Winning (26 page)

For more than a decade, Karen’s money managers posted impressive results, significantly outperforming comparable funds. But when the Internet bubble burst, the cost of her management approach began to show. Fund managers were heavily invested in high-growth stocks to make their numbers and avoid Karen’s ire—in fact, their biggest holdings were in Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco.
*

When Karen was fired, senior managers made a big show of denouncing her management style. Many of her people shook their heads in amazement—it had been in evidence for years, but it took a disaster to make management confront it.

You may not work at a company that lets a bad boss hang around until a mess erupts. But it’s possible great numbers will keep your bad boss around indefinitely.

If you feel that’s the case, your next question should be:

What will happen to me if I deliver results and endure my bad boss?
If you think that your organization, and in particular your boss’s boss or someone in HR, understands your bind and sympathizes, you should feel pretty confident that eventually you will be moved up or sideways as a reward for surviving. While you’re waiting, hang in there and give the job your all.

I was fortunate to have many great bosses during my career. They encouraged me, protected me, built my self-confidence, and gave me challenges that stretched my abilities. Reuben Gutoff, my boss for more than a decade when I was starting out, did all these. He kept the mammoth bureaucracy of GE off my back while I learned real-time how to build a business from scratch. I was able to travel the world in my twenties, setting up joint ventures and making small acquisitions.

It took seventeen years for me to bump into a bad boss. It wasn’t that Dave Dance, a vice-chairman, was actually bad, it was just that I was in the running for the CEO job, and he strongly supported another candidate. Every day felt like a week. No matter what I did, I felt that Dave was rooting for me to fail. What an awful feeling when your boss is not on your side. I tried to stay out of his way—I hung out at headquarters as little as possible. I spent my time in the field with people I liked, doing what I liked to do, reviewing businesses.
*

My situation was a lot easier than it is for many people. I knew that it couldn’t last more than a couple of years, and I also knew the potential reward if I endured, and it was big. You may not have that luxury.

But be careful. Uncertainty about the final outcome can make you do something foolish—that is, pull an end run. You may feel the impulse to sneak upstairs and talk to your boss’s boss about the situation. That can be suicide. About 90 percent of the time, complaining about a bad boss to his boss circles right around to bite you on the rear. The big boss may have your best interests at heart when he scolds your boss for his behavior, but you can be absolutely sure that your life will only become more unpleasant afterward. There is a reason why kids don’t tattle on bullies. Unfortunately, the same principle applies in the office.

There will always be an element of uncertainty to enduring a bad boss. You may surmise a happy ending or be promised one. But there are very few guarantees. All you know for certain in this kind of situation is that going to work every day isn’t fun.

Which is why you need to ask the following:

Why do I work here anyway?
Remember how, in the chapter on finding the right job, we talked about the inevitability of trade-offs? It is rare for a job to be perfect in every way. Sometimes you stay in a job for the money or the friends; sometimes you give up money and friends for the love of the work itself or the job’s location or its lack of travel. Sometimes you stay in a job because the company has so much prestige, you know it will help you get a new job once you have a few more years of experience under your belt.

When you find yourself in a situation with a bad boss that isn’t going to change anytime soon, you need to assess your trade-offs and ask, “Are they worth it?”

If the answer to this question is no, then start constructing an exit plan that gets you out the door with as little damage as possible.

On the other hand, if your boss situation offers some kind of long-term benefit that you understand and accept, you really have no choice. Focus on why you are staying, and put your bad boss in perspective. He isn’t everything in your life—he is the one downside of a career or life deal you have made with yourself.

More than anything else, come to grips with the fact that you are staying with a bad boss by choice. That means you’ve forfeited your right to complain.

You can’t consider yourself a victim anymore.

When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

In a perfect world, all bosses would be perfect.

That happens so infrequently that entire movies and books are written about bad bosses, not to mention lots of country-and-western songs.

When you get a bad boss, first find out if you are the problem. That’s not easy, but in many cases, a bad boss is just a disappointed one.

If you’re convinced you aren’t the problem, ask yourself if your company is likely to keep a bad boss with good results. If the answer is yes, the only thing left to do is look at the trade-offs you are willing to make. Is your job worth the price of enduring a bad boss? If so, put up
and
shut up, to put a twist on the old saying.

If the trade-off is not worth it, leave gracefully.

And as you start your next job, remember exactly what made the bad boss bad and how it made you feel—so that when the time comes for you to be a boss, you won’t do the same.

I
F EVER THERE WAS A CASE
of “Do as I say not as I did,” this chapter is it. No one—myself included—would ever call me an authority on work-life balance. For forty-one years, my operating principle was work hard, play hard, and spend some time as a father.

Had the concept been around at the time, I am sure I would have described my life as perfectly balanced. It felt like it had everything in it, all in the right amounts.

I grew up in an era and as part of a culture where you struggled to go to college and get a decent degree. During school, or very shortly thereafter, you got married and started having kids. Getting a job and working your ass off at it was considered the ticket to a good life.

