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Giving Equal Footing So Everyone Can Perform and Succeed — Deborah Epstein Henry on Work and Life

Contributor: Morgan Motzel

Work and Life is a two-hour radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday from 7 pm to 9 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body and spirit).

Deborah Epstein HenryOn January 21, the second episode of Work and Life on Sirius XM’s Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School, Stew Friedman spoke with Deborah Epstein Henry, an internationally recognized expert on workplace restructuring, talent management, work-life integration, and the retention and promotion of lawyers, with a focus on women. Henry is a sought-after consultant and speaker for audiences both inside and outside the legal profession. In her work both as a writer and an entrepreneur, Henry is striving to develop new employment models to improve the way professional services firms and clients interact and create shared value.

Following are edited excerpts of Henry’s conversation with Friedman.

SF: Debbie, could you tell us a bit about the company you founded, Flex-Time Lawyers, and how it works?

DEH: It may help to give you a little context on how it evolved. It was very auto-biographical. I was practicing as a litigator in Philadelphia 15 years ago, and found that, as a working mom of two, I was really struggling with how to play an integral role in my kids’ lives while also being successful on partnership track at my law firm. When I spoke with other women professionals, I found that they were struggling with the same thing.  So 15 years ago I sent an email to six lawyers I knew saying, “I’m going to start a group focused on work-life issues for lawyers.  Forward the invite to anyone you know who’s interested.” Within a few days, 150 people responded.

SF: What did they say?

DEH: They said, “We need to be a part of this, and thank you for bringing this to the fore.” And it was really at that moment, as a third-year associate being flooded by these emails, that I knew that I had struck a nerve. I started running events in Philadelphia on different work-life issues. And the subject also morphed into different women’s issues, given the largely female audience. That’s how Flex-Time Lawyers; as a networking and support group for lawyers interested in work-life issues.  But after three years of running it pro-bono on the side as a litigation associate, I ultimately turned it into a consulting practice. Working with companies, law firms and non-profits in the U.S. and Europe on different work-life and women’s issues took off from there.

SF: You’re talking about both leaning in as individuals — learning the skills and developing the support to be able to progress, particularly as a woman, in a hierarchical situation or setting that has traditionally not been supportive — as well as making structural changes in organizations. Let’s say we’ve got a small law firm somewhere in the Midwest that wants to make its organization more attractive and hospitable for men and women. What’s the first couple of things that organization should be doing?

DEH: There’s a multitude of things that can be done, but the first advice I would provide to this firm is: any change you want to make in terms of making the environment more hospitable must be linked to the business. It must be linked to the higher deliverable of revenue and an economic benefit, because these are not charitable organizations, and good will is terrific, but unfortunately people really need to be convinced by their pocket book that they’re going to get a return on this. For example, clients are really pushing back about the billable hour model because the way the billable hour is structured, the more money a firm earns, the more a client loses. The conflict is that when a law firm bills a lot of hours on a case that is a disadvantage to the client – that means more money the client is paying. So you have a structural model where a client and a law firm’s interests are in direct conflict, which makes no sense at all. What I would talk to this firm about is looking at other ways to bill clients so that clients would improve their satisfaction and in turn potentially give more business to the firm.

SF: How could they change their billing from billable hours, which is what everybody knows and everybody complains about?

DEH: They could develop alternative fee structures, which is something that clients are demanding. That means lawyers would be valued based on quality of work, results and efficiency, as opposed to hours logged. That would benefit the client-law firm relationship, and in turn would also benefit the lawyers, because they would no longer be judged on the hours they log, but instead they would be valued on what they should be valued on.

SF: So what’s your dream? How would you like to see things evolve in the legal world in 20 years?

DEH: My biggest goal is two-fold: one is to make alternative ways to practice law the mainstream – to have a greater variety of options out there so that a lawyer can be successful outside of the linear, traditional, equity partner track. On the individual level, to have different ways to evaluate success. On the employer level, it’s really a reciprocal goal, to have different models that service client relationships, and move away from the traditional way of billing clients for services. It’s really unpacking the employment model and providing variety there, but also refocusing the career path and saying there are many ways to practice law in a fulfilling way, having individual satisfaction but also delivering better legal services to clients.

SF: What’s the first question the managing partner of a law firm or an in-house counsel needs to be addressing in order to start to create a model that works better?

DEH: The question for both is, “Am I running a business that is giving equal footing to everyone to perform and succeed?” More often than not, the answer is no, and then the next question is really, “What structural changes do I need to evaluate in order to make the environment one where everybody can thrive?” Doing that is going to mean increased revenue for the business – it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s actually economically the beneficial thing to do.

Debbie’s book Law and Reorder: Legal Industry Solutions for Restructure, Retention, Promotion & Work/Life Balance focuses on the needs of legal employers, lawyers, and law students, helping them to understand the new legal world of productivity and work-life integration.

Debbie is also the Founder of Flex-Time Lawyers, offering advisory, training, and speaking services on the workplace and talent in the legal profession, and Co-Founder of Bliss Lawyers, providing businesses with legal services on a full-time or part-time secondment basis.

Join Stew next time on Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111 for conversations with Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brad Harrington on work/life interventions in organizations that improve both lives and the bottom line, and how Millennial Dads can lean in at home and win at work. Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Morgan MotzelMorgan Motzel is an undergraduate junior in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business focusing on Management and Latin America.

