by Jack Welch
Real work-life balance arrangements are negotiated by bosses and individuals on an as-needed basis, using the performance-for-flexibility chit system we just talked about.
That chit system requires a special environment.
It requires a supportive organizational culture where bosses are encouraged to strike creative work-life deals with high performers, and high performers feel entirely comfortable talking with their bosses about their work-life challenges.
In such a culture, bosses have the freedom to reward results with flexibility. They don’t have to clear work-life arrangements with HR, nor do they feel forced to adhere to formalized work-life policies that actually might limit their ability to win, rather than enhance it.*
Remember the case of the boss who had the employee who wanted to work at home Fridays to practice yoga? In the end, when the news of the incident reached senior management, she was told to agree to his request. It was company policy to “offer equal opportunity for flexible working arrangements.” Merit had nothing to do with it!
It should come as no surprise that this yoga employee didn’t last another year at the company. With just four days at the office, his performance continued to deteriorate. And just as damning, he got branded by managers within the business unit as a “But the company says…!” kind of employee.
You know the type. They bank vacation days. They hand in slips of paper noting how many half-days or holidays they’ve worked. They remind bosses and colleagues of company policies regarding overtime. They are little technocrats who show time and time again that they are not working for fun or the passion to win. They’re just logging hours.
No wonder they don’t have many chits in the bank. By operating outside the culture of one-on-one negotiated arrangements, these rule-book types screw themselves right out of the “rights” they claim they are owed!
The point here is, don’t get carried away by the work-life policies and programs advertised in virtually every corporate brochure. If you want real work-life balance, find a company that accommodates it as part of its everyday business.
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4. People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems or continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, or incompetent—or all of the above.
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In September 2004, the Financial Times published a story about Vivienne Cox, who at age forty-five was appointed head of the power, gas, and renewable energy division of BP. The paper noted that the promotion made Ms. Cox one of the most powerful businesswomen in the world.
It also noted that she had two small children and that she never talked about their impact on her ability to work. Vivienne Cox, the newspaper said, “is part of a generation of high-achieving women who just want to get on with the job.”
There are, without doubt, tens of thousands of Vivienne Coxes. And surely in total there are millions of successful working people, mothers and otherwise, who have full and busy personal lives—achieved without griping about how hard balance is and how much help they need from their companies to attain it.
The fact that these people exist makes it very hard, in the real world, to be a work-life moaner.
And that’s why most work-life moaners eventually get marginalized. Sometimes it takes a while because companies want to be politically correct, and they tiptoe around people who publicly identify themselves as work-life poster children. But with time, people who can’t seem to get their work-life challenges in order or continually ask the company for special arrangements get held back or pushed aside.
Not surprisingly, work-life moaners tend to be a phenomenon of below-average performers.
Here’s my theory on why.
You almost never hear people in the top 20 percent of any organization complaining about work-life balance. That fact is surely linked to their intrinsic abilities. At home, as at work, they are so smart, organized, and competent that they have figured out and implemented sustainable solutions. They have installed, as Susan Peters calls them, “home processes” of backup resources and contingency plans that take a lot of the uncertainty out of juggling situations.
Below-average performers, by contrast, have three strikes against them. First, they tend to be less expert at organizing their time and sorting through priorities, not just at work, but at home. Second, because of their middling performance, these people have been told they have limited chances of advancement. That lowers their self-confidence and raises their ambivalence. And finally, they’re not as financially secure as people in the top 20, giving them fewer resources to buy work-life balance with nannies or personal trainers or whatever. Put all three dynamics together, and it’s no wonder underperformers struggle publicly with work-life dilemmas and ask for help so often.
As the HR director at a New York company told me, “It’s always my weakest people who want the most flexibility from the company. That’s frustrating—to put it mildly.” (Not surprisingly, he also said, “Don’t use my name if you quote me on this!”)
So before you open your mouth a fifth time to ask for limited travel and Thursday mornings off, or occupy your boss’s time with concerns over your child-care arrangements, know that you are making a statement, and no matter what words you use, it sounds like, “I’m not really into this.”
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5. Even the most accommodating bosses believe that work-life balance is your problem to solve. In fact, most of them know that there are really just a handful of effective strategies to do that, and they wish you would use them.
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Look, only you can figure out your values and priorities. Only you know what trade-offs you are willing to make, and only you can envision their consequences. Only you can organize your schedule and your life, at work and at home, for the balance you have chosen.
That is why, at the end of the day, most bosses correctly believe work-life balance is your problem to solve, not theirs.
