| | I'm sure that some of you have already heard about or read this article - "Why Women Still Can't Have it All", written by Anne-Marie Slaughter and published in the July/August edition of The Atlantic - but I thought I'd share it for those who haven't, as it provides some thought-provoking commentary on issues that both women and men face in striving to attain fulfillment at work and at home.
Slaughter specifically highlights the legal industry, built on the foundation of the billable hour, and discusses the unique challenges that this model presents for a law firm associate seeking to establish a work/life balance with which he or she is satisfied. | | | Lizzie, the point you made above that "we can only hope to get more workplace flexibility the more we demand it, and we'll only demand more flexibility when we start becoming more open about our obligations at home and in life" really resonated with me. | |
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< | I was reflecting on the comment in the context of the anecdote I shared about the corporate culture transformation I witnessed at my former job, and I think that the catalyst for the sweeping change I witnessed was really the senior management team's honesty and openness about their own obligations at home. I worked as an analyst for one of these executives, and because his organizational chart included direct reports from all 50 states (he headed the company's force of financial advisors who worked in branches across the country and regional management teams) his job involved significant travel essentially by definition. I recall instances of my former boss's administrative assistant altering his travel schedule or rescheduling standing meetings because he needed to be at home for various personal events and commitments. Other senior members of my team struck a similar balance. I worked frequently with a managing director who left the office in time to attend virtually all of his son's high school hockey games, making up the hours either by arriving at work incredibly early or else working remotely, dialing into conference calls in the car, answering emails whenever necessary. Another senior member of my team senior member of his team decided not to partake in a week-long trip to Texas because his son, a senior in high school, was a member of his school's basketball team and competing in the state playoffs for the first time in his tenure on the squad. | >
> | I was reflecting on the comment in the context of the anecdote I shared about the corporate culture transformation I witnessed at my former job, and I think that the catalyst for the sweeping change I witnessed was really the senior management team's honesty and openness about their own obligations at home. I worked as an analyst for one of these executives, and because his organizational chart included direct reports from all 50 states (he headed the company's force of financial advisors who worked in branches across the country and regional management teams) his job involved significant travel essentially by definition. I recall instances of my former boss's administrative assistant altering his travel schedule or rescheduling standing meetings because he needed to be at home for various personal events and commitments. Other senior members of my team struck a similar balance. I worked frequently with a managing director who left the office in time to attend virtually all of his son's high school hockey games, making up the hours either by arriving at work incredibly early or else working remotely, dialing into conference calls from the car, answering emails whenever necessary. Another senior member of my team senior member of his team decided not to partake in a week-long trip to Texas because his son, a senior in high school, was a member of his school's basketball team and competing in the state playoffs for the first time in his tenure on the squad. | | | Clearly, it's far easier for a senior executive (male or female) to simply announce that a meeting is being cancelled or rescheduled because he or she has chosen to attend to a personal obligation instead, especially because in many of the aforementioned instances, the executive rescheduling the meeting was the one who arranged it in the first place. However, the senior leadership team's frank, unapologetic approach to these work/life conflicts had symbolic significance for the rest of us who lacked similar control over the scheduling of professional obligations. Their openness on the issue was the key which opened the door for other, more junior, employees to be similarly direct (and feel less guilty, at least in my case) when they had to leave the office a little early, or work from home for a morning, in order to attend to a personal matter. The "face time" norm began to fade when it became apparent that the highest ranks of the company's leadership team rewarded and valued high-quality work-product, not the number of times per week their analysts worked late enough to order dinner to the office or take a town car home on the company's tab. | |
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< | I thought http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/ this editorial, titled "The 'Busy' Trap", provides an interesting corollary to certain parts of this discussion: | >
> | I thought this editorial, titled "The 'Busy' Trap", provides an interesting corollary to certain parts of this discussion: | | | If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.” It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. | |
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< | I don't wholly agree with Kreider's 'solution' to the abovementioned problem - idleness as the escape route from the 'busy trap' - nor do I think that the great majority of us even have the option to choose to escape this trap, if it is in fact a trap. Despite these qualifications, however, I appreciate his conclusion: | >
> | I don't wholly agree with Kreider's 'solution' to the abovementioned problem - idleness as the escape route from the 'busy trap' - because I don't think that "busyness" and "exhaustion" are as mutually exclusive as he seems to imply. I also don't think that the great majority even have the option to choose to escape this trap, if it is in fact a trap. Despite these qualifications, however, I appreciate his conclusion: | | | I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. |
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