Posted on January 27, 2014 by
Filed Under: Flex Work/Project Work, Structure of Work, Women and Work | Leave a Comment

Wharton Students Discuss Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family

Contributor: Alice Liu

About Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family

Stew Friedman, director of The Wharton School’s Work/Life Integration Project, studied two Baby Bustgenerations of Wharton undergraduate students as they graduated: Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012. The cross-generational study produced a stark discovery – the rate of graduates who plan to have children has decreased by nearly half over the past 20 years. Men and women have become more aligned in their attitudes about dual-career relationships, and, while their reasons for opting out of parenthood are quite different, they are doing so in equal proportions. In his new book, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, Friedman draws on this unique research to explain why so many young people are no longer certain they’ll become parents. He reveals good news and bad news: there is greater freedom of choice now, but new constraints are limiting people’s options.

Student Reactions to Baby Bust

At the Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women discussion events on November 5, 2013 and January 17, 2014, Wharton undergraduate and MBA students explored the compelling findings of the study and the actions that might emerge to help Millennials achieve greater harmony and less conflict in work and life across all stages of their lives and careers.

After approximately fifteen minutes of small group discussions, students reconvened to share the findings that surprised and affected them the most. All students were shocked by the overarching finding that only 42% of 2012 graduates definitely plan to have or adopt children, compared to the 78% of graduates who indicated the same in 1992. However, students also articulated a variety of specific insights and concerns about how the definition of family is changing. Kashfia Ehsan (W ’16) was surprised that Wharton graduates who, by and large, had benefitted from robust parental care and support are choosing not to give back by becoming parents themselves. On the other hand, Federico Velarde (W ’14) and Katie Simon (W ’14) noted that while our personal upbringings affect what we believe is possible in our own futures, there are many structural challenges that create conflict between what we desire and the reality of what is possible. As an alternative to parenting, Briana Thompson (W ’15) resonated with the finding that Millennials are choosing to structure their “families” around their friends rather than starting to form their own nuclear families at the outset of their careers. However, despite the benefits of having a tight-knit “family” of friends in our twenties, Arjan Singh (W ’16) expressed concern that we are redefining family to the point where children won’t be part of the equation anymore. Thus, while students saw reflections of themselves in the results from the 2012 graduates, they were also disconcerted by how much the definition of family has shifted away from having children in the past 20 years.

After discussing the findings, students shared new actions and choices that might emerge after reading Baby Bust.  Many students said they feel that their energy and attention is devoted to academics and job-searching and that they neglect the other parts of their lives – family, community, and self. One suggestion was to encourage the practice of trying to consciously and deliberately integrate work and other parts of life starting at the undergraduate level by establishing small goals, such as finding a new café in another part of the city in which to study or going out to lunch with a new friend.  Stew Friedman added that these ideas aligned with the concept of “small wins” outlined in his Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life curriculum, which focuses on integrating work with family, community, and self.

Morgan Motzel (W ’15) noted that the most important new action that she plans to take is to encourage her peers “to be enthusiastic about pursuing a wider range of career paths and lifestyles than those typically chosen by Wharton undergraduates.” In his article, “Why Do Harvard Kids Head to Wall Street?” James Kwak, Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, argues that the reason so many elite university graduates head to typical career paths like consulting or investment banking is because these firms make the recruiting process straightforward and guarantee future opportunities. To combat the difficulties of reconciling these challenging career paths with other life priorities, many students inthe discussions believed that expanding the dominant mindset from consulting and finance to include work in the social impact and public sectors might be a beneficial adjustment. Hanna Seminario (W’ 16) noted that in order to pursue a more individualized path, she planned to utilize the Penn Alumni Network to learn more about positions in non-typical fields. More generally, Morgan suggested that undergraduates should broaden their imaginations and considerations when making early career choices in order to explore a wider range of possibilities to be in a better position to integrate work and life throughout the duration of their careers.

At the end of the November 5, 2013 discussion, Stew Friedman asked, “How do we get men to care?” Arjan, one of two men in a room of fifteen students, posited that the nature of “manliness” is changing. He believes that in order to engage more men in the discussion, we need to not only redefine family, but also redefine manliness. Visit the Forum next week for a guest post from Arjan about the role of men in the work/life integration conversation.

If you are interested in joining the discussion about challenges and choices in pursuing greater harmony between ones values and ones choices in work, family, and the rest of life, “like” the Wharton Work / Life Integration Project on Facebook and subscribe to the Forum.

About the Author

Alice LiuAlice Liu is an undergraduate senior studying Management at The Wharton School and English (Creative Writing) at the College of Arts & Sciences.

Posted on January 25, 2014 by
Filed Under: Gender Equity, Gender Roles, Meaningful Work, Millennials | Leave a Comment

Getting to 50/50: The Life-Changing Journey

Contributors: Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers

We are two working moms who believe that everyone wins when men are full parents and women have full careers. When both parents pay the bills and care for kids, this life is possible—we know from experience. In our homes, we don’t assume that Mom is destined to be the “primary parent.” Our kids see Dad as equal to Mom because we set it up that way. True, we did 100 percent of the breast-feeding and sometimes only we can make the monster under the bed disappear. But Dad loves parenting as much as we do—and he’s good at it, too. There is also no “primary breadwinner” among us. Mom and Dad are both on the hook for the costs of raising kids, from groceries to braces, from housing to soccer cleats. The payoff? We enjoy rewarding careers and see that our families thrive—not despite our work but because of it.

