Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  Fatema found the courage to have a direct conversation with her boss about what she needed. You should have this conversation too—after all, you can’t really expect your manager to know what you want if you don’t ask for it. But there are more and less successful ways of asking. Here are some pointers to make it easier.

  Do your research. Check your employee handbook to see what the company’s policies are on flexibility. If the company advertises the possibility of flexible arrangements, then your pitch should be less about whether you can take advantage of them than about how to ensure that you stay on track for promotion—even if on a slower track—if you do. Presume that the company’s values are in the right place, but tackle flexibility stigma head-on.

  Have a plan. Whether you’re making a proposal in line with existing company policy or proposing a customized arrangement, make sure you have a specific plan in mind that will make it possible for you to fit the different pieces of your life together. It might be working a four-day week, telecommuting on Mondays or Fridays, leaving work at 5:45 every day so that you can pick your kids up from daycare and come back online after they’re asleep, or whatever other arrangements will reduce your stress and increase your productivity.

  Make an appointment. Don’t just spring your suggestion on your boss at the office coffee machine. Signal that you and your partner have been talking about how to best maintain your commitments to your careers while making time for caregiving.

  Highlight the benefits to your company. Be sure that when you map out your plan, you make it clear to your boss how this new arrangement will benefit the company as well. Explain how you think you’ll be more productive. Working from home can allow you, for instance, to focus on bigger projects that require concentrated thinking for hours at a time, which can be very difficult to do in the office. If your boss is hesitant, suggest a trial period—career experts recommend three months—after which, if it’s not working out, you can reassess. And be sure to agree on metrics for evaluating the results of the experiment.

  If at first you don’t succeed…Asking doesn’t guarantee receiving, of course. But even if your boss says no, you don’t have to let the issue drop. In a Woman’s Day article about requesting flextime, Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO of FlexJobs, suggests that if you’ve been turned down, bring the issue back up at an annual review. She even offers a potential script: “I know we discussed this a while ago, and it’s still on my radar. I see it as a benefit not just for me personally, but for business,” and follow it up with an explanation about what you’re bringing to the table as an employee.

  I’ll be frank. When employees at the Woodrow Wilson School asked for more flexible schedules when I was a dean, I was willing but backed down in the face of staunch opposition from existing supervisors. The argument was always the same: “If we do it for this person we will have to do it for everyone and we won’t be able to maintain any kind of control or discipline.” Or else resentment that the person in question would be getting special treatment.

  At New America the question has been more one of linking teleworking to agreed standards of performance and of navigating the tensions between one set of standards for administrative staff and another for the program staff who work on policy analysis and research. In both cases, as in the State Department, the issue has been how to make the transition from an old system to a new one. I come from an academic culture where I am used to getting lots of work done in many different places—where my office was a place I went to mainly for meetings. But for people who come from more traditional office cultures, home or a café or even a library is a place you go when you are not working. This transition may need to be made gradually, one experiment at a time, with clear measures of success or failure.

  One final note. It’s important to remember that your boss isn’t necessarily your adversary; you may be pleasantly surprised at how he or she reacts to situations in which you have to adapt your work to fit your family. One week in the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg repeatedly missed or came late for Secretary Clinton’s 8:45 meeting. On the fourth day, she raised an eyebrow at his assistant. But the minute his assistant explained that Jim’s wife was traveling (she also worked for the government) and he was taking their daughters to school, Clinton’s potential irritation turned to respect and support for his willingness to be an equal parent.

  In general, your boss wants you to be the best employee you can be, and that means making you a happy employee. British economists have even found that happy workers are about 12 percent more productive (something you might want to mention casually to your boss!). It’s going to take some time to revolutionize the workplace, but every step an individual employee takes sets a precedent; the women and men following in your footsteps will thank you.

  If You Are Caught Up on Your Email, Your Priorities Are Wrong

  EVEN IF YOUR WORKPLACE GIVES you maximum control over when, where, and how you do your work, it’s still up to you to put your family first. Over a decade ago, I formulated what has been my work mantra ever since: “If you are caught up on your email, your priorities are in the wrong place.” I realized that I could spend another hour at the office every night knocking down the daily pile of email—at least a third of which was unnecessary to anyone and all of which would quickly pile up again no matter what I did—or I could go home and read to my sons before bed. When I thought about what really mattered, the answer was obvious.

  No one at a memorial service will ever remember if you answered all your email. Quite the contrary. When I worked in the State Department I noted an inverse relationship between how high up people were and how much email they actually answered—they simply had more important work on their plates. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, read all her email but did not respond unless a response was absolutely necessary, and then she had it down to one letter—“k” instead of “okay.”

