Balancing Your Life: Executive Lessons for Work, Family and Self
The most commonly mentioned challenge that business managers worldwide face is "balancing work and family/personal time." I can say this after having asked groups of senior level managers all over the world this question, "What is the biggest problem you face in life?"
I wonder what your biggest challenge in life is. Write your biggest challenge in life here: That might seem like an abrupt introduction, "Hello, how are you? What's your biggest problem in life?"
The basis for the question, though, is this: adult learning theory suggests that adults learn best when they are dealing with issues that are current, immediate, and personal to them. When speakers or educators or consultants begin talking about issues or concerns that are on their minds and not the issues that are on the listeners' minds, the listeners tend to tune out and glaze over. Unfortunately, that's often a problem in management education sessions.
Many consultants will conduct "needs assessment" prior to making recommendations to clients. The theory behind this is sound, namely, that one should know what the problems are before trying to solve them. Yet many, if not most, educational experiences presume an agenda and jump right in.
So, asking the question, "What is the biggest problem you're facing in life?" turns out to be a great way to begin a program and ground the discussions in current, immediate, personalized issues. We post these on the walls throughout the seminar so we can refer back to them and ensure that our discussions are on track.
Problems can occur, obviously at several levels including societal, organizational, immediate work group, and individual.
Balancing work and family/personal life is the most commonly mentioned issue in these discussions regardless of where you ask. It's not just a North American issue. The same issue comes up in London, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Sydney, Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, Mexico City, and San Jose, as well as in the United States.
There is ample reason to suggest why this balancing act is a global phenomenon.
Friedman's "flat world" suggests that with the advent of the World Wide Web and advances in telecommunication, we can be in touch instantaneously anywhere in the world. Margins are harder to hide. Deals are easier to make. Partners, vendors, and suppliers are more accessible. The competition is working harder.
The answer, it seems, is everyone is trying to do more with less and to keep up in the meantime.
Recently, I was standing in the men's room in a well-known four-star hotel chain on a break between program sessions, and the man standing next to me is on his cell phone discussing business matters. Can I cough? Do I flush? What are the business etiquette rules there? I have a friend who sleeps with his Blackberry. If he awakes during the night, he's answering and sending emails, so that associates get up in the morning with several to-do items in their inboxes. How does one balance work and family/personal life when work follows you wherever you go?
Another friend was a CEO who had a conversation with his wife about retirement. Like me, maybe like you, he's been thinking about slowing down and spending more time with his spouse.
With a smile as wide as the Mississippi River, former Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Ed Norrisa had reason to grin in the spring of 2007. A hit CBS radio show in Baltimore (a place he used to love second only to New York City), appearances on CNN and Fox News, an acting role in a popular HBO television series, a clever and devoted wife, a perpetually charming elementary school-age son, and more money than he could ever earn as a cop would make anyone beam. On the inside, though, Norris seethed.
He wanted his life as police commissioner or head of the Maryland State Police back -- a hope impossible to attain given that he had agreed to plead guilty in early 2004 to charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and fi ling a false tax return in exchange for not being prosecuted for lying on a mortgage application. Norris had believed that bargain would prevent him from serving jail time. That did not happen, and Norris spent the next six months in prison, another six months under house arrest, then returned to Baltimore to serve 500 hours of community service in 2006.
Was his life ruined? He was only 46 years old. Were the next 30 or 40 years going to be defined by this? Would those three years really haunt all the subsequent decades of his life? The future he had imagined since he was young was irrevocably changed. From his perspective, the entire country seemed to stand in judgment and condemnation of him. Would he move beyond the worst of his past?
Edward T. Norris came from a family of cops. His father was a butcher who became a police officer at age 32. "He had a military background and saw security in the police department," Norris said. Norris described his childhood as "fun"; he and his younger brother grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Under the watchful eye of their stay-at-home mom, the Norris boys hung out on the fire escape and played hide-and-seek on 13th Street. "There was always someone out there tougher than you," he recalled.
Young Eddie Norris dreamed of one day becoming a doctor or scientist. When he was 10 years old, Norris discovered football -- a game he really enjoyed playing.
Although he was a good student, being a defensive linebacker in high school was what landed Norris a Division III scholarship to the University of Rochester.
By his third year, though, school became less affordable. In August of that year, Norris went to football camp; within a month, he had quit school and was sworn into the police academy on September 2, 1980 -- "although I had not planned to stay," he said.
