Winning - Jack Welch [115]
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