 |
Work Life Balance - Are We Outsourcing
Leadership
The insistence on work life balance among young American workers is threatening
to catapult American business into a full-blown domestic leadership crisis.
Work Life Balance - Two Generations, Two Perspectives - Father and son
battle it out in this compelling article.
The United States has never been in such an economically competitive
situation since prior to the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the labor
imbalance caused by outsourcing so many services to India and China, I
can get everything from my Internet customer service, Web design, and
taxes done cheaper and more efficiently overseas than I can at home. Young
people in India and China are not talking about work life balance, worrying
about how to spend more time at home with the kids or to plant a garden.
As Thomas L. Friedman points out in his new book The
World Is Flat, based on 60 hours of interviews with up and comers
in Indian business and industry, as well as a variety of other sources
in the business press, young people from these countries are economically
hungry and extremely competitive. They are getting the kind of training
and developing the kind of work ethic that will soon take them to the
next level, where they'll be not only the "outsource" of American-based
companies but the primary "in-source."
The insistence on work/life balance among young American workers is threatening
to catapult American business into a full-blown domestic leadership crisis.
This past January at Renaissance Weekend, I participated in some panel
discussions alongside some twenty- and thirty-somethings. What issues
were on the minds of these best and brightest young American workers?
I didn't hear a word about legacy building, maintaining a competitive
edge or the importance of ongoing innovation. Instead, I heard about the
need for work life balance and how nice it is to sometimes work a 30-hour
week and take a hike to clear the mind when a bit of stress comes up.
In my experience, I think competitiveness and work/life balance are incompatible-there
is no way you can work six hours a day, be home to play with kids for
two or three hours and drive a company to the top. Taking a company to
the top takes much more commitment and drive than that.
I was somewhat encouraged by an April 2005 Fast Company piece by Linda
Tischler on "extreme jobs"-tales of young American movers and shakers
who work upwards of 90 hours a week at high pressure jobs that they love.
But admittedly, these young people make up a very small percentage of
the overall workforce. An excerpt from Jack
Welch's new book, Winning, as reprinted in Newsweek on April 4, 2005,
sums up the advice I would give to young people regarding work/life balance:
"There's lip service about work/life balance, and then there's reality.your
boss's top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy,
but only in as much 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."
Jonathon: A New Paradigm for Leaders
My father's concerns raise important issues for my generation and the
one behind me, but his assumptions regarding the causal relationship between
work-life balance and its negative impact on competitiveness may not hold
up. My father is making a classic "either/or" split between the ability
to lead a company to greatness and having a balanced life outside of work.
I think this "either/or" model sells us short and asks American workers
to compromise in ways that are unreasonable.
My father's argument is framed by a particular bottom line-global competitiveness.
This has been the bottom line for most of this nation's history and while
it has worked to keep us on top economically and politically, there have
been other costs. The Baby Boomer generation is the largest and arguably
the most economically productive in this nation's history, but their legacy
also includes "weekend Dads," "latch-key kids" and "TV dinners." This
generation was indoctrinated in the either/or mentality my father continues
to advocate. They were very much a product of Welch's "making your job
so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw," but
let's consider this notion in more depth. The idea that negotiating a
billion-dollar merger or designing a cutting edge new video game is a
more compelling draw than reading Goodnight Moon and snuggling with your
child at bedtime is an absurd comparison. These activities are on an entirely
different scale. Work without adequate time for intimate connection with
loved ones and a bit of personal time for us, in my opinion, has long-term
degenerative effects that may not show up on a company profit/loss analysis
but do show up in a society with considerably more at stake than economic
hegemony.
To tell the truth, I am skeptical of leaders who are all work, all the
time. Without some daily personal reserves of nourishment I think burnout
and diminished creativity are inevitable. I believe we can create a new
work-life paradigm based on "both/and," rather than the "either/or" attitude
we've inherited from my father's generation.
So, how can we do "both/and" equally well? I think the key is focus. There
can be no wasted time. If we acknowledge that life outside work is critically
important to us, we must do everything we can to make our time at work
critically important as well. We need to optimize our use of technology
to help manage our time effectively, concentrating on the important tasks
and weeding out the minutiae. Every hour of work should be structured
efficiently so that we can accomplish our goals and then return home to
the personal time our bodies and minds naturally crave. Too often today,
the reverse is true; workdays are spent unproductively and home life becomes
a frenzied race to get dinner on the table and the kids to bed. Time is
too precious to allow such a sorry state of affairs to continue. Work-life
balance and American competitiveness are not incompatible in my opinion,
although poor time management and remaining competitive are.
The emerging leaders of my generation will be the ones who know that time,
not money, is the commodity of choice. The creative optimization of time
will allow us to produce exceptional work while sustaining ourselves with
full lives outside the workplace.
This article brought to you by: By Sander A. Flaum and Jonathon A. Flaum
These AMACOM courses, brought to you by FlexStudy, will help you lead
more effectively:
For information on Program Courses from AMA visit American Management
Association Study Courses and Certification
from FlexStudy or use our 'Search' feature powered by 
For information on helpful job searching resources, please visit our
Career Services Information Area
and also to locate other resources - use our Search feature powered by
Register for FREE at our new interactive
database and get connected with recruiters, staffing agencies and
perspective employers first hand. There you can also try ChatWerx
our new video and voice chat room for networking and meeting live online.
www.jobwerx.com/videoconference/conf/index_content.html
Engineering
Programs from Infomotion - Audio Visual Training and Tutorials
Take a Closer Look
E-mail this page to a friend 
Jobwerx
makes no representation as to the accuracy of information transmitted
herein.
|
|
|