“Don’t you really need to choose? Won’t I need to pick which comes first, my work or my family?” We hear this often from women in their twenties on campuses where we speak. (We rarely hear it from young men.) And even when young women are more hopeful, there’s a big disconnect between what they hear (you’re equal) and what they see. “These issues creep up on us without our being aware of them,” one twentysomething told us. “I think women my age believe the world has changed so much that we don’t need to worry. But then we look at the men in charge where we work and think, That is not what I want my life to look like and it’s clearly not feasible for me if I want to have kids.”

We remember the angst we felt at their age, that somehow things would be tougher for us than they were for our guy friends. At times in each of our own careers, we shared the fear that we’d have to forfeit something big—a career or a husband.

“I’ll never find the right guy if I can’t ever leave the office,” Joanna, then a lawyer in her first 24/7 job, complained to her mother. At her second corporate law firm, still unmarried but curious about the future, Joanna went to a meeting on work/life balance. The discussion leader, the only female partner with children, started to cry. Not inspirational. Joanna had grown up with a mother who mostly stayed home. So the discouraging signs around her at work did not give Joanna much conviction that she would want to keep working after she had kids.

Sharon, a child of divorced parents, assumed she’d always earn her own living. No man Sharon dated could miss the point. She grilled boyfriends for double standards and gave them books such as The Women’s Room and The Feminine Mystique—which largely went unread. Working stock-market hours in San Francisco, Sharon was in the office close to 4 a.m.—and asleep by 9 p.m., making her an even more unusual date. As she was turning thirty-one, Sharon walked down the street after work one day with tears in her eyes. “No marriage is better than a bad one,” she thought, “but how did I end up alone?”

Then we met our husbands and learned this: The most important career decision you make is whom you marry. (And the deals you make with him.)

When Joanna got engaged, her fiancé, Jason, told her he wanted to start companies. To take the risks that entrepreneurship requires, Jason knew that sometimes he would be putting more money into his business than he’d be taking out. When Joanna wanted to quit her job, Jason did his share of child care while Joanna transitioned to a career she found more satisfying than the law. Jason not only wanted to be a good father, he also knew Joanna’s income bought him freedom to pursue his own career dreams.

“Women are more nurturing and should stay home with kids for a few years,” Sharon’s future husband, Steve, said on their first date. That evening did not end well. But Steve, an Iowan raised with the virtue of fairness, was curious (and a good sport). So he asked Sharon to put her thoughts on paper. “I want my husband to share every part of parenting with me 50/50. How do you feel about this?” Sharon wrote. Steve wasn’t sure but kept an open mind until he and Sharon found a vision they could share.

We’re not saying it’s easy. Living this way takes lots of discussion and often debate. No matter how fair-minded your spouse, if you’re anything like us, you’ll still find plenty to argue about. But hundreds of men and women in this book tell you in their own words why they make the effort: The 50/50 mind-set can help you live the life you want.

About the Authors

Sharon Meersjoanna stroberSharon Meers is the Head of Enterprise Strategy at Magento, which is part of eBay Inc.  Prior to joining eBay, Sharon was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.  Joanna Strober is the Founder and CEO of an online company to help fight and prevent childhood obesity.  Together they have written Getting to 50/50 — How Parents Can Have it All.

Posted on January 24, 2014 by
Filed Under: Gender Equity, Gender Roles, Women and Work, Working Families | Leave a Comment

Create More Space For You — Erin Owen on Work and Life

Contributor: Liz Stiverson

Work and Life is a two-hour radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday from 7 pm to 9 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body and spirit).

On January 14, the first episode of Work and Life on Sirius XM’sErin Owen Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School, Stew Friedman continued the discussion he began with Brett Hurt, on the seemingly-paradoxical benefits of slowing down at work in order to get more done, in a conversation with Erin Owen. Erin Owen is a performance breakthrough coach, which she describes as “a combination of an Eastern guru, a business coach, a life coach, a health coach, and a time management master.” She helps professionals and entrepreneurs apply the wisdom of ancient Eastern philosophical and energetic practices to modern, Western ideas of performance.

Following are edited excerpts of Owen’s conversation with Friedman.

Stew Friedman: How did you get into this? How did you discover the wisdom of the East?

Erin Owen: I was working for a large consulting firm, on a lot of complex international projects, on a crazy schedule, with 60+-hour weeks. It was high-intensity stress, but very intellectually stimulating, which is what drove my ego to keep working harder to get better results. But that reality drove my health into the ground at a very young age, in my late twenties. Even after working with specialists and taking medication, I started to have problems with my short-term memory. That was a really scary point, at which I said the way I’m living is not working – something has got to change.

I started a series of experiments and alternative practices, part of them from an Eastern point of view. At a very young age I was drawn to things Chinese; when we studied world history in high school, I thought, “Wow, these people really have something figured out – they’ve been inventing things for thousands of years, and it’s so much different than the European perspective.” So when it came time to choose a college I wanted to make sure I had an opportunity to study the Chinese language and really dig into the culture.

