by Jack Welch
2. Most bosses are perfectly willing to accommodate work-life balance challenges if you have earned it with performance. The key word here is: if.
3. Bosses know that the work-life policies in the company brochure are mainly for recruiting purposes and that real work-life arrangements are negotiated one-on-one in the context of a supportive culture, not in the context of “But the company says…!”
4. People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems and continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, or incompetent—or all of the above.
5. Even the most accommodating bosses believe that work-life balance is your problem to solve. In fact, most know that there are really just a handful of effective strategies to do that, and they wish you would use them.
PRIORITY MANAGEMENT
Let’s look at these points one at a time, but first, a few words on what work-life balance really means.
It is no coincidence that work-life balance entered the public domain about the time that women—and especially mothers in dual-career households—started working in force. Suddenly, there was a whole group of people juggling two mutually exclusive and colliding demands: being great parents and great employees at the same time. Especially in the early days, the struggles to make everything work were messy and painful for many working moms, and their stories were filled with guilt, ambivalence, and anger.
Today, work-life balance remains largely the purview of working mothers, in that they are the people most likely to be grappling with the issue on a daily basis.
But without question, work-life balance as a concept has grown and expanded. It isn’t just about how mothers can make time for all the demands in their lives. It’s about how all of us manage our lives and allocate our time—it’s about priorities and values.
Basically, work-life balance has become a debate about how much we allow work to consume us.
Now, you can be like me and my type, and make work your major priority. Or you can attempt a kind of literal balance, with work and life each getting 50 percent of your time, or you can go surfing 80 percent of your time and work 20. There are as many work-life balance equations as there are individuals.*
But no matter what balance you choose, you’ll have to make trade-offs. After all, as I’ve noted before in this book, it is a rare and lucky person who can have it all in life, all at the same time. Usually, that’s not the case. Working parents who want to be very involved in their kids’ lives, for instance, often have to give up some of their ambition. People who put business success first most likely have to give up some level of intimacy with their kids.
Work-life balance is a swap—a deal you’ve made with yourself about what you keep and what you give up.
I remember one Q & A session with about five hundred executives in Melbourne, Australia, where the moderator was Maxine McKew, one of the country’s most respected newscasters. The session was moving along on all the usual business topics for about an hour when a woman in the audience stood and said, “Could you tell me, Mr. Welch, why must all women who succeed in business act like hard-assed, bullheaded men? When will we see the day that every female CEO doesn’t have to be like Margaret Thatcher?”
I can’t recall my exact answer, but I know I said something very politically incorrect right off the bat about how most women slowed down their career advancements by having children, and while I thought that was a worthy choice, it wasn’t going to get them to the boardroom very quickly.
This comment enraged the questioner, who shot back, “Why must women give their lives up to get ahead while men do not? Women should not have to make all the sacrifices—should they?”*
Some of the men in the audience groaned, and one called out, “My wife did it.” Another one shouted, “Hey, we all make sacrifices.”
Up on stage, I shrugged. “I cannot give you a good answer to your question,” I said. “I’m not sure that pausing on the corporate ladder is a ‘sacrifice’ to the mothers who make that choice.”
Just then, Maxine stepped in. To be honest, I expected a real slam, but her answer surprised me.
“Women do give something up. It’s biology,” she said. “Let me tell you what I gave up. I wanted my career. And so I never had children. Maybe I would be able to do it with children now. Still, twenty-five years ago, when I was entering broadcasting, it just wasn’t possible to achieve the highest levels and raise babies along the way. It was my choice. Of course I wanted children. But I chose to put my career first, and I cannot blame anyone for my happiness or lack thereof.”
You could have heard a pin drop. In the silence, someone raised his hand and changed the subject with a question about the Australian economy.
I tell this story because you simply can’t talk about work-life balance without acknowledging that it’s so contentious because it’s so personal—and so universal.
Everyone these days makes work-life balance decisions—from working mothers and fathers to single people who want to write a novel or volunteer to build homes for Habitat for Humanity.
Work-life balance means making choices and trade-offs, and living with their consequences. It’s that simple—and that complex.
Just remember, you are not in this alone. Your company also feels the impact of your choices and actions.
And with that in mind, let’s take a work-life balance reality check from your boss’s point of view.
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1. Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.
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Clearly, most bosses want their employees to have great personal lives. Nobody wants their people hauling family or social problems into the office, where they can leak into the atmosphere and do nothing for productivity.
Then there’s that matter of retention. Satisfied people tend to stay where they are and work with more enthusiasm. So all in all, good bosses don’t want their people to feel unbalanced.