Now, some managers are very adept at helping their people go through the process of sorting out priorities and selecting tradeoffs, and even in coming up with scheduling solutions that work equally well for their employees and the company. In fact, they see that activity as an integral part of their jobs.
But helping people find work-life balance is really a special skill. Not every manager has it, and not every manager wants it. Some managers feel, “What the heck am I supposed to be now, a mother and a therapist? Forget about it!”
But many do not. In my speaking and consulting engagements over the past several years, I’d estimate about half of all managers want to actively work with their employees to help them achieve some form of balance. That’s a lot more than five years ago.
There can be no question that negotiating work-life balance arrangements adds a layer of complexity to a manager’s job. But your manager should welcome the challenge. It gives him another tool to motivate and retain great performers, just like salary, bonuses, promotions, and all other kinds of recognition.
But along the way, you can and should help yourself. The work-life balance debate has now been out there long enough that a handful of best practices have emerged. Most experienced bosses know about these techniques. In fact, many use them, and they wish you would too.
Here they are.
Best practice 1: Keep your head in whatever game you’re at. We’ve already established that work wants 150 percent of you, and so does home. To alleviate angst and distraction, and to enhance your performance no matter what you are doing, be focused on where you are and whom you are with.
In other words, compartmentalize.
No one wins when you routinely run your family’s carpool logistics from your office phone or e-mail customers from the soccer field.
Compartmentalizing isn’t easy, obviously. Sometimes you must call a customer from the gym or check on a sick child between meetings. But the more you blend your life, the more mixed up, distracted, and overwhelmed you feel and act.
Technology is a real two-edged sword on this. On the one hand, you can be home for dinner three nights a week when you have the ability to check e-mail on your BlackBerry from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. On the other, you can give yourself a real ulcer by encouraging your office to call your cell phone while you are skiing.
The absolute ideal is to draw crisp boundaries around your activities. Then, when you are at work, keep your head in work completely, and when you are at home or play, keep your head there, and only there. I realize this is something of a fantasyland. There will always be pressures on whatever rules you set, but the smaller and less frequent the interruptions are, the more balance you will actually feel.
Best practice 2: Have the mettle to say no to requests and demands outside your chosen work-life balance plan. Eventually, most people come up with a work-life balance arrangement that works for them. The trick is sticking to it.
That takes discipline. Saying no is hard, especially for business-people who have gotten ahead precisely because they have said yes so often. I will always be impressed by Bill Woodburn, who was running GE’s industrial diamond business in the 1990s. We asked him to run a division several times that size, but he had the clarity about his priorities to say no, despite our efforts to persuade him. He had a daughter with two years to go in high school, and he didn’t want to uproot her. Today, Bill’s daughter has long since graduated, and he has been promoted twice. He’s now president and CEO of GE’s infrastructure business.
Usually, however, you don’t need to say no to something as large as a promotion to get the balance you want. You just need to say it to smaller stuff—a request that you join yet another nonprofit board, a plea to coach yet another kids’ sports team, and the like.
If you say yes to everything, you won’t get balance. You’ll get off balance.
Saying no is incredibly liberating. Try it on anything and everything that is not part of your deliberately chosen work-life plan.
Best practice 3: Make sure your work-life balance plan doesn’t leave you out. A really killing dynamic in this work-life balance thing is the everyone’s-happy-but-me syndrome. Very competent people figure out a perfect work-life balance plan that allows them to deliver enough of themselves to the workplace, enough of themselves to family, and enough of themselves to one or two volunteer organizations.*
The problem is, this perfect plan creates a kind of fun-free vacuum for the person at its center.
Of course, work-life balance involves making trade-offs, and decent people are obliged to deliver on their commitments to home and work. But if you craft a work-life balance plan where you are having no fun, chances are you won’t be able to sustain it.
You have to make sure your work-life balance plan fulfills your dreams and passions. If that means working a lot, do it. If that means being home every night, let that happen too. Yes, you have to be responsible to those around you, but you can’t live someone else’s concept of your life in the name of balance.
Well, you can, but you shouldn’t. It almost always backfires.
We all know outwardly happy-looking people who juggle huge career and family demands only to suddenly stop and make drastic changes to their lives. They’ve just had enough of hanging on by their fingernails.
One person we met recently at a cocktail party explained her decision to “throw it in” this way: “I hadn’t really had a good laugh for fifteen years. I hadn’t read the newspaper with a cup of coffee or played with the dog or called an old friend. It felt like every single minute, I was struggling with logistics in order to meet everyone’s needs but my own.