There are so many dimensions to Chinese philosophy. Yin and yang is the idea that there is and can be balance in the world. Contraction and expansion is a yin and yang comparison. Contractions, things that are very dense and hard, are yang. Things that are the opposite – expansion, open, flowing – are yin. I find that one of the qualities missing most in people who are out of balance is yin. If you can find a way to bring more openness, more flow, more subtlety, and more quiet into your life, you get a lot more out of it. Working harder is not the answer. By creating more time and space in my life, allowing myself to relax, to nourish my body, mind and spirit, I can show up more focused mentally, be more present and engaged in conversations, be more creative in my work and get better results.  That’s counter to the culture we’re living in.

SF: Can you give an example?

EO: An obvious example from yin is water. Things that are water flow, they move in a downward direction. When you are reflecting, going inward, there’s a movement away from the mind at the brain level, toward the heart, or maybe even the gut and your intuition. That’s a yin movement. When you look at your average person’s calendar, how many appointments do you have scheduled back to back, no space in between? You don’t have time to pause, to reflect on what you took away from a meeting. There’s no time to think, or get creative about problem solving with your customers and clients. You don’t have time to even take a bathroom break, or eat, or breathe, and what happens is there’s a lot of contraction – yang. You’ve got enough intensity and a kind of suffering in your life with a packed, busy schedule. How can you bring a little space into that? Even by taking deep breaths. Take a nice, deep, full breath, and notice how your shoulders lower, your muscles relax, you might even feel a little more space across your brow. When you come back to work with that more relaxed perspective, you’re able to see things more clearly, have more mental focus, and get those creative juices flowing so you start to see some better results.

SF: Why don’t more people think and live this way? What makes it difficult?

EO: It gets back to fear, to worrying that if you’re not there every single minute you’re going to miss something. But I’ll give you an example of a client I worked with eight years ago. She had gotten to a point in her life where she’d been following the path of “should”. She went to the right school, she got the right sequence of jobs, and she woke up to find herself in her late thirties not having lived her personal dream, which was to get married and have a family. So we started to find room for her in her calendar. That’s one of the foundational principles I give my clients – put you in your calendar first.

SF: To play devil’s advocate, let me ask, Isn’t that selfish? Aren’t we here to serve other people?

EO: Is it selfish to put your oxygen mask on in the airplane before you help others? It’s smart, so you’re actually present and there and capable of helping. For [this client’s] calendar, we blocked time each morning when she would have the morning to not have meetings and do what she wanted. Maybe she would get a massage. Maybe she would meet with a friend for tea. But she communicated it in the spirit of an experiment. She told her secretary, her teammates, even a couple of her clients who were friends that she was going to try it out for a while. She discovered that, first of all, everyone was excited for her and wanted to the same thing, so she immediately had support. And second, when she did go get a massage once every couple weeks, get to the gym a couple times a week and be able to connect with a friend, she showed up to work happier, she was more focused and present, and there was a more creative and fun spirit to her contributions because she was feeling that energy in her life. She was able to get more done in less time.

SF: How is my boss going to notice that [putting me in my calendar first] makes me a more productive employee?

EO: When, with the consistent practice of slowing down and giving yourself some space, you are showing up more focused and more creative, they’re going to notice. If you want, be more explicit in telling your boss or your colleagues, “Hey, I’m trying this out, give me some feedback – do you notice any change in the contributions I am making at the meeting? In the way I’m writing my memos?” Whatever that activity might be – so they can concretely measure the impact of you getting a little bit more yin in your very extreme yang lifestyle.

SF: What advice do you have for people who don’t have the resources to take time out or get professional coachng as your clients can?

EO: You need to create some space, and it just takes five minutes a day. If you’re someone who is working two jobs, who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility or resources, you can look at the way you commute to work and figure out how you can make it a more Zen experience, more simple and easy. For example, if you’re riding the subway or the bus, could you get off one stop early and walk, and just breathe? Don’t check your phone, don’t try to get anything done in that time, just look around you and notice what’s happening.

Erin has published two books, which expand on her ideas and advice about Eastern philosophy and modern work/life integration and apply them to a variety of settings:

Refuel, Recharge, and Re-energize: The Conscious Entrepreneur’s Guide to Taking Back Control of Your Time and Energy (Erin Owen, Vervante)Refuel, Recharge, Re-enegize

Boost Your Performance In and Out of the Office with Eastern-Inspired Clutter-Clearing Secrets Workbook (Erin Owen, Vervante)

You can also hear more from Erin on Twitter, and find more of her insights and suggestions on the Your Performance Breakthrough website (where the first chapter of Refuel, Recharge, and Re-energize is available for free).

Join Stew next week (Tuesday January 28) at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111 for conversations with Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brad Harrington on work/life interventions in organizations that improve both lives and the bottom line, and how Millennial Dads can lean in at home and win at work. Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Liz StiversonLiz Stiverson is a 2014 MBA candidate at The Wharton School.

Posted on January 21, 2014 by
Filed Under: Health and Wellness, Mindfulness | Leave a Comment

To Be More Productive, Take More Vacation — Brett Hurt On Work And Life

Contributor: Liz Stiverson

Work and Life is a two-hour radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday from 7 pm to 9 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body and spirit).

