Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  You should be prepared. Without even a basic plan, you are much more likely to end up making rash decisions you’ll later regret. What’s more, even with the best plan in the world, you will encounter plenty of obstacles. Whether you are a woman or a man, holding down two full-time jobs, which is what earning an income and taking primary responsibility for caring for others entails, is hard. Don’t give up, but start thinking through different possibilities and planning for them, preferably together with your family, friends, colleagues, and superiors. Remember Dwight Eisenhower’s memorable phrase about the army: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

  THE NEW CAREER SPAN

  THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING to remember if you’re a young man or a young woman planning a career in the United States or most other developed countries is that you have considerably more time ahead of you than your parents did. If you’re an American woman born in 1990 or later, your life expectancy, according to the Social Security Administration, is about 86 years. That means that 10 percent of women will live to nearly 95, and 0.001 percent of women will live to 113. If you are an average American man of the same age, your life expectancy is 82, lower than women but still a decade longer than your grandfather’s. The numbers vary by factors like education and race; due to the epidemic of obesity that is highest among the poorest Americans, in some categories life expectancy is actually, disgracefully, going down. Still, women who are educated and paid enough to be able to plan a career can expect to live much longer than their mothers and grandmothers.

  As lives lengthen and women gain more options and control over our lives, caring for others need no longer be our principal occupation, even if we spend substantial chunks of our lives (preferably alongside partners) raising children or tending the needs of aging parents. These periods are phases: intervals of putting others first in a long life of both love and work.

  Athletes have long understood that the best way to get into peak condition is to engage in interval training. You go all-out for a period of minutes, then slow down for a certain number of minutes before going at it again. Any StairMaster or stationary bike has an interval program: a baseline of steady activity punctuated by repeated periods of intense effort. Going at 100 percent all the time never gives your body a chance to recover; you have to be strategic about when and how you ramp up and ramp down.

  Life, and careers, can be approached the same way.

  Rather than picking a single professional ladder to climb as your parents and grandparents did, over the course of a forty- or even fifty-year career you’ll encounter many hierarchies in various different jobs. Depending on your career goals, you’ll want to put in the intense effort to climb at least some of those ladders, to do everything you can to make it to a certain level or even to the top. But between these periods of push, you’ll also be able to plan intervals of less intensive and more flexible work, work that is much more compatible with caregiving.

  Even better, if you take charge of your own professional development and think about your career in terms of a series of different jobs and life experiences, you can choose your intervals accordingly. While specific intervals cannot always be planned for, the idea of intervals certainly can.

  U.S. demographics are already pushing in this direction. Millennials beginning their careers are treating their first decade out of school differently than their elders did. London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott predict the rise of a new “explorer phase,” in which “people in their twenties keep their options open and experiment with different roles and skills to better understand what they are good at and what they enjoy.” They’ll take risks that they cannot afford to take later, either physical or entrepreneurial, and invest in building networks and new experiences.

  At the other end of life, as baby boomers “retire” from whatever job they’re in, many will be looking at several decades of energy and health ahead of them. The vast majority will also discover that they can ill afford to stop working completely. Some will opt for care intervals—spending the time with their grandchildren that they did not have for their children, often becoming invaluable extra caregivers helping their sons and daughters rise in their own careers. Others will become teachers, volunteer for the Peace Corps, run for office, work in small businesses, distill their wisdom and experience as consultants, gain new credentials, and create new businesses with spouses and friends.

  Along the way, as they ease out of their current jobs or arrange deals with employers to continue working on different terms, they will be asking for flexible hours, part-time work, project-based work, and other arrangements that millennials and all workers juggling caregiving responsibilities will be only too happy to support.

  THE CAREER PORTFOLIO

  IN THIS NEW KIND OF career planning, we have to begin by rethinking what a career is. The first time I heard the term “portfolio career” was from Bridget Kendall, an award-winning British journalist who has been a BBC diplomatic correspondent since 1998. As we talked about different ways to fit work and family together, she mentioned that in Britain the idea of portfolio careers was taking off: making a career by working at a “portfolio” of part-time jobs, all of which together add up to a full-time job and each of which allows you to express a different part of your identity. The huge difference between Britain and the United States, of course, is that health and pension benefits are provided by the government rather than by individual employers. And yet, it is still possible to adapt versions of the idea to American circumstances.

  As I thought about it, it occurred to me that I’ve developed a different kind of portfolio career over the years—a sequential one—although without ever thinking of it in those terms. I’m a lawyer, scholar, writer, teacher, public speaker, media commentator, manager, entrepreneur, and foreign policy expert. I have invested in developing different parts of that portfolio over the years in different full-time jobs, sometimes deliberately choosing new challenges in order to learn and add new skills and other times taking on new roles as a function of the circumstances in which I found myself. In either case, I believe that those roles have provided me with both versatility and security, a safety net of possibilities should any one of them not work out.

