Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  Grant then asks the same question with regard to the personality type of people most likely to be at the top of corporate hierarchies. After thinking for a second, most people answer “takers,” although some may guess “matchers.” They are wrong. The answer, once again, is “givers.”

  Givers are great successes not just in fields like education, where doing things for others might fit in better with the core mission, but also in business and even politics, which are not generally seen as warm and fuzzy fields. That’s because being a giver doesn’t mean you’re a doormat, and it doesn’t even mean that you’re necessarily nice. It just means you continuously do things without expecting anything in return.

  Grant describes how Abraham Lincoln’s political career was built on giving. When Lincoln first ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, he ended up withdrawing so that he could help Lyman Trumbull win—that’s because Lincoln and Trumbull shared a commitment to abolishing slavery, and that goal was more important to Lincoln than being a senator. Though Trumbull lost, Lincoln’s behavior built goodwill and trust, and it helped him establish a reputation that would eventually land him in the White House.

  It’s worth noting that Lincoln’s supportive actions didn’t pay off right away. His behavior over time led to networks of supporters who ultimately helped him along the road to the White House. Working parents are especially well equipped to bring that same kind of giver sensibility into the office, and taking the long view is important for them, as they may have moments when they need to step back from work. We need to stop thinking of that giving, caring personality as a roadblock to success or leadership and start thinking of it as a new, authentic way forward.

  CARE GROWING

  ANDY COMES FROM A LONG line of professors, including his father, his aunt and uncle on his father’s side, and his father’s father, a great Hungarian professor of Byzantine history. His aunt Edu, a retired professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, is beloved by all the family. A few years ago, Edu sent me a small book entitled On Caring, by a now little-known philosopher named Milton Mayeroff. It was first published back in 1971 as part of a series of forty-five books called World Perspectives, an effort by some of the most distinguished scholars, politicians, and artists of the time to help make sense of the world “in a new era of evolutionary history, one in which rapid change is a dominant consequence.” Sounds familiar!

  This slim volume was a revelation to me, like a secret that had been hiding in plain sight. A man wrote it. A man who was writing not for an audience of women who want “work-life balance” but for entrepreneurs, leaders, and managers, as well as men and women of all types trying to figure out what a well-lived life might look like. After reading On Caring, I felt like I finally had the missing piece of a complicated puzzle; everything finally fit together. Suddenly, I saw how all the aspects of a caring personality, though commonly derided as “soft,” are actually just as vital—at home and in the workplace—as any of the “hard” aspects of a competitive personality.

  The book’s central message is that the essence of caring is to help another person grow and realize his or her potential—the exact opposite of simply using that person for one’s own ends. Caring requires us not to put ourselves aside but to put others first in ways that allow them to flourish as independent people. “In caring as helping the other grow,” Mayeroff writes, “I experience what I care for (a person, an ideal, an idea) as an extension of myself and at the same time as something separate from me that I respect in its own right.”

  Any parent, grandparent, older sibling (sometimes!), teacher, or mentor of a younger person will recognize this sentiment—the process of nurturing and teaching means that you are pouring your own experience, values, and views into the other person while at the same time, if you are doing it right, giving her space to be herself. What is particularly striking, though, is that Mayeroff does not distinguish between caring for a person and caring for “an ideal or an idea”—anything that you create or are committed to.

  Think about how great artists describe their process of creation. Sculptors talk about having an idea for a sculpture but then having to follow the grain of the wood or the fissures of the stone. As they age and gain experience and confidence, painters typically become freer and more abstract with their brushstrokes, letting the paint guide their hands rather than the other way around. I think of my mother, who became a full-time artist after we left home, showing me the work in her studio and often saying that a canvas I think is perfect “still needs something,” almost as if the painting is talking to her.

  In writing, many novelists, including Henry James, Marcel Proust, E. M. Forster, Alice Walker, and J. K. Rowling, have described how their characters can sometimes “take over” and dictate the course of their novels. At some point in the writing process, as the characters develop and start seeming to have their own independent lives, the author stops struggling to invent new dialogue and plot and instead just thinks about what a character might say or do in a certain situation and then writes it down. Sometimes, a character might even change an author’s original idea, taking the story in a whole new direction.

  A talented artist knows how to allow his or her creation to develop its own integrity, to let it shape itself in a way that requires his guidance but is not entirely within his control. This is exactly like being a parent. A good parent is deeply connected to the child but also knows when to let that child form his or her own path and understands how to raise an independent, autonomous person, not just some sort of “mini me.”

  This vision of care is as demanding and rewarding as any other field of human endeavor. Indeed, Mayeroff lists a number of elements necessary to be a good caregiver, attributes that are just as necessary to be a good employee or manager. His roster includes knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope.

  Each of these elements links to a specific dimension of caring. Knowledge, because “to care for someone…I must know who the other is, what his powers and limitations are, and what is conducive to his growth.”