On January 14, on the first episode of Work and Life on Sirius XM’s Brett HurtBusiness Radio Powered by The Wharton School, Stew Friedman spoke with Brett Hurt (WG’99), an e-commerce pioneer, about his company’s unconventional approach to vacation time and executives’ responsibility to develop perspective by taking breaks.  Hurt co-founded Bazaarvoice (a platform for companies to understand and use online consumer product reviews in marketing and product development) and founded Coremetrics (marketing analytics for e-commerce companies).  His tenure as CEO of Bazaarvoice brought him deep understanding about building a strong culture and motivating high-achieving employees.

Following are edited excerpts of Hurt’s and conversation with Friedman.

Stew Friedman: How did you manage to invest in yourself and employees as whole people while you were running a company in the start-up phase, with so much going on?

Brett Hurt: Part of the way I did it was I set out to have guard-rails. I’m a big believer in having guard-rails and non-negotiables for yourself, and there were two for me. One, no matter how busy we got in the company, I would be there for my daughter’s most important events. Two, our family would take five to six weeks of vacation every year – half of that just with my wife, and half with the kids. I’m proud to say that even in the year we took Bazaarvoice public, I still took those five to six weeks. That matters because as the CEO of a company, you’re the only person who sees what’s happening across the entire company. Everyone else on your team is focused at a departmental level, and no matter how collaborative they are, your head of sales doesn’t know the world of your head of product. You, as the CEO, can see across and decide what the priorities should be for the entire company. Of course, you get lots of input from your team and you need to listen especially to the people on the front lines with your clients and your partners, you are the synthesis point. You have a duty to the company to step back, clear the air for yourself personally, and essentially have that level of objectivity to be able to look at the company from afar instead of being so close to it that you lose perspective. You’re absolutely more productive if you maintain objectivity.

SF: What have you been able to do to help employees believe in themselves and overcome doubts and concerns to get what they need at work?

BH: At Bazaarvoice, one of the leaps of faith we took early on was to make our vacation policy solely based on trust. It is unlimited and self-regulatory, meaning that an employee can decide how much vacation they need, based on their life circumstances. We don’t track it. When I was younger and just starting my career, my vacation needs were much different than they were when I started Bazaarvoice, and I had a six-month-old daughter, my first child. We had an employee who joined us and worked really hard for three months – he beat all of his goals, and did in three months what someone would normally have done in six months – and then take a three week vacation to China. And of course when he came back from China, he told all his friends about what a unique work environment he’s in. People who are that amazing from a performance standpoint tend to hang out with other people who are amazing performers, and they all came to work for us.

SF: Has anyone ever abused that policy?

BH: To my knowledge, no one has ever abused it. When you treat someone you work with the way you, yourself, would want to be treated, with the ultimate respect [for their judgment] – when you follow through on the Golden Rule – that person will treat you, in turn, with such respect that you have to encourage them to go on vacation.

Part of Hurt’s innovative approach to building trust and flexibility in his organization is his practice of introducing books about integrating work and life to his management team, always with robust debate about what their lessons mean for Bazaarvoice and how to “make them part of our narrative.” Here are his top recommendations for further reading and what he said about each book on the show last week:

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and In Life One Conversation at a Time (Susan Scott, Berkeley) – “This was all about helping us be authentic with each other.”

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us(Seth Godin, Portfolio) – “This taught us to bring our personal passions into the workplace, and to treat it like a collegiate environment.”

Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life (Stew Friedman, Harvard Business Review Press) – “Stew’s followers are familiar with this, and how it focuses on the development of the whole person.”

Brett is currently the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bazaarvoice, a Partner at Capital Factory, and he invests in early stage companies through Hurt Family Investments with his wife of 18 years and “confidante and best source of business advice,” Debra. Brett also serves as a Mentor at TechStars Austin and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Wharton. You can find more of his insights and advice for entrepreneurs on his blog, Lucky7, where he writes regularly.

Come back to our Forum on Wednesday to read excerpts of Stew’s conversation with Erin Owen, about bringing Eastern philosophy to bear on modern management and – to pick up a theme started in the Brett Hurt conversation – the benefits of stepping back to move forward smarter.

Join Stew tomorrow night (Tuesday January 21) at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111 for conversations with Deborah Epstein Henry and Matt Schneider (W’97) on new career paths and employer models in the legal profession, and the rise and impact of stay-at-home dads. Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

Liz StiversonAbout the Author

Liz Stiverson is a 2014 MBA candidate at The Wharton School. 

Posted on January 19, 2014 by
Filed Under: CEOs, Entrepreneurs | Leave a Comment

Careers Outside The Narrow Path

Contributor: Connie Gersick, Ph.D., Yale School of Managment

We have certain phrases in life that kind of—make us up. Mine was, “I can’t.  I can’t do  anything.“ (laughs)  Over and over, I’ve proved myself the opposite!  I’ve been able to do things I thought I could never do. … I never thought I could do the work that I’m doing.  And the children that I have!   I just never imagined it’d be so great!     —Olivia at 51[1]                                                                                      

In his new book, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, Stewart Friedman presents the stunning discovery that, among graduating seniors in Wharton’s 2012 college class, only 42% (of men and women) plan to have children—half the percentage who took the same survey in 1992. This is not because they don’t want to become parents, but because they feel they must “conform to a narrow set of career paths”[2] that will not permit it.