  You can think about a portfolio career in either form—holding multiple part-time jobs at once or looking for a series of full-time jobs—each challenging you in a different way. Having different jobs, hobbies, and passions will give you a portfolio of diverse skills and experiences that will help you learn and advance in all the different stages of your life. Pick a dream job that you would like to hold someday and analyze all the different kinds of abilities and experience it requires: fund-raising, say, or strategy, management experience, profit and loss responsibility, writing ability, or public-speaking experience. Instead of gaining those skills by moving up through a preordained series of rungs on a corporate ladder, think about the many ways you could acquire them by doing different jobs at different times.

  Many notable women have blazed this trail, including former Texas Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and current Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren. Hutchison graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1967, only to discover that Houston law firms were not hiring women. She became a TV news correspondent, ran for and won a position in the state legislature, and later worked as a lawyer, banker, businesswoman, and mother before entering national politics. Elizabeth Warren had a brief spell as a full-time mom in her early twenties, attended law school as a young mother, did part-time work for a bit after she had her second child, and then became a full-time law professor in her late twenties. After a few government appointments in middle age, she began her first campaign for elected office at age sixty-two.

  It’s important to look at the different phases of your life, or at least what you hope your life will be. If you want to have children, you are likely to need more flexibility and control over your working hours at key times in the
ir lives. The same is true if you want to be an important part of your parents’ lives as they age. If you expect to be a single parent, you’re even more likely to need that flexibility and control at various points.

  Even if you don’t want kids, and have a longer period of time to devote yourself single-mindedly to your career, you may want to immerse yourself in your community in some way, write a novel, learn a foreign language and live abroad, build a social enterprise, or devote yourself full-time to a hobby you are passionate about. These broader life ambitions are just as important as your career ambitions; it’s up to you to figure out how to combine them.

  As you look forward, try also to imagine what it will be like looking back at the end of your life and what it is you will most wish you had done. David Brooks contrasts “résumé virtues” with “eulogy virtues,” noting that while résumés list the “skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success,” the “eulogy virtues are deeper.” They’re “the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.” They’re the ones, in the end, that matter most.

  DON’T DROP OUT, DEFER

  IF YOUR WORKING LIFE REALLY is likely to extend roughly from age twenty-five until seventy-five or even later, with periods of education, caregiving, and—if you are fortunate—life enrichment built in, then it makes sense to take some time when your children are younger and your parents are older to care for them and savor those moments. Planning your career as if you were going to peak in your mid-fifties and then retire by sixty-five is the equivalent of cramming a seven-course meal into the first three or four courses.

  If you have any choice at all during these periods, don’t drop out. Defer. Far too many women who have left the workforce planning to come back at some point, confident in their education and professional credentials, find that it’s much more difficult than they expected to get back in. In 2003, Lisa Belkin published “The Opt-Out Revolution” in The New York Times Magazine, interviewing ten Princeton graduates who were all in the same Atlanta book club. Half of those women had quit work entirely to be full-time moms, one worked part-time, one had a business with her husband, two freelanced, and one had a full-time job and no kids.

  Ten years later, Judith Warner interviewed a number of women who had made the same choice as Belkin’s subjects to see how they were faring. Almost to a woman, they wanted back into the workforce, although they generally were looking for different kinds of work than the jobs they had left. Roughly a third of these women were able to transition back into paid jobs with relative ease, largely because they kept up their contacts, had the most prestigious educations possible, and volunteered strategically. As Warner puts it, “Fund-raising for a Manhattan private school could be a nice segue back into banking; running bake sales for the suburban swim team tended not to be a career-enhancer.” But many had a hard time finding any work at all and have a much more sober view of their original decision to leave, although none regret the time they have been able to spend with their children. They chose to leave their jobs without realizing that they were also choosing economic and social disempowerment.

  So if at all possible, stay in the game. Plan for leaning back as well as leaning in; make deliberate rather than unintended choices. If you’re strategic about it, you can find ways to keep your networks fresh and your skills sharp even as you slow down, move laterally or even backward for a while.

  One hard and fast rule will help you plan. I borrow this one from my brother Hoke, an investment banker for twenty-five years who has watched many of his colleagues come and go. Never make a decision about leaving your job when you’re in crisis. Anticipate the crises, the times when you feel like you are both the worst caregiver and the worst professional in the world. Know that they will come, but know also that they are the worst possible time to make a life decision. Build a support network, at work and at home, to help you get through them, and make sure you nurture the relationships in that network. They are not a distraction from work but something that will help you work better and stronger over the long haul.

