A former Goldman Sachs executive shares
her tips for balancing professional work with your personal life during a
recession.
When I was a new manager at Goldman
Sachs, an executive coach told me: "If you can't get your job done in 10
hours a day, there's something wrong with you—or there's something wrong with
your job." I laughed. In my 16 years in finance, I found it hard not to
admire the 24/7 ethic and even harder to imagine that top results could be
produced without it.
But this coach was an advisor to highly
respected CEOs. And he forced me to open my eyes and see what really effective
executives do to cut time—and stress—for both themselves and the teams they
lead.
Intrigued, I dug into the research. I
learned how performance and judgement erode when we work too many hours and
that motivating people to spend ever-more hours at work is bad for the bottom
line. I also talked to hundreds of men and women working in a wide range of
executive roles—C-suite jobs, partners at big investment, law, and accounting
firms, and middle managers in various industries—to learn how they manage the
stress in their lives.
Today's downturn means everyone who
still has a job has more work to do. Things have been so uncertain that we all
have to work harder because we don't know what will pay off. While
"balance" may be a term that makes executives nervous in bad times,
it's merely good management to ensure that each hour gets invested in the right
things and that we cut all the waste we can. Here are five tips I've found that
let executives produce world-class results and still get home for family
dinner—most nights.
1 . Measure
what matters.
With your boss and
your subordinates, become very precise about how performance should be
evaluated. What are the top five measurable items that drive better results?
Many firms spit out lots of reporting, using metrics that don't tell you much
because they reflect the priorities of past management, or never were effective
at capturing what drives sustained profits.
Researchers at Harvard
Business School have found that dramatic gains are made when managers make it
clear what specific, measurable work will be rewarded. One case study shows how
an underperforming Wall Street research department (ranked No. 15 in the
industry) became #1 in three years. A new manager came in and told his team
that only numbers—not schmoozing or boasting—would get them paid. For the
companies that each analyst covered, how many times per month did the analyst
call the CEO, key customers, and suppliers? How often did the analyst see money
managers and sales people? How accurate were earnings estimates? But when this
metrics-driven manager left, his disciplined approach fell out of use and the
research team's ranking plummeted again, to No. 13.
Most firms lack the
IT budgets and managerial will to step aside and prioritize what they want
employees to do with their time. For instance, sales: What kind of clients are
the best long term? Quality: How do you measure it concretely? Profits: What
time frame do you look at to make sure you've captured the real costs behind
your revenues?
On my own teams, I've
found that the effort to develop good metrics is worth it—even if you have to
cobble numbers together on a spreadsheet. Your employees can be more efficient
because they know what you want them to do. They have more confidence that the
system is fair—and this reduction in subjectivity relieves a lot of stress.
When the boss wants to know who is or isn't pulling their weight, where the
problems and opportunities are, it's all in the numbers.
2. Cut
interruptions and fire drills.
Time management
experts say it takes us 25% longer to get something done if we get interrupted
in the middle. The biggest drains are mismanaged meetings and crises that suck
up huge portions of executive time.
A former colleague
used to say: "Most of our meetings are spent admiring problems. 'Yeah,
that's a big problem.' Or 'that problem's a tough one.' But we're reluctant to
actually attack the problem and get rid of it." Smart executives we talked
to were very mindful about making meetings efficient: Some limited meeting
times to 20-minute slots; others required short, concrete agendas and clear
commitments that you could not come back to the next meeting without X being
done.
Researcher Leslie
Perlow has run experiments in a variety of demanding environments to see how we
can rethink our use of time. Perlow helped one firm design "study
halls"—blocking a few hours per week when interruptions were banned—and
this allowed a behind-schedule team to make its deadlines. In another study a
software team was able to produce the same high-quality product in 40% less
time. How? A very different work process encouraged the asking of questions,
trust, and collaboration. (It also erased the notion that working longer hours
achieved more.)
Perlow's research
says we are often seduced by charismatic colleagues who work lots of hours,
make numerous errors (and bad judgments) and suck the rest of the team into
cleaning up their messes. Emergencies create masses of wasteful work: an irate
client, a technology meltdown, or an unexpected product failure. Reward people
on your team with a low fire drill rate and make them report their errors and
say how they will fix them in writing—even if they are "stars" who think
they can't be bothered.
3. Use
your spouse to triage.
A lot of working
couples told us the opposite of what you often hear, saying instead that having
a working spouse cuts stress by providing an expert efficiency advisor at home.
One couple, both partners at a top accounting firm, scrutinized each other's
schedules every week. Both husband and wife had run parts of the firm. When one
spouse said, "I think that meeting's a waste of time; just say no”,
the other spouse was willing to listen.
My husband is a real
estate developer, and he taught me that if you are really profit-minded, asking
yourself questions can free you from some wasteful business norms: "What
is the return on this conference call—can I skip it?" "Yes, everyone
else does lots of business dinners, but can I get the same result in less time
over coffee at Starbucks?" "Do I really need to chime in on that
e-mail I was copied on, or will the five other people in the e-mail chain
figure it out themselves?"
4. Trade
Venus and Mars for common ground
New workplace
research from think tank Catalyst shows how much businesses fail because people
worry too much about being manly or womanly. Now that leaner workplaces have
less support staff, male executives find themselves needing to do corporate
housekeeping, such as serving coffee, booking lunch, and filling administrative
functions. And this recession has put more women in the traditionally male role
of primary earner.
But fear of being
labeled “soft” causes undue stress for many. Studies say that men suffer from
mental and physical health problems when they feel that doing lower-status work
typically handled by women puts their manhood in question. And when a female
executive leaves a sick child at home, she'll undergo a lot more stress if she
believes in "maternal instinct" and fears that her husband can't
cover for her. It's a huge labor market inefficiency—worse than any union rules
about who can do what—to believe that men can't do certain jobs and women can't
do others.
Men and women who see
all work as gender-neutral have an easier time adapting to new job and family
realities, and so do their employers. Ending the worry about "tough"
vs. "soft" work helps the bottom line, too. A recent study found that
accident rates dropped 84% when a leading oil company retrained its oil rig
workers to drop the view that planning for safety isn't macho.
There are many ways to cut executive
stress. First we have to imagine it's possible. We need to stop believing that
only 24/7 work hours produce success and look to the evidence that there are
other ways of producing world-class results. For example, one study of top
executives at Fortune 500 companies found that 1/3 of these high performers
worked five hours per week less than the others and took more of their
vacations—with no apparent cost to performance. If we're willing to rethink our
assumptions about what's good practice at work and at home, it's easier to see
solutions.
An article
by Sharon Meers, a co-author of “GETTING
TO 50/50: How Working Couples can Have it All by Sharing it All” and a former managing director at
Goldman Sachs.
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