  Email is just the most obvious manifestation of a much bigger issue: the 24/7 work culture and its associated feelings of responsibility and guilt. Many of us try so hard to respond to an ever-increasing set of demands from an ever-growing number of people who can now reach us at all hours. The key is to stop long enough to think through what your real priorities are. What’s really most important to you? If you don’t set your own priorities and draw the boundaries that will help you achieve them, no one else will do it for you.

  IF FAMILY COMES FIRST…

  IF CEOS, SUPERVISORS, AND MANAGERS want to avoid missing out on the next great wave of productivity increases and morale improvements, they too need to adopt policies that provide true flexibility. It might seem daunting, but all it takes is understanding, vision, and a little bit of nerve.

  When I took my first big management job as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School in 2002, our sons were five and three. If one of them had a problem—from falling sick at school or daycare to a more sustained learning issue that might require diagnosis and outside assistance—that family matter came first.

  The situation I’ve just described probably confirms many managers’ worst fears about hiring a mother. But since I had no doubt about my own commitment to my work and my ability to focus, reason, and lead while I was a mother, and since I was the boss, I rejected the stereotype. After some trial and error, I found that if I attended to the family issue first, subject of course to meeting important obligations that could not be postponed or delegated, then I would be far more focused, productive, and determined when I turned back to my work.

  Once, during a daylong meeting I had with the Woodrow Wilson School’s advisory board, I told the board members that my associate dean would take over from eleven to noon while I went down the road to attend a teacher’s conference. It would’ve been better, of course, to schedule the teacher’s conference on a different day, but for whatever reason that was not possible and it was important that I be there. The world did not come to an end; my associate dean was perfectly capable of taking over; and alt
hough some of my board members may have been bemused, others recognized that missing one hour out of eight with them mattered far less than missing a crucial hour with my child’s teacher.

  Over time, I developed a slogan: “If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together.” This slogan applied equally to me, my colleagues, and my employees. If anyone working for me had a family issue—with a child, a parent, a spouse, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, or cousin—she should attend to it. We, her managers and co-workers, would cover for her and support her in any way we could. In return, we expected her to take responsibility for meeting her professional obligations, for making up any work she could not delegate, and for ensuring that important issues or assignments did not fall through the cracks.

  I have applied this philosophy at the Woodrow Wilson School, at the State Department, where I managed some thirty-five people in the Office of Policy Planning, and now at New America. Indeed, within my first year at New America, on the eve of a trip to Chicago to meet with the head of a foundation that funds our work, the director of one of our programs wrote to me to say that his wife had been covering for him with their children for the past two weeks but she now had an important case and he simply had to step up.

  I could have told him that this was an important trip (it was) and that he could not simply bow out on such short notice. It would have been completely within my rights as president of the organization going to meet a funder. But as a working spouse myself, I knew exactly the kind of interspousal negotiation he was going through and thought better of him as a husband and father that he was doing his fair share. His presence at my side was a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have; the trip went off fine without him. For him, however, the entire incident affirmed his commitment to New America as an organization that lives its values and allows him to be both a family man and a working man. He is a very valuable member of our team, and I now know I can breathe a bit easier the next time a headhunter calls.

  I certainly cannot claim to be a perfect manager; management is a process of continual learning and course correction. But I’ve witnessed firsthand that when I create the space for all the people who work for me, regardless of rank, to put their families first, their work never comes second. They put the two together in a way that both get done. Responsible people do not limit their obligations to the workplace. Indeed, I would not hire a job candidate who told me that his work would always come before his family. I would question his character.

  Focus on Results

  THE MOST EXTREME FORM OF flexibility that I have come across is the results-only work environment, or ROWE, an approach pioneered by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution. As they describe it, ROWE means “people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.” That means no set hours at all. The only thing that matters is that your work is getting done, and getting done well.

  ROWE is harder than it looks, and, inevitably, has some unintended consequences and problems of its own. To begin with, some employees have jobs that require them to be physically present at designated times, and even when work can be done effectively at home, lots of empty offices, particularly those of managers, can erode morale. Worse still, a two-tier class system can quickly develop whereby lower-level employees resent having to be present to do their jobs when higher-level staff can stay home.

  ROWE has also had mixed reviews in large companies. It was famously adopted by Best Buy but was stopped later by new CEO Hubert Joly, who thought the approach was too one-size-fits-all. In an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune he wrote, “This program was based on the premise that the right leadership style is always delegation [to the employee]. Anyone who has led a team knows that delegation is not always the most effective leadership style.” On the other hand, the Gap adopted ROWE and has claimed remarkable early success with the program.

