Home And Work A Volatile Mixture
The pressures that private and professional life exert are great and their interaction often stressful most of all for the entrepreneur. Fernando Bartolomé examines the issues.
Most people would like to succeed at work and in their private lives. And most regard this as having a good job and advancing in ones professional career while having a good marriage and a good relationship with ones children.
Some may define success particularly in private life differently. Some men and women today may say that success does not necessarily mean marriage or having children. These, however, are exceptions among the people I work with: mostly successful executives in large multinational corporations.
The model of success in professional and private life for these people fits the conventional model. The only change that I perceive is that while only a few years ago the conventional model of success in private life for male executives was to have a traditional family with a wife staying at home, the proportion of people for whom the ideal is a dual-career family is increasing slowly.
But this increase is mostly among women, not men. Indeed, if one listens carefully to many men who say their ideal is a dual-career family one discovers that in fact they are closet traditionalists and would be much happier with a traditional wife.
Is it easy to have it all? No. It is extremely difficult and it is becoming increasingly so. And there are several reasons for this:
Work demands are increasing. Organisations are trying to do more with less. Personnel reductions, particularly among middle management are pervasive;
Work stress is increasing. The main source of stress is not only work demands but uncertainty and insecurity. In the past, excellent performance was almost a guarantee of a secure job. Today, outsourcing and globalisation put even the job of the excellent performer in jeopardy. This stress is multiplied by the frequent lack of transparency from the top of organisations about their strategic personnel decisions. When people feel highly stressed at work it is very difficult for them to pay attention to their private lives;
The relationship between the genders is changing. We live in a brave new world where men and women expect more out of their relationship and are struggling to find new definitions of a good relationship. Our parents model has become obsolete. We have to re-invent what a good relationship between a man and a woman in the 1990s means. These experiments are risky and stressful;
Our standards of what it means to have a good relationship with our children have been raised. The definition of what being a good mother means has remained quite stable. But the definition of what being a good father means has changed substantially;
Both men and women would like to have it all. Many women today are unwilling to sacrifice it all for their families. After a period of trying to be superwomen, many women decided that this was impossible and gave up some aspect of their lives. Some chose not to marry. Many decided not to have children or have fewer. Many postponed having children.
Research shows that even in dual-career families women are still doing about 70 to 80 per cent of the jobs concerned with private life. Even very liberated women tend to feel more responsible for the quality of private life and particularly for the well being of their children than do men.
When I ask executives how men and women should divide the job of taking care of young children (up to five years old) the average response is that the ideal division should be 70 per cent for the mother and 30 per cent for the father. And many women share that view. When I ask them how much did each parent actually do, the average man does about 20 per cent of the job.
The problem is difficult but not impossible to deal with. There are no perfect solutions but here are some ideas that may help. First we should put things in perspective and avoid clichés and easy answers. Lets debunk a couple of clichés.
The main problem is time. Not true. My research shows that executives devote only 50 per cent of their waking hours to work. And this is true even if they work long hours.
For example: 1 week = 168 hours Average weekly sleep = 49 hours Total waking hours = 119 hours Daily average commute = 1 hour Daily average time at work = 10 hours x 5= 55 hours
Average work hours during the weekend = 4 hours
Total working hours = 59 hours 59/119 = about 50 per cent
Executives are often startled when they make this calculation. They cant believe the numbers. But they are accurate. Note that the percentage of waking hours devoted to work would decrease substantially if holidays were included.
Time is indeed an issue. But not the main issue.
The main problem is my boss. That may be true in some cases but is often used as an excuse. Many executives who say this have never discussed with their bosses how to protect their private lives. Women are better than men at this, but even women may find it difficult to negotiate these issues, and therefore avoid doing it.
What the individual can do
Stop blaming others. Stop blaming the organisation, the boss, incompetent subordinates, demanding clients;
Analyse what one could do oneself without asking for anybodys permission to improve
the situation. Learn to manage ones time better. Learn to prioritise. Learn to delegate. Learn to cut unnecessary activities, meetings and so on.
