would stop allowing in your work environment?

10. What would change if you practiced single-tasking for a week instead of multitasking?

11. If you lead others (even informally), how clear are they on what they control? What would help?

12. What's one specific boundary you want to implement in your work life after this session?

Personal Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1: Define Your Domain

Take 5 minutes to write answers to these questions:

• What is the scope of my "property" at work? (My cubicle? My role? A project? A team? A department?)
• Within that domain, what's going well that I want to protect?
• Within that domain, what's not going well that I've been allowing to exist?
• If I were "ridiculously in charge," what would I do differently starting this week?

Exercise 2: Emotional Climate Audit

Rate the following aspects of your work environment on a scale of 1-5 (1 = very negative, 5 = very positive):

Looking at your ratings:

• What patterns do you notice?
• Where are you contributing to the climate (positively or negatively)?
• What's one thing you could do to improve the weakest area?

Exercise 3: Priority Clarity Check

Answer these questions honestly:

1. What is the single most important outcome I'm responsible for at work?
2. How much of my average day is actually spent on that outcome?
3. What distracts me most from focused work on my priority?
4. If I protected 2 hours of uninterrupted focus time daily for my main priority, what would I need to say no to?

Real-Life Scenarios

Scenario 1: The Negative Coworker

Marcus works on a team of six. Five of them get along well and work collaboratively. But one team member, Rachel, is chronically negative. She complains about leadership, criticizes others' work in meetings, and sighs loudly when given new assignments. The team has started avoiding her, but the negative energy is affecting everyone. Their manager seems oblivious or unwilling to address it.

Discussion Questions:

• What is Marcus allowing to exist by not addressing this?
• What are his options for having a boundary around emotional climate?
• What would you do in Marcus's situation?

Scenario 2: Everything Is Urgent

Priya is a project manager who receives about 200 emails a day. Her boss marks nearly everything as urgent and expects immediate responses. She feels like she's always behind, always reactive, never able to do deep work on the projects that actually matter. She's exhausted and starting to wonder if she's bad at her job.

Discussion Questions:

• What boundary issue is at play here?
• What could Priya do to protect her attention without damaging her relationship with her boss?
• How would you have a conversation with a boss who treats everything as equally urgent?

Scenario 3: Role Confusion

David was recently promoted to lead a small team at his church. But his former peer, Amanda, keeps doing parts of his job — making decisions she used to make, answering questions that should come to him, and sometimes overriding his direction. David doesn't want to seem territorial or create conflict, but he's confused about what he actually controls.

Discussion Questions:

• What's at stake if David doesn't clarify role boundaries?
• How could he have a conversation with Amanda without damaging the relationship?
• What would healthy role clarity look like in this situation?

Practice Assignments

Assignment 1: Single-Tasking Experiment

For the next week, experiment with doing one thing at a time during your focused work periods:

• Close all browser tabs except what you need for the current task
• Silence phone notifications
• Set specific times to check email rather than checking constantly
• When you catch yourself switching tasks, pause and return to the original

At the end of the week, notice:

• What was hard about this?
• What was different about your work quality or sense of calm?
• What will you keep doing?

Assignment 2: One Honest Conversation

Before the next session, have one honest conversation about work boundaries. This could be:

• Addressing a negative behavior with a coworker
• Talking with your boss about priorities
• Clarifying role boundaries with a teammate
• Setting an expectation about communication norms on your team

Come prepared to share how it went — what you said, how they responded, and what you learned.

Closing Reflection

Taking ownership of our work lives requires courage. It means acknowledging that we have more influence than we've been using — and that some of what's not working, we've been allowing.

But this isn't about perfection or control. It's about stewardship. God has placed you in your current role, with your current sphere of influence. Your domain at work — whatever its size — is a place where you can create life-giving conditions, do excellent work, and honor Him in how you treat yourself and others.

What would it look like to be "ridiculously in charge" in a way that blesses everyone around you?

Optional Closing Prayer:

God, thank you for the work you've given us — both its challenges and its opportunities. Help us to see what we control and to steward it well. Give us courage to address what we've been allowing, wisdom to focus on what matters, and clarity about our role and responsibility. May our work become a place where we and others can thrive. Amen.