I followed this pattern without a lot of thought. Luckily for me, I found work to be enormously exciting. I saw the weekends as a time to play golf and party with other young couples.

But looking back, it is clear that the balance I chose had consequences for the people around me at home and at the office. For instance, my kids were raised, largely alone, by their mother, Carolyn.

By the same token, from my earliest days in Plastics, I used to show up at the office Saturday mornings. Not coincidentally, my direct reports showed up too. Personally, I thought these weekend hours were a blast. We would mop up the workweek in a more relaxed way and shoot the breeze about sports.

I never once asked anyone, “Is there someplace you would rather be—or need to be—for your family or favorite hobby or whatever?” The idea just didn’t dawn on me that anyone would want to be anywhere but at work.

My defense, if there is one, is that those were the times. In the 1960s and ’70s, all my direct reports were men. Many of those men were fathers, and fathers were different then. They did not, by and large, attend ballet recitals on Thursday afternoons or turn down job transfers because they didn’t want to disrupt their kids’ sports “careers.” Most of their wives did not have jobs with their own competing demands. In general, it was assumed that wives stayed at home to make everything run smoothly.

All that started to change, of course, in the ’80s, when women started moving up in the workforce, and by late in the decade, I started to hear a lot more about work-life balance. It initially bubbled up in many of our management development classes at Crotonville, where managers started to describe the pressures they felt trying to manage travel and transfers in two-career households. Debate about the topic within GE became more intense in the early ’90s, both at Crotonville and during meetings with the GE African American Forum, and it reached a new level of intensity later on during my meetings with members of the company’s Women’s Network.

These conversations forced me to confront something that I had never really confronted for myself—the conflicts involved in managing two full lives—the one at work and the one after hours, be it caring for kids, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or running marathons.

While work-life balance was increasingly front and center during the 1990s, the debate about it has only intensified since my retirement in 2001. Today, no CEO or company can ignore it. In fall 2004, for instance, the
New York Times
ran a front-page, three-part series on work-life balance and job stress. That same week,
Fast Company
’s cover story was entitled, “Still Worried About Work-Life Balance? Forget It. But Here’s How to Have a Life Anyway.” There is a whole consulting industry devoted to the subject, and too many books and Web sites about it to even estimate a number.

Not surprisingly, then, as I’ve traveled around the world for the past three years, I’ve gotten slews of work-life balance questions. The most common is, “How did you find time for all that golf and still become CEO?” but they run the gamut. Once, in Beijing, a man in the audience who looked to be in his thirties asked me, “How did you manage your children while you were managing GE?”

My answers to these questions have been of limited use, I’m sure. I say that I found time for golf because I didn’t spend my leisure time on much else. As for my children, I didn’t “manage” them, except to crack the whip on grades and play social director during my three weeks of vacation each year. Their happy lives today have a lot more to do with their mom than with me.

So, I’m clearly no expert on just how individuals should prioritize the various parts of their lives, and I’ve always felt that choice is personal anyway.

But I have dealt with dozens of work-life balance situations and dilemmas as a manager, and hundreds more as the manager of managers. And over the past three years, I’ve heard from many people—both bosses and employees—about this complex issue.

From all these experiences, I have a sense of how bosses think about work-life balance, whether they tell you or not.

You may not like their perspective, but you have to face it. There’s lip service about work-life balance, and then there’s reality. To make the choices and take the actions that ultimately make sense for you, you need to understand that reality:

 

1. 1. Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.
   
 

2. 2. Most bosses are perfectly willing to accommodate work-life balance challenges if you have earned it with performance. The key word here is:
   if.
   
 

3. 3. Bosses know that the work-life policies in the company brochure are mainly for recruiting purposes and that real work-life arrangements are negotiated one-on-one in the context of a supportive culture,
   not
   in the context of “But the company says…!”
   
 

4. 4. People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems and continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, or incompetent—or all of the above.
   
 

5. 5. Even the most accommodating bosses believe that work-life balance is your problem to solve. In fact, most know that there are really just a handful of effective strategies to do that, and they wish you would use them.
   
 

 

PRIORITY MANAGEMENT

Let’s look at these points one at a time, but first, a few words on what work-life balance really means.

It is no coincidence that work-life balance entered the public domain about the time that women—and especially mothers in dual-career households—started working in force. Suddenly, there was a whole group of people juggling two mutually exclusive and colliding demands: being great parents and great employees at the same time. Especially in the early days, the struggles to make everything work were messy and painful for many working moms, and their stories were filled with guilt, ambivalence, and anger.

Today, work-life balance remains largely the purview of working mothers, in that they are the people most likely to be grappling with the issue on a daily basis.

But without question, work-life balance as a concept has grown and expanded. It isn’t just about how mothers can make time for all the demands in their lives. It’s about how all of us manage our lives and allocate our time—it’s about priorities and values.

Basically, work-life balance has become a debate about how much we allow work to consume us.

