Becoming Conscious of Balance


This passage tends to arise later rather than sooner. Young executives are usually very ambitious and willing to work long hours. Recently graduated MBAs who work for top consulting firms often accept, even relish, total demands on their time. Consulting companies often provide free dinners to young professionals in an effort to encourage them to work longer and harder. These early-career professionals love the adrenaline rush of traveling around the world and the opportunity to put their education and ideas into practice. Many times, they’re not even involved in relationships and are more than willing to sacrifice a personal life for professional gain.

Even if they have a partner, however, they often make it clear to that partner that work comes first.

Even executives in their thirties and forties may not become acutely conscious of the need for a meaningful balance. If they’re married and have children, they and their spouses may agree that career and financial gain must be prioritized. Couples are often so focused on achieving specific goals—a certain size home in a certain community, private schools for children, vacations—that work becomes their means to an end.

At some point in midlife, though, all this changes. Sometimes a professional passage, such as a significant failure, triggers the change. Other times, it’s a personal passage that is the catalyst—the loss of a loved one, for example. Whatever the cause, it creates a disconnect between the individual and his work. He gradually comes to question all the sacrifices he’s made for a company and his career. He wonders if it was worth it to miss most of his kids’ childhood or to endanger the relationship he has with his partner. He may even question all the time and energy he has invested in his job, thinking to himself, “There must be more than this.” He questions whether he might do something more meaningful with his life than help sell products, whether relationships with the people he cares most about or establishing a spiritual connection are more important than the job. Even though all this questioning can cause him to quit, the typical outcome is a desire to achieve a more meaningful balance between work and family.

Some people, of course, wake up to discover they’ve emphasized family to the detriment of their careers. They chose not to travel as much or work as many hours as their companies wanted. They may have refused to relocate because they didn’t want to uproot their families or chosen positions that demanded less of them but offered fewer career rewards. At some point, they realize that the people they went to business school with or with whom they worked at their first jobs are now several levels ahead of them, and they become frustrated. They may even start questioning the balance between work and family because they can’t afford the things that other, more successful executives can afford.

Realistically, however, most people go through this passage because they’ve invested more in work than family; some women are the exception to this rule. Relatively early in their careers, they’re faced with the choice of whether they should start a family. This may entail taking six months or six years off from work. In either case, they often find that it’s difficult to pick up where they left off. In addition, still relatively few women with children are in senior leadership positions. Though this is starting to change, some corporate leaders believe that women with children simply can’t make a total commitment to work.

Although these attitudes are understandably aggravating to women, our point is that they tend to struggle with the work-family balance issue earlier than men. Increasingly, some women “solve” this problem when their husbands agree to be stay-at-home dads. In other instances, women decide to have children later in life. Still others rely on professional child-care providers and avoid a sustained work absence. No matter what option women choose, this passage is often even more intense for them than it is for men, and the struggle to achieve a meaningful balance can go on for years. Cultural norms, as well as friends and relatives, can make women feel tremendously guilty for entrusting their children to nannies and au pairs.

Whether you’re a woman or a man, you enter this passage torn by the natural desire to find both work and family fulfillment. Complicating matters is organizational encouragement to achieve work-family balance. Everyone from the CEO to your boss may encourage you to take all your vacation time and be home every night for dinner with your family. No doubt, they mean it. Unfortunately, work realities render their good intentions meaningless. Companies want their people to achieve this balance but not if the work product suffers. Organizations will take as much of an employee’s life as he is willing to give, and this makes perfect sense. As humanistic as it might seem on the surface to insist that people spend more time with their families, it’s not humanistic to downsize the workforce—a consequence if productivity falls because people aren’t spending sufficient time on the job.

We know of one highly accomplished executive whose wife suffered from a serious illness. The company was very understanding and encouraged this executive to spend the time he needed with his wife. He did so, and one week before Christmas, he was terminated. He simply wasn’t able to maintain an acceptable level of productivity, and when the review of his performance against his peers was made, the other factors were not deemed relevant.

As brutal as it sounds to say so, this executive made a choice about work-family balance, and despite the negative consequences, it was the right one for him, and he felt good about it. His values dictated that he care for the most important person in his life during her time of need, even if it meant he would lose his job. As we’ll see, values are critical for resolving the work-family paradox.




Leadership Passages. The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader
Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)
ISBN: 0787974277
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 121

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