  Regardless of whether ROWE works as a formal, detailed program to be implemented, I find that the ROWE mindset has a positive impact on how managers manage. Ressler and Thompson insist that supervisors be clear about their expectations for employees as well as how results will be measured. Overseeing who comes in on time (or better yet, early) and leaves on time (or better yet, late) is much easier than thinking hard about how to set goals that can be met precisely. That process, in turn, requires setting clear priorities and communicating those priorities to your team, with measurable benchmarks and deadlines against them.

  Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto Software, has applied these principles to her workplace with great results. Although the firm did not officially roll out ROWE, it uses similar principles. All of Parsons’s employees have flexible schedules. “We very much focus on results and setting real tangible goals and objectives for every job and every employee,” she says. If you work for her, you’re “judged on what you do, not how many hours you’re at the office. We think people do better work and more innovative work if they come in fresh every morning.”

  Parsons is a mother of three boys, ages ten, eight, and five. She has taken her focus on results a step further, transforming the workplace itself. When her children were infants, she brought them into the office, and she has allowed employees to do the same. Though Palo Alto employees get three months of maternity leave, a handful of employees have wanted to come back earlier, and they are allowed to bring their infants with them. “We’ve given them a place for the baby to be,” Parsons explains. It’s primarily a place of work, so if an employee had a colicky or special needs infant, Parsons says she would work out some other arrangement, whether it was working from home or something else. But otherwise, as long as employees can get their work done, why is an infant snoozing away a problem? Parsons’s commitment to these principles has paid off: her company has grown from twenty-eight to sixty employees in the past three years and their revenue has increased 40 to 50 percent each year.

  Thinking and working this way requires an even deeper mind shift about how we get good results in the first place. It’s a strange analogy, but I always think of my rice cooker. Traditional rice cookers operate on clear input and output principles—one cup rice, two cups water, thirty-five minutes’ cooking. But mine determines the cooking time based on the quality of the rice, the weather, and any other factor that might affect the outcome.

  It sounds odd, and requires additional calculation on the part of the machine, so the cooking time always varies. But the result is so much better! So too is the work that is done when we determine assignments and time based on the quality of the work we need done and the individual characteristics of the people who are going to do that work.

  Invest in Caregivers

  THE FINAL STEP TOWARD CREATING a workplace in which all employees can be their best and most productive selves requires managers and executives to see caregiving itself as an asset. Radical as it may seem, it’s time for CEOs, supervisors, and team leaders to assume that the experience of caring for children, aging parents, or any loved one will give your employees experience and insights that will help them on the job. To begin with, they will be extremely efficient; working caregivers do not have time to waste. And remember, from chapter 5, all the attributes that care helps develop: knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope.

  Believing that care is just as valuable and formative an experience as competition means making paternity leave mandatory, or at least the default option, so that new fathers would have to opt out of taking it rather than opting in. It also means welcoming whatever arrangements allow workers who are also caregivers not only to stay on the job, but also to stay on a leadership track, even though their rise will likely be slower and more irregular than workers who are not caregivers.

  Even more important, managers must recognize the enormous talent pool of women in their late forties and fifties who have taken time out for caregiving.

  The M
cKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2020 the world will face a “skills gap” of nearly 40 million people, meaning that employers will need that many workers with a college degree or higher than the global labor force can supply. In their words, “Businesses operating in this skills-scarce world must know how to find talent pools with the skills they need and to build strategies for hiring, retaining, and training the workers who will give them competitive advantage.” Part of the answer is right in front of them. All those women currently missing from the ranks of top management—the ones who keep disappearing between entry level and the C-suite—are actually still there. You just have to have eyes to see them and the foresight and wisdom to give them a real chance and hire them again.

  So take some risks and invest in caregivers. Even more broadly, invest in care itself: in the many ways that our caring sides and our competitive sides can come together brilliantly and productively. Take your cue from Bill Gates, who amassed one of the world’s biggest fortunes before being influenced by his wife, Melinda, to give most of it away. One of the key moments for me in writing this book was reading a speech that he gave at the World Economic Forum in 2008, where he identified self-interest and caring for others as the twin forces of human nature. He sees those same forces as the drivers of what he calls “creative capitalism,” the harnessing of market forces to lift billions of people out of poverty. Figure out how to mesh competition and care in your own business, and create the perfect workplace of your own.