Winning - Jack Welch [116]
So before you open your mouth a fifth time to ask for limited travel and Thursday mornings off, or occupy your boss’s time with concerns over your child-care arrangements, know that you are making a statement, and no matter what words you use, it sounds like, “I’m not really into this.”
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5. Even the most accommodating bosses believe that work-life balance is your problem to solve. In fact, most of them know that there are really just a handful of effective strategies to do that, and they wish you would use them.
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Look, only you can figure out your values and priorities. Only you know what trade-offs you are willing to make, and only you can envision their consequences. Only you can organize your schedule and your life, at work and at home, for the balance you have chosen.
That is why, at the end of the day, most bosses correctly believe work-life balance is your problem to solve, not theirs.
Now, some managers are very adept at helping their people go through the process of sorting out priorities and selecting tradeoffs, and even in coming up with scheduling solutions that work equally well for their employees and the company. In fact, they see that activity as an integral part of their jobs.
But helping people find work-life balance is really a special skill. Not every manager has it, and not every manager wants it. Some managers feel, “What the heck am I supposed to be now, a mother and a therapist? Forget about it!”
But many do not. In my speaking and consulting engagements over the past several years, I’d estimate about half of all managers want to actively work with their employees to help them achieve some form of balance. That’s a lot more than five years ago.
There can be no question that negotiating work-life balance arrangements adds a layer of complexity to a manager’s job. But your manager should welcome the challenge. It gives him another tool to motivate and retain great performers, just like salary, bonuses, promotions, and all other kinds of recognition.
But along the way, you can and should help yourself. The work-life balance debate has now been out there long enough that a handful of best practices have emerged. Most experienced bosses know about these techniques. In fact, many use them, and they wish you would too.
Here they are.
Best practice 1: Keep your head in whatever game you’re at. We’ve already established that work wants 150 percent of you, and so does home. To alleviate angst and distraction, and to enhance your performance no matter what you are doing, be focused on where you are and whom you are with.
In other words, compartmentalize.
No one wins when you routinely run your family’s carpool logistics from your office phone or e-mail customers from the soccer field.
Compartmentalizing isn’t easy, obviously. Sometimes you must call a customer from the gym or check on a sick child between meetings. But the more you blend your life, the more mixed up, distracted, and overwhelmed you feel and act.
Technology is a real two-edged sword on this. On the one hand, you can be home for dinner three nights a week when you have the ability to check e-mail on your BlackBerry from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. On the other, you can give yourself a real ulcer by encouraging your office to call your cell phone while you are skiing.
The absolute ideal is to draw crisp boundaries around your activities. Then, when you are at work, keep your head in work completely, and when you are at home or play, keep your head there, and only there. I realize this is something of a fantasyland. There will always be pressures on whatever rules you set, but the smaller and less frequent the interruptions are, the more balance you will actually feel.
Best practice 2: Have the mettle to say no to requests and demands outside your chosen work-life balance plan. Eventually, most people come up with a work-life