But more than that, bosses want to win—that’s what they’re paid for. And that’s why they want all of you—your brain, your body, your energy, and your commitment. After all, they have a big game to win, and they can’t do that effectively with absentee players—in particular, if the other team draws its players from countries like India and China, where work-life balance is not exactly a cultural priority.
The fact is: work-life balance concerns are actually a luxury—“enjoyed” largely by people who are able to trade time for money, and vice versa. You can bet your bottom dollar that the Korean grocer who just opened his shop in New York doesn’t worry about whether he has time to get to the gym, just as you can be absolutely certain that 99 percent of the entrepreneurs in China’s huge emerging competitive workforce don’t wring their hands about working late every night.*
Your boss is fully aware that most competitors in the global marketplace do not invite their people to decrease their productivity in the name of work-life balance.
That’s why, when your boss thinks about meeting your work-life balance needs, he is guided by the question: How can I accommodate this person and still keep him or her totally riveted to the job?
The truth is, your boss wants 150 percent of you and, if you are good enough, he will do almost anything to get it, even if your family wants 150 percent too.
It’s not that bosses want you to give up your family or your hobbies or any other interests. It’s not that diabolical. They’re just driven by the desire to capture all of your energy and harness it for the company.
In most cases, bosses see a good offense as their best defense against life’s yearnings—and that offense would be to make work so exciting and so much fun that people don’t actually want to go home for dinner, let alone play amateur chess or write the great American novel in their attic.
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nbsp; For many years, Gary Reiner worked for me as the head of Business Development in Fairfield. Although he never advertised it, Gary had clearly made a work-life balance choice where time with his family played a large role. Every day he showed up early at the office, but he was a stickler about leaving at six, and he rarely engaged in the banter that slowed work down. He was about as cool and efficient as you could get.
But Gary was a star in every way. His performance in a corporate staff job year after year opened up huge operational opportunities for him, but he always said he liked what he was doing, his travel load was manageable, and he didn’t want to move. That was OK with me. I loved what he was doing, and the whole company was benefiting.
But I worried, as I’m sure Gary did, about how long we could keep a staff person fresh and engaged. I didn’t want Gary to leave GE or just check out mentally.
For the next decade, every time we launched a major initiative—from Services to Six Sigma to e-business—we asked Gary to take charge of organizing councils, comprised of leaders from each business, to transfer best practices around the company. Along the way, he took on the role as chief information officer for the company. Gary stayed put, but just about every couple of years, he expanded the scope of his job, bringing great value to GE while remaining true to his work-life balance choices.
Gary’s story is an example of thousands like it that take place every day—a boss pulling out the stops to keep a star performer hooked and excited. I knew what Gary needed and what the company needed, and fortunately, with his intellectual curiosity, commitment, and energy, we found a solution where everyone won.
So every time you think about your work-life balance issue, remember what your boss is thinking about—and that’s winning. Your needs may get heard—and even successfully resolved—but not if the boss’s needs aren’t met as well.
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2. Most bosses are perfectly willing to accommodate work-life balance challenges if you have earned it with performance. The key word here is: if.
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Admittedly, there are bosses out there who think, “I never got any kind of special help with my work-life issues, and I’m not going to give any. Each person has to make it on his own.”
Moreover, there are people who don’t have children who frankly resent their coworkers who are parents who ask for a “special pass” because of their family responsibilities. I have heard these individuals say things like, “They wanted to have children. Now they want us to make it easy for them!” That perspective is not particularly charitable, but I can understand where it’s coming from.
Actually, the reality of the workplace is that there are very few special passes. Yes, bosses are agreeable to giving people the flexibility to come and go as they please—but only after they have earned it with their performance and results.
In fact, I would describe the way work-life balance really works as an old-fashioned chit system. People with great performance accumulate chits, which can be traded in for flexibility. The more chits you have, the greater your opportunity to work when and where and how you want.
You cannot talk about this chit system, however, without mentioning face time.
Face time is a big deal at most companies, especially when it comes to promotions. Despite all the technology that makes virtual work possible, most managers are simply more comfortable promoting people they’ve gotten to know in the trenches, people whom they’ve seen in meetings and hallways or lived with through a really tough crisis. Your work from off-site may be spectacular. You may be the most productive person on your team. Your current job may not even technically require you to come in to the office! But when push comes to shove at promotion time and qualifications are close, bosses will almost always give the job to the devil they know. And nothing makes a person familiar like showing up.
For an example of a typical chit system in action, let’s take the case of Susan Peters.