As a teacher, mother and grandmother who cares about young people, I find the revelation heartbreaking.  Not everyone wants or needs to have children, or to pursue an involving career.  But when so many feel these deeply human experiences to be mutually exclusive, something is very wrong.  As a social scientist, I see Friedman’s finding as an urgent challenge.  What do we know, what can we learn and how can we communicate it, to provide young adults with far better options?  How can we help foster the changes needed to give them (justifiable) confidence that they may do things that they now believe—as did the successful woman quoted above–they “could never do”?

Friedman reports that Millenials are actively willing to try out new models of family and work.[3]  If this is correct, then we have arrived at a crossroads of spectacular need and opportunity for change.  In fact, resources like the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, the Families and Work Institute[4], and Catalyst[5], along with voluminous research by scholars such as Bailyn, Galinsky, Hewlett, and Valian–to name only a few–offer a wealth of evidence-based recommendations for pulling outdated organizations into alignment with the needs of today’s workforce, both in terms of the way work is done and in the way careers are permitted to grow over the long term.

Many approaches are required, but I believe that if we wish to encourage change we need to significantly broaden our understanding of the meaning of work across the life span.  We need to provide alternatives to the “narrow set of career paths” that confine the imaginations of both individuals and institutions.   Friedman’s new study is a wonderful step in that direction, and it begs for more.   Currently, we have almost no research that illuminates the personal experience of careers beyond young adulthood and into middle age—a time span through which profound change and development can occur.   For the past several years, I have been immersed in a study of forty women from four occupations and a range of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.  Their biographies, recounted from childhood to their mid forties and fifties, demonstrate how much room there is for variation, uncertainty, flexibility, delay and misstep on the way to rewarding work—given certain key opportunities.  These ordinary / extraordinary women’s lives veer far outside the polarized debate that has sprung up between “Leaning In”[6] and “Women Can’t Have It All, And Shouldn’t Even Try.”[7]

My study participants grew up in a culture even more confining than that described by Wharton’s 2012 graduates.   As children, their generation largely assumed that men would focus on breadwinning, while women (who might work outside the home, but in jobs, not careers) would concentrate on family.  Baby Boomers became pioneers inventing new career journeys and new ways to combine work and family, often with the support of spouses, mentors and employers.  Now they are nearing retirement, and the results of their important choices are in.  The learning they offer is immense. We can see the new pathways they carved out, the ways they managed their doubts, what helped them along and how they recovered when they got lost.  Importantly, we can see the rewards that delighted them as they exceeded their own expectations.

Capturing the underlying structure in these women’s lives was extremely challenging because of the incredible diversity in their histories.  They found their métiers at ages ranging from 6 to 50; they became mothers any time from their teens to their forties or not at all; they did or did not take time out from careers, at varying moments and with varying results.  Patterns emerged only when I stopped looking for the conventional signs of career progress and turned to Levinson’s definition of the successful life structure as one that is “suitable for the self and viable in the world.”[8]   These criteria suggested two dimensions for capturing career development: the degree to which a woman was clear about what she wanted to be (Vocational Identity) and the degree to which she was proactive in moving to get there (Navigational Control).  These measures formed the basis of a two-dimensional grid on which each woman’s starting position could be located, and then the major changes she made as she moved from adolescence to the present could be tracked.   After all forty women’s journeys were mapped, six distinctly shaped career “trajectories” emerged, each with its own particular challenges.

The study’s findings contrast sharply with the notion that in order to succeed, people must know clearly in advance where they want to go, and must be vigilantly strategic about getting there.   Defined goals and well thought-out plans were not always best.  Alongside those who did well by the conventional wisdom, there were women who benefitted by loosening the focus of their ambitions, women who found fine careers by trial and error, and women who thrived on improvisation.

The six trajectories are illustrated in “Getting from ‘Keep Out’ to ‘Lean In’: A New Roadmap for Women’s Careers.” The paper also explores the pervasive role of confidence in women’s development, and offers a set of implications for individuals and institutions.  This forum is not the place to go into detail.  But I do want to emphasize the sharp contrast between the imagined futures of new college graduates who fear their careers will rule out family–with the experience of a generation who began adulthood with at least as many constraints.  These women’s stories suggest the possibilities of a much richer, more adventureous, more complicated and more forgiving reality.

 

[1] Pseudonym.  Quote from Gersick, C. 2013  “Getting from ‘Keep Out’ to ‘Lean In’: A New Roadmap for Women’s Careers”

[2] Friedman, S.  2013  Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family  Wharton Digital Press  page 5

[3] Friedman, op cit

[6] See Sandberg, S., with Scovell, N.  2013  Lean In  location 118, Kindle edition  New York: Alfred Knopf.

[7] Leibovich, L.  9/30/13  “Debora Spar, Barnard President, Says Women Can’t Have It All — And Shouldn’t Even Try” The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/debora-spar-wonder-women-making-it-work_n_4015978.html

[8] see Levinson, D.  1996  The Seasons of a Woman’s Life  New York, Knopf.  pp. 28-29.