  Patience will be obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with a young child or an elderly adult. But as Mayeroff explains, the patience involved in caring is not just about time but also about space: by listening to someone who is upset, we are present in a way that gives that person space to express his emotions and to identify their source. That same ability is the essence of good management, as opposed to overly controlling bosses who micromanage and immediately insist on taking over when a problem or a conflict arises.

  True patience also “includes tolerance of a certain amount of confusion and floundering” on the part of others who are figuring things out for themselves. That attitude, according to Mayeroff, leads to an acceptance of time that may appear to be wasted but in fact is part of the “free play” necessary to growth. Google could not have said it better, with its insistence on Lego bricks, pingpong tables, scooters, and toys everywhere.

  Patience is also involved in what Mayeroff calls embracing “alternating rhythms.” Caring for a person or for an artistic endeavor means trying to express yourself in a way that attains the result you want—teaching a child a concept or writing a paragraph on a page—and then stopping and assessing whether you have been successful. If not, you try again. Caring is thus a continual process of adapting to figure out what works, moving between your own needs and the needs of another, between the needs of the moment and needs over time. Interestingly, this process is exactly what entrepreneurs like Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, say about how to take an idea and make it a successful business. “Nobody has a great idea the first time out of the gate. Nobody, ever. You have to iterate, and change and pivot” in response to what you learn in the marketplace.

  Honesty, in Mayeroff’s catalogue, is seeing the person—or the idea or painting or music—as it truly is, not as you want it to be “or feel it must be.” It is also looking at yourself clearly enough
to see whether your actions help or hinder the growth of the person or idea you care for. That kind of honesty takes courage, the courage to accept things that you may not like or want to see, as well as the courage to go “into the unknown.” In my experience, courage is one of most essential attributes of leadership. Having to face my own limitations as a parent, finding the courage to acknowledge what I don’t know and apologize when I have made a mistake, has certainly made me a better leader.

  Mayeroff’s catalogue of caring attributes are all bound together. If honesty requires courage, courage requires trust. That trust is certainly leavened by humility and hope, the humility of accepting your own limitations. I think about this dimension of caring often in my frequent conversations with my sons about procrastination. My father is a procrastinator; he always used to laugh and tell me, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” when he would urge me to get to work and I would point out that he was still reading the paper. Now the shoe is on the other foot, as I urge my sons to start earlier and not leave their projects until the last minute, while knowing full well that I have looming deadlines all over the place!

  Humility also means accepting that you have done the best you can, however imperfectly, combined with the hope that inspires us to believe we can always do a little better today than we did yesterday and that if we just keep trying, things will come right. How often, as a parent, have I felt that I am at wit’s end, that I have tried and tried to get my children to understand why it is important that they study or focus or be nice to each other! How often have I thought to myself that I just have to hope and have faith; that if I keep trying, keep repeating, keep insisting, somehow it will sink in.

  More generally, the virtues that caring for others teaches and builds are part of what New York Times columnist David Brooks would call “the cultivation of character.” I believe deeply in character, that hard-to-pin-down combination of integrity, morals, self-direction, strength, and courage that I see in the people I admire most. It is what I have dug deep for at critical junctures of my own career: when I decided not to work for a big law firm but instead to try my hand on the teaching market to see if I could become a law professor, even though I looked like a very unusual candidate; when I accepted Hillary Clinton’s offer to be her director of policy planning, even though I had never served in government; and when I chose to leave the academy, the wonderful secure world of tenure and long summers to work in any way you like, for the much more uncertain life of running a young organization.

  My competitive side certainly played a role in those decisions, but as I reflect on Mayeroff’s writing, I can see a strong link between caring about the people I love most in the world and caring about ideas and ideals in ways that have shaped many of my professional decisions. I can also say, without reservation, that I would hire anyone who has all or even most of the attributes Mayeroff lists as essential to caring in a heartbeat. Furthermore, any boss who doesn’t have at least some of those attributes isn’t tougher or stronger or better, just a bad boss.

  WE GET WHAT WE PAY FOR

  HERE IN THE UNITED STATES, we pay a great deal for managing money. We pay far less for doing anything with kids. Megan Gunnar, the psychologist who specializes in early education, points out that Americans pay early-childhood workers, those stimulators of young brains, the same wages we pay those who “park our cars, walk our dogs, flip our burgers, and mix our drinks.”

  We “pay” people in the sense of not only money but also social prestige. Conduct your own experiment. Go to a cocktail party and tell half the people you meet that you are an investor. Tell the other half that you are a teacher, and measure how long it takes for your newest acquaintance to turn away or look over your shoulder for someone more important to talk to.

  And we do indeed get what we pay for: third-rate public education, near the bottom of the league tables among advanced industrial countries. Look at what happens at the tops of those tables. In Finland, a country that ranks high on all international educational measures, teaching is a prestigious profession. To become a teacher in Finland, you must be accepted to one of eight teacher training colleges, which are about as difficult to get into as MIT. If you want to teach language arts, for example, you must take a difficult literature exam. Finnish teachers make an amount comparable to other college graduates in their country. By contrast, in the United States, many teachers’ colleges have no admissions requirements, and so our country produces two and a half times the teachers we need each year and then pays them less than what other college grads make.