Now, you can be like me and my type, and make work your major priority. Or you can attempt a kind of literal balance, with work and life each getting 50 percent of your time, or you can go surfing 80 percent of your time and work 20. There are as many work-life balance equations as there are individuals.
*

But no matter what balance you choose, you’ll have to make trade-offs. After all, as I’ve noted before in this book, it is a rare and lucky person who can have it all in life, all at the same time. Usually, that’s not the case. Working parents who want to be very involved in their kids’ lives, for instance, often have to give up some of their ambition. People who put business success first most likely have to give up some level of intimacy with their kids.

Work-life balance is a swap—a deal you’ve made with yourself about what you keep and what you give up.

I remember one Q & A session with about five hundred executives in Melbourne, Australia, where the moderator was Maxine McKew, one of the country’s most respected newscasters. The session was moving along on all the usual business topics for about an hour when a woman in the audience stood and said, “Could you tell me, Mr. Welch, why must all women who succeed in business act like hard-assed, bullheaded men? When will we see the day that every female CEO doesn’t have to be like Margaret Thatcher?”

I can’t recall my exact answer, but I know I said something very politically incorrect right off the bat about how most women slowed down their career advancements by having children, and while I thought that was a worthy choice, it wasn’t going to get them to the boardroom very quickly.

This comment enraged the questioner, who shot back, “Why must women give their lives up to get ahead while men do not? Women should not have to make all the sacrifices—should they?”
*

Some of the men in the audience groaned, and one called out, “My wife did it.” Another one shouted, “Hey, we all make sacrifices.”

Up on stage, I shrugged. “I cannot give you a good answer to your question,” I said. “I’m not sure that pausing on the corporate ladder is a ‘sacrifice’ to the mothers who make that choice.”

Just then, Maxine stepped in. To be honest, I expected a real slam, but her answer surprised me.

“Women do give something up. It’s biology,” she said. “Let me tell you what I gave up. I wanted my career. And so I never had children. Maybe I would be able to do it with children now. Still, twenty-five years ago, when I was entering broadcasting, it just wasn’t possible to achieve the highest levels and raise babies along the way. It was my choice. Of course I wanted children. But I chose to put my career first, and I cannot blame anyone for my happiness or lack thereof.”

You could have heard a pin drop. In the silence, someone raised his hand and changed the subject with a question about the Australian economy.

I tell this story because you simply can’t talk about work-life balance without acknowledging that it’s so contentious because it’s so personal—and so universal.

Everyone these days makes work-life balance decisions—from working mothers and fathers to single people who want to write a novel or volunteer to build homes for Habitat for Humanity.

Work-life balance means making choices and trade-offs, and living with their consequences. It’s that simple—and that complex.

Just remember, you are not in this alone. Your company also feels the impact of your choices and actions.

And with that in mind, let’s take a work-life balance reality check from your boss’s point of view.

Clearly, most bosses want their employees to have great personal lives. Nobody wants their people hauling family or social problems into the office, where they can leak into the atmosphere and do nothing for productivity.

Then there’s that matter of retention. Satisfied people tend to stay where they are and work with more enthusiasm. So all in all, good bosses don’t want their people to feel unbalanced.

But more than that, bosses want to win—that’s what they’re paid for. And that’s why they want all of you—your brain, your body, your energy, and your commitment. After all, they have a big game to win, and they can’t do that effectively with absentee players—in particular, if the other team draws its players from countries like India and China, where work-life balance is not exactly a cultural priority.

The fact is: work-life balance concerns are actually a luxury—“enjoyed” largely by people who are
able
to trade time for money, and vice versa. You can bet your bottom dollar that the Korean grocer who just opened his shop in New York doesn’t worry about whether he has time to get to the gym, just as you can be absolutely certain that 99 percent of the entrepreneurs in China’s huge emerging competitive workforce don’t wring their hands about working late every night.
*

Your boss is fully aware that most competitors in the global marketplace do not invite their people to decrease their productivity in the name of work-life balance.

That’s why, when your boss thinks about meeting your work-life balance needs, he is guided by the question: How can I accommodate this person and still keep him or her totally riveted to the job?

The truth is, your boss wants 150 percent of you and, if you are good enough, he will do almost anything to get it, even if your family wants 150 percent too.

It’s not that bosses
want
you to give up your family or your hobbies or any other interests. It’s not that diabolical. They’re just driven by the desire to capture all of your energy and harness it for the company.

In most cases, bosses see a good offense as their best defense against life’s yearnings—and that offense would be to make work so exciting and so much fun that people don’t actually want to go home for dinner, let alone play amateur chess or write the great American novel in their attic.

For many years, Gary Reiner worked for me as the head of Business Development in Fairfield. Although he never advertised it, Gary had clearly made a work-life balance choice where time with his family played a large role. Every day he showed up early at the office, but he was a stickler about leaving at six, and he rarely engaged in the banter that slowed work down. He was about as cool and efficient as you could get.