When you see a workman building something alone, often you see a struggle. The wood is longer than his arms. The support beams are taller than his reach. You observe him and tell yourself, “He needs someone to help him: someone with complementary skills; someone able to hold up an equal share of the task.”

My friend Brad is a really smart carpenter. He was replacing the fifteen or so 2 by 8 inch beams that covered the patio outside the apartment below my office. The beams were rotted with age and weather, so he had no problem taking them down. Putting new ones back up would be a different challenge altogether.

Brad is well over 6 feet tall, but the beams would have to be nailed to end supports that were 9 feet tall. Somehow, he’d have to hold a huge 15 foot beam above his head, balance it in place and then secure it with nails pounded into the ends. He propped the left side of the beam up at the 9 foot height using two of the other beams as the diagonal support. He nailed the other side of the beam into place with one nail, then secured the other end while the first dangled from the other side. Ingenious. But then he showed how smart he really is.

Brad went and brought in another great carpenter, as tall as he, and together they hoisted and held the beams in place and each one secured his end while the other held his end in place. Where Brad had struggled before with the weight of the 15 foot span, the two of them together were able to make it appear as if the beam were a toothpick. Team work, leverage, making a tough job easy, distributing the burden between two people so that each felt he was hoisting much less weight.

I’ve often admired how men work together effectively and how they come up with powerful tools to lesson the burden of the task at hand. One example that comes to mind was some city street workers chartered with the task of checking under the street manhole covers. Manhole covers weigh between 100 and 150 pounds to keep them in place when car wheels hit them. Can you imagine lifting hundreds of those tiddly-winks each week as a normal part of your work?

The city workers brought out a metal crowbar with one strong forward prong and another pivot leg that extended at a 45 degree angle away from the primary bar. The forward prong fit perfectly into the 1 inch square hole of the manhole cover, and the pivot touched the ground. By pushing down on the long handle of the bar, the edge of the cover was lifted away from its position just enough for another worker to use a hook to slide and drag the cover away, revealing the open manhole. Leverage: using the power of the crowbar with its unique design to lift the hefty metal disks vertically just enough for his partner to apply leverage again horizontally. Ingenious.

It’s smart because together they found a solution to the challenge. It’s smart because they used two sets of hands to truly make light work of an onerous task. It’s smart because they designed a solution in the form of an instrument which – when they worked together -– accomplished a task neither could perform independently.

Think about it. Think about all of the onerous tasks any given family faces in a household. Laundry, shopping, cleaning, cooking, tending the children (in sickness, in school and in all of their events), and the host of other burdens that constitute the sum total of the imbalance between “work-family balance.” I’ve read again and again about how women complain and nag their spouses to contribute labor and time to these and hundreds of other household tasks. And I’ve also read again and again about how many women have so unsuccessfully achieved their performance goal of attaining anything even close to “balance.” How is it that men can be so creative and innovative in solving problems outside the household, but so resistant to problem solving “opportunities” inside the household?

Perhaps the team is not coming together to perform the task as a real team. Perhaps women, with a strategy of complaining and nagging, are failing to tap the powerful mental and physical resources available to them and which have demonstrated an ingenious ability to solve complex problems in other circumstances.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don't gather your people and ask them to provide wood, prepare tools, assign tasks. Call them together and raise in their minds the longing for the endless sea.”

The same is true in our own mundane world: inspiration is more powerful a tool than intimidation. Men can and will provide very creative solutions if given the opportunity to search and find a way that works for them. When women carp and harp, they are insisting that there is only way to solve this problem: “HER Way.” Women can consider themselves as peers in the process of finding leverage -- ways that both of them can work together to lighten the workload for each of them, not just “HER burden.”