  Just to drive home the point, the most successful effort by far to raise the social prestige of teaching has been Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America. She did it by creating a highly selective competition, such that in some years it has become almost as hard to become a Teach for America fellow as it is to get into some Ivy League schools. Human nature works in the United States just as in Finland: higher standards lead to more prestige. But that aura of selectivity and success does not extend to career teachers.

  So why don’t we value teachers? Or coaches, therapists, nurses, nannies, primary care physicians, gerontologists, eldercare specialists—essentially any profession centered on helping others flourish rather than winning ourselves? I can think of a number of reasons for this distortion in our value structure. The most obvious, at least to most women, is that we are talking about men’s traditional work versus women’s traditional work, and we have traditionally valued men more than women.

  Another possibility is that the professions that involve competition more than care have much more measurable outcomes; it is easy to figure out who won—the deal, the lawsuit, the sales contract, the race to invent a new product—and to compensate the winner accordingly. It is much harder, as teachers and education reformers both know, to measure learning outcomes. You can reduce those outcomes to multiple-choice tests, but real learning often suffers in the process. Parents know the drill: it often takes years to find out that a particular conversation or life experience with a child planted a valuable seed that actually flowered.

  I first started thinking about these questions when I watched an elementary school class shortly after becoming a law professor at the University of Chicago. My beloved friend and college roommate Nora Elish was teaching first grade in New York. As I sat in the back and watched her guide a group of six-year-old boys through various reading exercises, carefully calibrating her interaction with each one, I kept thinking: If I fail in my task of teaching civil procedure or international law, my students may do less well on their exams or go through their legal careers disliking those subjects. If Nora fails, however, her students’ lives could be blighted forever. Learning to read is the foundation for almost everything else they will do in life.

  In terms of both prestige and compensation, that is not exactly how the world sees it. I don’t mean to diminish my own accomplishments in passing through the narrow needle that is the law school teaching market. But that’s just it. The prestige and high salary that accompanies a teaching position at Chicago or Harvard law schools is a reward for winning out over many others on a fast and difficult track. It reflects the expectation that the professor will advance the frontiers of knowledge through his or her research; students who are admitted to those schools then have the opportunity to study with leading scholars. But at no point are we measuring the value of teachers in terms of what students actually learn.

  I have had to re-educate myself to, when I meet a teacher, therapist, or coach next to a banker or businessperson, push back against the reflexive assumption that because the banker is richer and more powerful, he or she is thus somehow smarter, more interesting, and more valuable. I think to myself that the teacher has the harder and ultimately more important job, one with the potential of altering a life for good or ill. When I had minor but scary surgery right under my left eye, the nurse whose calm and experienced presence made such a difference told me she had left a career in advertising. At that moment, I was ve
ry glad she had chosen to apply her intellect and emotional intelligence to a caring profession rather than a commercial one. Teachers and nurses also have the courage and character not to respond to the dominant measures of value in our society.

  It may be a constant in human history that having money is valued; even under communism humans found a way to become far richer than their fellows and wielded power as a result. But what we consider cool and attractive has changed continually across time and cultures, from men in wigs and elegant hose to jocks to geeks, from Rubenesque figures to social X-rays. What we value is ultimately up to us.

  THE COMPETITIVE MYSTIQUE

  SO IS MANAGING MONEY MORE valuable than managing kids? It should be clear by now that I think the answer is emphatically no.

  In theory, at least, the rest of the world agrees with me. Ann Crittenden opens The Price of Motherhood with the observation that it is a commonplace to say that being a mother is the most important job in the world. “In the United States, motherhood is as American as apple pie. No institution is more sacrosanct; no figure is praised more fulsomely.” A video circulated in the spring of 2014 that purported to show people being interviewed for a position called “director of operations.” It involved working all the time, with no breaks for holidays, lunch, or even sleep, and required “excellent negotiation and interpersonal skills.” The position was unpaid. The candidates responded to the job description by balking. “That’s inhumane!” they cried, “That’s insane!” Then, at the end of the video, the interviewer told them that someone actually holds this job already—in fact, billions of people. “Moms,” he tells the job seekers, who laugh and thank their mothers.

  But behind this public approbation of motherhood lies a deep well of insincerity. I was reminded of a letter from a young woman who was at the time a first lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve. She wrote to tell me that when she accepted an offer for a tenure-track faculty position, the guy she was dating broke up with her because it was apparent that she would not be putting his nascent career first. At the same time, she reported, “My commanding officer had a chat with me about my priorities. When was I going to stop working so much and start a family? He proceeded to show me a picture of his wife with their 5 children and told me that is what life is about.”