 

 

Posted on October 20, 2013 by
Filed Under: Career Paths, Gender Roles, Women and Work | 1 Comment

Adriano Olivetti (1901–1960) and the Relationship between Work and the Rest of Life

Contributor: Marcello Russo, Assistant Professor of Management Rouen Business School

Adriano Olivetti (11 April 1901 –  27 February 1960), the son of the founder of Olivetti, Camillo Olivetti, was a luminary Italian industrialist, known worldwide not only for the high quality of the company’s products, including the innovative Lettera 22 typewriter, but also for his efforts to apply in management a utopian view grounded on a positive integration between employees’ work and family roles. In his discourses with the workers of the Ivrea and Pozzuoli subsidiaries in the 1950s, he exhorted managers and workers of his company to acknowledge the powerful bond existing between the company and its people and to behave accordingly, with a spirit of cooperation, care, and reciprocal respect.

Here are two illustrative quotes:

By working every day in the factory to produce something that we then see living and running in the streets of the world and returning to us in the form of wage, which then becomes bread, wine, and house for our family, we contribute to the vibrating life of the factory, to its smallest as well as to its biggest things, we end up loving it, growing fond of it and, in this way, it truly becomes part of us. The work becomes little by little part of our soul, like an immense spiritual force” (Olivetti, 2012: p.33).

 

On us [the management] is the responsibility to make the factory a fair place that cares for the justice of each one of its members, is supportive of the goodness of their family, is thoughtful of the future of their children and is participative of the life of the local communities, which will draw from our growth economic nourishment and incentive to social advancement” (Olivetti, 2012: p. 31).

These words were written in 1955. Olivetti’s innovative view of the work-life interface was at the core of work-family enrichment theory, later elaborated by Friedman, Christensen, and DeGroot (1998), Rothbard (2001), Friedman and Greenhaus (2000), and Greenhaus and Powell (2006).  The idea was as powerful as it was shocking for its simplicity: Encouraging employees to fully participate their lives inside and outside the company could produce momentous benefits in terms of positive mood, knowledge, skills, abilities, self-confidence, resilience, and optimism, just to name a few; and these in turn, improve organizational performance and the overall quality of an individual’s life.

Adriano Olivetti can be rightly considered a groundbreaker of the work-life interface and a pioneer of the work-family enrichment movement because he had a vision that presaged in several ways the basic principles of this movement that arose decades later. On many occasions, Olivetti exhorted his managers to care for workers’ personal and professional development and think about all possible initiatives that could favor a positive integration between work and family lives. The company, he argued, has a moral obligation toward its workers because through their intellectual contribution and physical efforts the company is able to grow and flourish. Therefore, the company must do the best it can to repay workers for the fatigue it causes them, for the competencies it exploits, for the time it takes from family life, and for the stress it causes them. This must happen not only with economic inducements but also by promoting cultural and social initiatives that help workers and their families to flourish, just as the company does.

Olivetti offered an extraordinary view on the ultimate goal of a company that is worthwhile to reiterate nowadays, given that the severe and prolonged economic crisis might instill a belief among employers that integrating work and the rest of life is an irrelevant argument, not a priority anymore during economic downturns. The goal of a company does not coincide with profit only, but it has a more spiritual nuance; it benefits from favoring the individual thriving and by providing moral and cultural redemption in the workplace, as well as in every other domain of life.

 

References

Friedman, S. D., Christensen, P., and DeGroot, J. (1998). Work and life: the end of the zero-sum game.  Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 119–129.  

Friedman, S. D. and Greenhaus, J. H. (2000), Work and Family – Allies or Enemies?  Oxford University Press.

Greenhaus, J. H., & Powell, G. N. (2006). When work and family are allies: A theory of work-family enrichment. Academy of Management Review, 31(1), 72–92.Friedman, S. D. and Greenhaus, J. H. (2000), Work and Family – Allies or Enemies?  Oxford University Press.

Olivetti, A. (2012), Ai lavoratori (Italian Language), Edizioni di Comunità, Roma.

Rothbard, N. (2001), Enriching or depleting? The dynamics of engagement in work and family roles, Administrative Science Quarterly, 46: 655-684.

 

Marcello Russo is an Assistant Professor of Management at Rouen Business School in France. His research interests include the benefits of work-family enrichment, the psychological consequences of accent diversity in the workplace, and error reporting in healthcare.

Posted on May 22, 2013 by
Filed Under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments

What Is Really Bugging Employers about Work and the Rest of Life?

Contributor: Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Associate Professor of Management

Director of the Research Center ‘Contemporary P@thways of Career, Life and Learning’ at Rouen Business School, France

In the midst of heated debates around a number of prominent employers’ decisions to cancel telework arrangements (e.g. Yahoo) and pioneering initiatives such as Results Only Work Environments (e.g. Best Buy), and of the vivid discussions on Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, I’d like to go back to the classics.

One of the most eye-opening books I have ever read is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Work and Family in the United States. I read the first chapter and suddenly there was light. There was light and I was able to make sense of my observations regarding work and life during ten years of business consulting.

In this book 35 years ago, Kanter drew on a well-documented historical analysis to explain why employers were having such a hard time with their employees wishing and needing to balance their work commitments with other life commitments. It’s all about loyalty: employers want to secure employee’s total commitment and are reluctant to endure competing loyalties such as the ones represented by families.