As a 20-year veteran of the NYPD, Norris moved up when he took the job as commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) in March 2000. Norris had never really considered leaving his hometown, but he decided to run the idea by his wife. Kate Norris had grown up in California and graduated from Stanford University with a master's degree in fine arts. The couple met in a men's shop where she worked on Fifth Avenue. They had a one year old son and had begun to think about where they might like to raise him. After some discussion, the pair decided Norris should explore the opportunity -- which, at the very least, offered them a chance to live in a city where they could afford to buy a house, something out of their reach in the high-priced New York real estate market.
Norris's appointment was controversial, and he faced constant and tough critics in the media. His outspokenness often stimulated significant public response in Baltimore. He subscribed to the "crime reduction" model; he publicly stated that the few hard-core criminals responsible for most violent crimes needed to be identified swiftly and put behind bars and that if BPD did this, criminals would go elsewhere, and violent crimes in the city would drop dramatically. His critics, including the director of the local American Civil Liberties Union, feared his approach would compromise the constitutional rights of citizens and clog the court system. Community leaders who lived in high-crime areas began to meet with Norris to learn more about him and to challenge his philosophy. West Central citizen leader Myrtle Howerton (known widely as "Momma Myrt") remembered her first meeting with Norris: Not all community groups were unhappy with Norris's approach. Business leaders on the Greater Baltimore Committee praised Norris and his approach to crime-fighting. The group raised $550,000 to support the reduction of violent crime. Local restaurant entrepreneur Joel Shalowitz believed that Commissioner Norris had immediate credibility among businesspeople. Shalowitz had lived in New York City and had seen firsthand the dramatic reduction in crime under Norris's supervision. He said, "I was really glad to have one of NYPD's strategists on the home team at Baltimore. I just knew he was going to make a difference and had a level of devotion to go beyond protecting only the Inner Harbor."
Norris believed that fighting crime was primarily a numbers game. First, one had to find out the status quo, so his first agenda item was to clarify the numerical crime picture. He wanted to have good measures by which he could gauge progress. He began by poring over a 1999 FBI crime report on Baltimore. He knew that collecting and reporting "solid" police statistics were -- like accounting in a business -- difficult tasks fraught with subjectivity and a wide variety of approaches. Some systems, for example, keyed off of citizen call-ins. If an automobile theft was called in, it was recorded as such, but if the responding officer discovered the car was actually not stolen, the record was not changed.
Second, I invited you to consider the research on the predictable chapters in life ranging from psychological development to professional stages. Each of the chapters in the various models presented significant challenges, personally and professionally, that we all must confront and navigate in some fashion. That chapter invited you to think about the challenges of each chapter in life and the consequences of under-attending to their resolution. Unresolved issues often come back later to haunt us. Many of these challenges can be the result of early childhood experiences as we learned from Dee Dee Fisher and Bob Johnson. While I didn't explore the nature of these processes here, I have done so elsewhere. You can explore those processes more fully there if you'd like.
Third, I invited you to consider the nature of success. What does that mean to you? What's the balance between money, power, fame, health, family, recreation, and creativity (among other criteria) that will most satisfy you? It's not that easy, perhaps, to know what you want before you get to a point where it's harder and harder to change things.
Surely people's definitions of "success" change over time, yet if you go too hard in one direction, you may shortchange your ability to later on go hard in another direction. Better to be thinking about this early on so you can be moving in the general direction that you will find satisfying later on. As one Harvard Business School alumna once told me, it's not all that easy to change life management habits developed over a 10-year period and to begin placing different emphases in life. In the same way that corporations develop core capabilities, bundles of competencies, individuals do as well, and habits tend to be persistent.
We should be grateful that the people represented here were willing to share with us how they've lived their lives. From their stories, we can glean insights and strategies that we might not have thought of. We can compare and contrast our own backgrounds and stories with theirs and ponder the differences -- and similarities. We can do a little gut checking to see if we had the same creativity, discipline, determination, vision, flexibility, shall I say, "inside-out-ness" that they demonstrated in their treks to positions of executive responsibility.
Being an executive, from these stories and in my own experience, requires enormous energy and commitment. Perhaps a main reason more of us don't find ourselves in those ranks is that we are deep down unwilling to spend the time and energy required to get there. We prefer a more "comfortable" lifestyle.
Yet we remain fascinated by those who do become our leaders. We want to know how they did it. How they manage to somehow take care of it all.
Do they? Can a person be a super-being, physically fit, intellectually stimulating, well-read, powerful, influential, wealthy, happy, lovingly involved in long-term relationships, kind and compassionate parent, emotionally secure.