Winning - Jack Welch [113]
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