Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.

With work/life balance, it’s all about one portion of person’s life suffering for the sake of another. Friedman doesn’t believe it has to be that way.

In his new  book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Friedman talks about how people can be successful at home, at work, within their community and as individuals all at once. According to Friedman, the trick is taking a more integrated approach to how we view the different areas of our life, rather than trying to balance them all.

“Total Leadership represents a new step in the evolution for the work/life field: it is a systematic method for producing four-way wins that is tailored to fit the lives of individuals.”

Wow, that sounds lovely. But how do you do it?

Total Leadership provides readers with a series of exercises that they can do with one or more partners to figure out what their priorities are, who the core stakeholders are in their lives and what can they do to realign their lives to better meet their own needs, as well as the needs of the stakeholders.

I think Friedman’s book has a lot of great suggestions. The exercises are valuable, really, for anyone who feels that there are some disconnects between how they spend their time and how they’d like to be spending it. (And who doesn’t fall into that category?)

And I agree with Friedman’s thesis that there needs to be a new dialogue that goes beyond the idea of work/life balance. As a working mother of a young infant, I know all too well that there really is no such thing.

But I’m really skeptical about how likely it is that most people could sit down with their bosses and speak frankly about their needs. Even if they couch it in “I statements” and ask their bosses what they want from them, as Friedman suggests, I know a lot of people whose bosses don’t even ask them how their weekends were, let alone have conversations about how they are doing on a personal front.

The fact is that those employees who are feeling this disconnect the most are the ones whose bosses are least likely to be receptive to these conversations.

However, maybe this will start to change as employees become more disgruntled about their lack of work/life balance—or integration, as Friedman sees it.

As a result, it’s possible that more bosses are going to be forced into having these discussions, and if you are one of these bosses, Friedman’s Total Leadership would be a great book to share with your workforce.