Work and family, in the eyes of employers at least, have been competing since the beginnings of the second industrial revolution. Employers have first used families to discipline and socialize newcomers, and then have either tried to swallow it up in paternalistic programs or to ignore it – the famous myth of the separation between the work and family spheres that leads employers to pretend people can leave their personal life and identity at the door and behave in a strictly professional way.

It seems that we haven’t done much progress since then. And that makes sense given the increasing loyalty demands of workplaces that need employees to be available and reactive around the clock in a globalized and competitive world.

What most employers seem to not be getting, however, is that work and life don’t have to be competing. Yes, daily schedules are often in conflict, and yes families and communities provide alternative places to the workplace that people can belong to. But work and family also enrich each other, as Nancy Rothbard has demonstrated in her research, and as Stew Friedman has shown in Total Leadership. Work and family nurture each other on a daily basis and on a life-time horizon. Win-wins are possible, when employers trust employees.

Why does this matter? It matters, obviously, for those employees who will or will not be given the gift of autonomy over the time and place that they work. This is well known and I want to highlight instead the invisible and un-discussed side of work-life balance. In that same seminal book, Kanter brought forward the invisible stakeholders of the work and family debate. She argued that employers’ demands on employees, and the supports they provide, impact not only employees’ health and well-being, but also employees’ families and communities.

An employer may have 100 persons on their payroll, and see only these 100 persons. Yet the scope of their influence expands to the children, partners and elderly parents of those 100 persons. It expands to the communities of those 100 persons. Whether or not employers and managers enable their employees to craft the combinations of work and life that will meet business demands and work for them impacts whether those 100 people will be able to spend time to invest in their children’s future, to care for their partner and loved ones, and to contribute to their communities. Kanter concluded that employers should include a “Family responsibility report” when they prepare their work-life balance and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports.

So Kanter had a vision. One that broadens otherwise narrow individualistic discussions of work-life integration, one that contextualizes work-life integration and carries hope for invisible stakeholders who are rarely centerpiece (for notable exceptions, see Ellen Galinsky’s Ask the Children and Friedman and Greenhaus on “children as the unseen stakeholders at work” in Work and Family — Allies or Enemies?).

Is this vision out of reach for us? I’d like to point to recent discussions I have had with PhD candidates who examine a new breed of organizations that make social responsibility the heart and core of their business strategy, instead of doing what they usually do and having on-the-side CSR initiatives. I would hope that these organizations would understand the scope of their responsibility in a broad way.

I’d also like to point to a paper that as a special issue editor I have just accepted for publication in the European Management Journal (see reference below): this paper by Sharon Lobel discusses poverty alleviation efforts of private sector companies in Brazil. She argues that some companies hold an “in-group CSR” view in which they develop poverty alleviation programs targeted to their employees and immediate stakeholders (e.g. suppliers), whereas other companies embrace a “universalist CSR” view in which they extend their programs to the local communities and beyond. This in my view truly reflects the spirit of Kanter’s vision and leaves me hopeful for the future.

As individuals and as managers, how you view work-life integration, how you view employee loyalty, has the power to change your life – and the life of many visible and invisible stakeholders.

 

Lobel, S. Forthcoming. Predicting organizational responsiveness to poverty: Exploratory models and application to comparison of Brazil and the United States. European Management Journal, Special Issue National Context in Work-Life Research edited by A. Ollier-Malaterre, M. Valcour, L. den Dulk and E. Kossek.

Posted on April 23, 2013 by
Filed Under: Work/Life Integration | Leave a Comment

The Class of 2012

Contributor: Stew Friedman

This post is an invitation to the members of the Wharton Undergraduate Class of 2012 who participated in our study and to anyone else who might be interested in our findings and what they mean for individuals, organizations, and society. Welcome, and please comment.

In our extensive survey of the Class of 2012, we asked questions about career prospects and progression, personal values, family, views on the relationship of work with the rest of life, health and religion, civic engagement, and Wharton. We also asked these questions of the Undergraduate Class of 1992 20 years ago and then again in 2012.

If you are a member of the Class of 2012 and participated in our study you should have received via email a copy of your report by now, with your classmates’ responses to all the questions. We also included what the Undergraduate Class of 1992 said in response to the same questions, back in 1992 and again in 2012. We welcome your comments in response to these questions below or on other reactions and ideas you might have.

  • To what did you react most strongly in this report?
  • What was most surprising to you?
  • What would you like to say to your classmates about what you read?

If you aren’t a member of the Class of 2012, here are two links with information from this study:

We’ll be posting more on the findings and implications of this research here and in other media in the future, so please subscribe to this Forum for more to come.

Posted on February 17, 2013 by
Filed Under: Millennials | Leave a Comment

Videos of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Feb 6 Talk and K@W Interview

The videos of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s lecture (one hour) at Wharton and the interview (20 minutes) with her at Knowledge@Wharton are now live.

You’re invited to share your ideas and questions by commenting here in our Forum.

 

W/LIP Co-Hosts Slaughter Lecture

Slaughter Talks to Friedman

 

 

Posted on February 14, 2013 by
Filed Under: Gender Roles, Women and Work | Leave a Comment
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