Winning (27 page)

But Gary was a star in every way. His performance in a corporate staff job year after year opened up huge operational opportunities for him, but he always said he liked what he was doing, his travel load was manageable, and he didn’t want to move. That was OK with me. I loved what he was doing, and the whole company was benefiting.

But I worried, as I’m sure Gary did, about how long we could keep a staff person fresh and engaged. I didn’t want Gary to leave GE or just check out mentally.

For the next decade, every time we launched a major initiative—from Services to Six Sigma to e-business—we asked Gary to take charge of organizing councils, comprised of leaders from each business, to transfer best practices around the company. Along the way, he took on the role as chief information officer for the company. Gary stayed put, but just about every couple of years, he expanded the scope of his job, bringing great value to GE while remaining true to his work-life balance choices.

Gary’s story is an example of thousands like it that take place every day—a boss pulling out the stops to keep a star performer hooked and excited. I knew what Gary needed and what the company needed, and fortunately, with his intellectual curiosity, commitment, and energy, we found a solution where everyone won.

So every time you think about your work-life balance issue, remember what your boss is thinking about—and that’s winning. Your needs may get heard—and even successfully resolved—but not if the boss’s needs aren’t met as well.

Admittedly, there are bosses out there who think, “I never got any kind of special help with my work-life issues, and I’m not going to give any. Each person has to make it on his own.”

Moreover, there are people who don’t have children who frankly resent their coworkers who are parents who ask for a “special pass” because of their family responsibilities. I have heard these individuals say things like,
“They
wanted to have children. Now they want
us
to make it easy for them!” That perspective is not particularly charitable, but I can understand where it’s coming from.

Actually, the reality of the workplace is that there are very few special passes. Yes, bosses are agreeable to giving people the flexibility to come and go as they please—but only after they have earned it with their performance and results.

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 when I needed it. I had earned it with commitment and performance over the years.”

Contrast Susan’s story to that of a friend of mine who managed a sixty-person unit of a fast-growing company.

A few years ago, she was approached by a member of her team—let’s call her Cynthia—who had just had her second child. Cynthia asked if she could work at home on Fridays. The executive (a working mother herself) immediately said yes because she knew that Cynthia—an eight-year veteran of the company—would continue to deliver stellar results. She always had. In fact, she was one of the hardest-working, most organized, and productive members of the staff.

After a week or two, word got around the office that Cynthia was working from home on Fridays. Soon enough, my friend was approached by a young guy—we’ll call him Carl—who had been at the company for about a year with no distinguishing results. He too wanted to work at home on Fridays. “I want to perfect my yoga practice,” he explained.

When my friend said no, the conversation got very awkward. “You’re imposing your values on me,” Carl said. “You’re saying that mothering has more value than yoga. But I’m never going to have children. Who are you to say that my yoga is less meaningful in my life than Cynthia’s children are in hers?”

“Sorry, but that’s the decision I made!” the boss shot back.

Later, when the confrontation hit the office gossip mill and distracted Carl’s coworkers for a week with minidebates over fairness and values, my friend came to regret the fact that she hadn’t been more direct in her answer. Carl couldn’t work at home on Fridays because he hadn’t demonstrated he could do the job at the office Monday through Thursday!

Despite her own personal circumstances, my friend’s decision
hadn’t
been about yoga versus babies. It hadn’t been about values at all. It had been about results. Carl didn’t have any chits.

What does this mean for you? It means that as you think about work-life balance, know that to get it in most companies, you have to earn it. That process will take time.

One last thing to know about the chit system. To people just entering the workforce, it often seems unfair. Why, they wonder, do you have to
wait
to get the freedom and flexibility you want? But more experienced people tend to get it—in fact, many see the give-and-take of chits as perfectly equitable.

Finally, bosses like it too. For them, it’s a win-win deal.

A company brochure can be a sight to behold, with its glossy photos and long lists of lifestyle benefits, such as job sharing and flextime.

But most people know that the last time you look at the company brochure is the first day at work, when you fill out your insurance paperwork in the HR office. In fact, most savvy people realize pretty quickly that most brochure work-life balance programs are primarily a recruiting tool aimed at new candidates.

Real work-life balance arrangements are negotiated by bosses and individuals on an as-needed basis, using the performance-for-flexibility chit system we just talked about.

That chit system requires a special environment.

It requires a supportive organizational culture where bosses are encouraged to strike creative work-life deals with high performers, and high performers feel entirely comfortable talking with their bosses about their work-life challenges.

In such a culture, bosses have the freedom to reward results with flexibility. They don’t have to clear work-life arrangements with HR, nor do they feel forced to adhere to formalized work-life policies that actually might limit their ability to win, rather than enhance it.
*

Remember the case of the boss who had the employee who wanted to work at home Fridays to practice yoga? In the end, when the news of the incident reached senior management, she was told to agree to his request. It was company policy to “offer equal opportunity for flexible working arrangements.” Merit had nothing to do with it!

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.

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.