For many men, and some women, taking care of their private lives is more duty than passion I ought to attend the PTA meeting or I have to pick up the children at school or I have to take them to the doctor.
There is indeed a lot of duty to be taken care of. Some of it can be delegated to others: day care centres, baby sitters, school, vacation camps. But there is much that should not be delegated.
For example, we may be tempted to delegate the more painful or uncomfortable activities. But this may be totally wrong. Taking care of a sick child is both an anxious time and an opportunity to discover more deeply your love for your child. To learn perhaps to become a better husband to your wife.
I work with people of different ages. And when we discuss this topic, the older they are the sadder they feel. Because they can not go back. There are only a few years when you can hold a baby in your arms.
Develop priorities
I often ask executives to prioritise three areas of their lives children, couple and self. Many say children, couple, self. But the correct order is the opposite: self, couple, children.
Some women find that idea troubling and difficult. But, if one thinks about it, it is logical and evident. You can not take care of anybody if you do not take care of yourself. You can not have a healthy relationship with anybody if you have a lousy relationship with yourself.
The best way of taking care of your children is to take care of your marriage. If you destroy your marriage you will hurt your children. A childs home is not his house but the safety he/she feels when his/her parents love each other.
Prioritising does not mean that one thing is more important or has more value than the other. All may be equally important. But it does mean having a sense of how each aspect of our lives relates one to the other.
Beyond the individual
The responsibility starts with the individual but does not end there. To protect the quality and stability of private life, and particularly to protect families, society as a whole has an important role to play.
Unemployment, under-employment, job insecurity and poorly paid jobs are the most serious threats to the well being and stability of families;
A better distribution of income, a more just society and a better distribution of work (if the economy does not produce enough employment) are important contributing factors to creating the economic and social conditions where families can thrive;
At the deepest level, materialism conflicts with what I call relationism. When we hecticly seek material wealth and possessions, when we try to achieve happiness by buying the best car, the latest record, the ideal Caribbean vacation we may pay too much attention to things and too little to people and relationships. Things do not bring us together. Corny as it may sound, love does. And it requires valuing people more than things.
Changes in male and female roles
The quality of private life, and especially that of family life, will improve when men and women feel equally responsible for the quality of their private lives and when they have an equal degree of passion for it.
Today a woman still suffers more when
she has to leave her children in a day-care
centre than a man does under similar circumstances.
Women today would like to have a more
fulfilling professional life but without risking the quality of their private lives. The first wave of feminism was fought under the banner of womens liberation. Liberation was often interpreted as jettisoning female roles and functions that women believed they had been brainwashed into assuming. The second wave of feminism is ready to assume the existence of deeply rooted feminine impulses, such as nurturing, to value them and to integrate them into a richer ideal of what being a woman means.
Unfortunately, men have not yet achieved an equal transformation. Very few wanted to be liberated from their traditional roles. It was the feminists who suggested to men that they should be liberated from their traditional roles as money earners and sole providers of economic security. Few men fought women to defend their right to feed a baby or get up in the middle of the night to nurse a sick child.
But today, forced in part by their wives, men are starting to discover the value of these aspects of their lives and proposing for the first time a new, much richer definition of the fathering role.
Structural changes
The term family friendly policies is now widely used at state and company level. The more advanced a society, the more varied are the tools it offers people to help take care of both work and family. But laws and policies are often ahead of practice. When a society, for example, offers family-friendly solutions to men and women, women use them much more often than men.
In the Netherlands in 1994, for example, 36.4 per cent of the labour force had part-time jobs. But, while 65 per cent of the women had chosen this option, only 16 per cent of men did. The reasons are many, including the differential pay between men and women. But, certainly, the willingness of women to sacrifice professional success in favour of paying attention to family needs plays an important role.