“Technically, I was a good enough wife and mother, and I was good enough at my job. Everyone else was OK, but I was miserable. I had to quit or I was going to collapse.”
Today, this woman works from home. Her family has less money, and she will tell you she misses her old life as a professional. But at least she can breathe—and laugh.
Work-life balance is not a decision you make alone. You have to confront how your choices affect a myriad of others.
But if you don’t fulfill your own joy with your plan, all the balance in the world is just duty. One day, you’ll wake up and find yourself in a special kind of hell, where everyone is happy but you.
And that doesn’t do anyone any good.
When you get right down to it, there are only a few things you need to know if you want, as the title of this chapter says, to have it all.
Outside of work, clarify what you want from life.
At work, clarify what your boss wants, and understand that, if you want to get ahead, what he or she wants comes first. You can eventually get what you both want, but the arrangement will be negotiated in that context.
Make sure you work in a supportive culture where performance matters and you can earn flexibility chits with great results.
Earn a lot of chits. Redeem as needed; replenish often.
Achieving work-life balance is a process. Getting it right is iterative. You get better at it with experience and observation, and eventually, after some time passes, you notice it’s not getting harder anymore. It’s just what you do.
TYING UP LOOSE ENDS
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20. HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE
The Questions That Almost Got Away
Here, There, and Everywhere
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THE QUESTIONS THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY
BACK IN THE INTRODUCTION, I said that I was inspired to write this book by the questions I received traveling around the world over the past several years. Most of those questions, and my answers to them, ended up fitting into the nineteen chapters preceding this one.
A few questions, however, just couldn’t be wedged into one topic area or another, be it leadership, hiring, change, strategy, or work-life balance. They were too broad, narrow, specific, or unusual. They just defied categorization.
And yet these questions actually call to mind several of the themes that run through this book—the importance of candor and positive energy, for instance, the effectiveness of differentiation, the importance of voice, the power of authenticity and meritocracy, and the absolute necessity of change and never letting yourself be a victim.
So I’m going to end this book with the “questions that almost got away,” hoping that they cover any territory I’ve missed, and perhaps even remind you of some of the major signposts of the territory we’ve covered so far.
This question was posed at a working dinner in Mexico City, attended by about thirty CEOs from various industries:
We spent the last ten years bringing our company up to speed with training and process improvements, and with our low-cost labor, we were extremely competitive. But now we’re getting killed by China. How can we stay alive?
I’ve heard some form of this question everywhere—except China, of course.
When I was in Dublin in 2001, for instance, a couple of months after Gateway announced it was closing up shop, an Irish technology executive anxiously asked, “Does this mean the end of the long boom for us?” In Milan in 2004, I spoke with a German manager who wondered if his company’s only hope was to sell out to an Asian company that wanted his European distribution capability. At a conference in Chicago the same year, a machine parts manufacturer based in Cleveland described in agonizing detail how the Chinese kept lowering and lowering the price of their competing products. “Will there be any manufacturing jobs left in Ohio?” he asked.
There is no easy answer to the China question. Yes, you hear about China’s problems—its scarcity of middle managers, for instance, and the massive number of poor farming families moving into unprepared cities with not enough jobs to support them. Lumbering, bureaucratic state-owned enterprises still make up most of its economy. And the country’s banks are saddled with bad loans.
But for China, these aren’t mountains to be scaled, they’re blips to be flattened by the giant, high-speed bulldozer that is its economy. Increasing prosperity from spectacular
economic growth over the past twenty years has given the Chinese enormous self-confidence. But China has so much more: a massive pool of low-cost, hardworking laborers and a rapidly expanding number of well-educated engineers.
And then, there’s its work ethic, which may be its single biggest strength. Entrepreneurship and competition are baked into the Chinese culture. Consider the executive who hosted me during a weeklong visit to Shanghai and Beijing last year. She said she’s at the office from 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., goes home for dinner to join her husband and son until 8:00 p.m., and then returns to work until midnight. “This is very typical here,” she said, “six days a week.” And she works for a U.S. multinational!
So, faced with the inevitability of China, what do you do?
First and foremost, get out of the tank. The sense of bleakness that I heard from Mexico to Milan and across the United States is perhaps understandable, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.
It’s not as if the developed economies of the world are in shambles. The developed world has large consumer and industrial markets, all thirsting for products, with great brands and distribution mechanisms to serve them. Its economies have open and mature legal systems. They are transparent societies, with democratic governments and good education and social systems. Its businesses have fully developed management processes. The United States has the added advantage of a large, thriving venture capital market with the capability to provide seed capital for just about any good idea.