  PHASE THREE

  A FEW YEARS AGO, AS I waited in line at a coffee shop near my house, I overheard a snippet of conversation that has stayed with me. A woman who looked to be in her late fifties was saying to a friend that her last child was leaving for college and she was “beginning to think about phase three.” Not retirement, not some part-time volunteering, but the next active phase of her life.

  In every job, every profession, some workers will choose to be hares, ready to put in longer hours, take more trips, be available 24/7. And they will be promoted faster and reach various peaks earlier than those of us who choose a different rhythm.

  That’s only fair. People who choose to marry their work or who manage, one way or another, never to have to make a trade-off between competition and care—either by having a full-time caregiver at home and accepting the price of rarely seeing their loved ones or through some combination of money, a farsighted choice of jobs, and good fortune—will be able to advance faster to top jobs. Others may be perfectly content to stay in the middle, knowing that they are valued as managers and team players. The point is not to ensure that everyone who competes reaches the finish line at the same time, but to ensure that those who choose a slower path will still have an opportunity to compete on equal terms if they want to, whenever they’re ready.

  And why not? If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she’ll be a healthy, smart, and experienced sixty-nine when she’s elected. For all the excitement about her potentially being the first woman president, I think it’s equally inspiring that she would be the first grandmother president. She has had many phases in her career, even though it appeared that she had subordinated a successful early career as a children’s rights lawyer to her husband’s political ambitions. She ran for senator after her husband finished his presidency and, equally important, after Chelsea went to college. After losing a presidential campaign, she took on a job she never expected to hold, as secretary of state.

  Clinton was following in Madeleine Albright’s and Condoleezza Rice’s footsteps as secretary of state. Albright was named the first woman secretary of state at age fifty-nine; she had already made careers for herself as a professor and a congressional staffer while she was still raising her daughters as a single mother (she and her husband divorced). Since leaving office in 2001, she has become an author, entrepreneur, and businesswoman. Condoleezza Rice has already had multiple careers as well, beginning as a professor, taking a position as a staffer at the National Security Council, becoming a provost at Stanford, then national security advisor and secretary of state, and now principal in her own strategic consulting group, while often being touted as the next NFL commissioner.

  Clinton, Rice, and Albright lead very high-profile lives. But any of us could think about sequencing intervals of competition and care much more strategically. If you are married, consider Hanna Rosin’s vision of “seesaw marriages,” where couples take turns being lead caregiver or lead breadwinner. If you have children, plan for the day they leave home. We often talk about empty-nesters as if they are sad mother birds flapping forlornly around the nest, wondering what on earth to do now. I prefer thinking about phase three as a second surge, a time of renewed energy, focus, and commitment to a professional goal.

  Who knows? Some of us, and certainly our children, may be thinking about phases four and five.

  TOURS OF DUTY

  FARSIGHTED EMPLOYERS ARE ALREADY BEGINNING to incorporate the interval training concept, albeit under a different name and without the same focus on the needs of caregivers. In The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman and his co-authors Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh describe a new model of employer-employee relations that is sweeping Silicon Valley. The book starts from the premise that the lifetime employment model and the employee loyalty that it genera
ted is dead. Millennial workers understand very well that they will hold many jobs over the course of their careers, leading them to limit their investment in their employers just as their employers have little incentive to invest in them. The Alliance proposes a very different model in which both sides, as the name suggests, ally to advance their mutual interests.

  Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh discuss how the old model of work broke down in the 1970s and 1980s. The pressure to compete globally created a scenario in which workers were treated as disposable. As they put it, companies insist that “ ‘employees are our most valuable resource.’ But when Wall Street wants spending cuts, their ‘most valuable resource’ suddenly morphs into their ‘most fungible resource.’ ” This attitude bred an understandable distrust among employees.

  The way to regain mutual trust is to create a framework in which job contracts aren’t seen as open-ended commitments; they’re seen as tours of duty that have clearly defined goals and finite time spans. After your tour is up, you might go on to another tour within the same company or go to another company entirely. But neither party feels used or abused in this scenario. The employees feel like they are learning new things and they’re not at the mercy of an unfeeling market; the employer feels like its investment is worthwhile.

  The authors are careful to note that even though this approach was engineered in the flexible wonderland of Silicon Valley, its main lesson will work in any environment in which “talent really is the most valuable resource, and employees are treated accordingly.” Companies like GE and the global nonprofit Endeavor already use a tour of duty framework. The most distinctive feature of this approach is that it allows jobs to be customized for each person and his or her specific relationship to an organization at a specific time in his or her life. Though lower-level workers with less bargaining power and desired skills still need government protection to make sure that they are not being exploited, the tour of duty notion looks like it is a possible new way forward.