Susan joined GE in 1979 at age twenty-six as an HR manager in Appliances. She quickly distinguished herself as a high-potential and was moved several times to give her new challenges. In 1986, three months after her daughter, Jess, was born, Susan was working in Pittsfield, and unexpectedly, her boss had to undergo serious back surgery and needed to be out for a long time. In a big step up, she was named head of HR over other more senior people. She hit the ball out of the park.
Next, Susan moved to Holland, then back to corporate headquarters, then back to Pittsfield. Two years later, we moved her to Louisville to head up human resources for the appliances business. In every job, her performance was terrific.
In 1998, we needed to fill the HR job in our medical business in Milwaukee, and we knew what to do: send Susan Peters. When she was called, everyone expected a fast and simple “OK, when do I start?”
Instead she said, “I just can’t—I have family issues here that I have to resolve.”
It was as if a bucket of cold water had been poured on our heads. We had never given a thought to Susan’s personal life, and she had never brought it up. Even when we had sent her for eight weeks of training—four in Japan in 1992 and four in China in 1993—she hadn’t made a peep about being away from her daughter or managing a dual-career household from the road. Suddenly here she was, asking for a break, and we were mortified.
Damn it, we thought, how many people like Susan Peters had we lost along the way because they took our silence about work-life as indifference?
We couldn’t give Susan her break fast enough. By that point in her career, her pile of chits was about a mile high—far higher than she would have ever needed to reach out for assistance. We told her not to worry and stay put. Our main concern at that point was that she successfully resolve her family issues.
That took a couple of years. Never once in that time did anyone at the company mention Susan’s new limitations in a negative context. Then, in 2000, Susan told us she was back in the game, and we quickly promoted her to head of HR at NBC. She is now the vice president of executive development for the whole company, based in Fairfield, making her the No. 2 HR executive at GE.
When you ask Susan about her career, she says, “Basically I learned that you can have all the work-life balance you want if you deliver. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard at certain points. It was hard.
“When I went to Japan and China, my daughter was about seven—old enough to lay a real guilt trip on me. I cried my eyes out all the way over. But I had made a conscious decision about work-life balance, and part of that decision was to travel for my career.
“I knew I’d always have flexibility in my job when I needed it. I had earned it with commitment and performance over the years.”
Contrast Susan’s story to that of a friend of mine who managed a sixty-person unit of a fast-growing company.
A few years ago, she was approached by a member of her team—let’s call her Cynthia—who had just had her second child. Cynthia asked if she could work at home on Fridays. The executive (a working mother herself) immediately said yes because she knew that Cynthia—an eight-year veteran of the company—would continue to deliver stellar results. She always had. In fact, she was one of the hardest-working, most organized, and productive members of the staff.
After a week or two, word got around the office that Cynthia was working from home on Fridays. Soon enough, my friend was approached by a young guy—we’ll call him Carl—who had been at the company for about a year with no distinguishing results. He too wanted to work at home on Fridays. “I want to perfect my yoga practice,” he explained.
When my friend said no, the conversation got very awkward. “You’re imposing your values on me,” Carl said. “You’re saying that mothering has more value than yoga. But I’m never going to have children. Who are you to say that my yoga is less meaningful in my life than Cynthia’s children are in hers?”
“Sorry, but that’s the decision I made!” the boss shot back.
Later, when the confrontation hit the office g
ossip mill and distracted Carl’s coworkers for a week with minidebates over fairness and values, my friend came to regret the fact that she hadn’t been more direct in her answer. Carl couldn’t work at home on Fridays because he hadn’t demonstrated he could do the job at the office Monday through Thursday!
Despite her own personal circumstances, my friend’s decision hadn’t been about yoga versus babies. It hadn’t been about values at all. It had been about results. Carl didn’t have any chits.
What does this mean for you? It means that as you think about work-life balance, know that to get it in most companies, you have to earn it. That process will take time.
One last thing to know about the chit system. To people just entering the workforce, it often seems unfair. Why, they wonder, do you have to wait to get the freedom and flexibility you want? But more experienced people tend to get it—in fact, many see the give-and-take of chits as perfectly equitable.
Finally, bosses like it too. For them, it’s a win-win deal.
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3. Bosses know that the work-life policies in the company brochure are mainly for recruiting purposes, and that real work-life arrangements are negotiated one-on-one in the context of a supportive culture, not in the context of “But the company says…!”
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A company brochure can be a sight to behold, with its glossy photos and long lists of lifestyle benefits, such as job sharing and flextime.
But most people know that the last time you look at the company brochure is the first day at work, when you fill out your insurance paperwork in the HR office. In fact, most savvy people realize pretty quickly that most brochure work-life balance programs are primarily a recruiting tool aimed at new candidates.