Winning - Jack Welch [110]
So, I’m clearly no expert on just how individuals should prioritize the various parts of their lives, and I’ve always felt that choice is personal anyway.
But I have dealt with dozens of work-life balance situations and dilemmas as a manager, and hundreds more as the manager of managers. And over the past three years, I’ve heard from many people—both bosses and employees—about this complex issue.
From all these experiences, I have a sense of how bosses think about work-life balance, whether they tell you or not.
You may not like their perspective, but you have to face it. There’s lip service about work-life balance, and then there’s reality. To make the choices and take the actions that ultimately make sense for you, you need to understand that reality:
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.
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