Work Life Balance

Many tried and have yet to achieve their intended outcome.  I recently watched the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada.”  The Art Director, Nigel, told Andy Sachs that when her whole life is up in smokes it means it’s time for a promotion.  Many executives struggle with that balance.  I know how torn they are.  All of them want to have a meaningful family life but are constantly drawn away by the demands of their work.  They want to be successful at work and successful at home.  Can the balance be ever achieved?

In a TED presentation, Nigel Marsh talked about work-life balance.  He mentioned a number of interesting thoughts.  One is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.  What troubled me most is when he said that one will achieve balance when you don’t have work or don’t have a life.  I am troubled because of its truth. 

Given these scenarios, do we have a chance at achieving work life balance?  There is a ray of hope.  Nigel Marsh also said that “If you don’t design your life, someone else may design it for you and you may not like their idea of balance.”

When I started my career the work was demanding.  I was fortunate that it didn’t take me away from my family for long periods of time.  In fact, I could only remember one occasion that I had to travel for a 3-week period.  I could spend my evenings with my family and didn’t have any conference calls.  While I worked in shifts, it still meant that I am home for the major portion of the day.  Work was stressful but when I left the office, I didn’t have to bring any home.  Well I did occasionally.  This is when the top brasses of the company are visiting and we had presentations to make.  Laptops were not in fashion and too expensive.  So any computer work is left on the table top in the office.  Come to think about it, the laptop may be a reason why we had to extend our work hours to the home.

When I got promoted, the company gave me a laptop and a mobile phone.  They call them tools of the trade.  These are the handcuffs that constantly connect you to the office.  There is no escape.  You are within reach with 11 key punches or less.  As the company grew and become global, my time and my family time reduced proportionately.  There were teleconferences that took me right to the wee hours of the morning.  We complained about these teleconferences but there is not much we can do about it.  Some conferences are useful while most were not worthy of our time.  With the ease of getting information, we are pulled into a situation where managers are pressured to providing “live” information.  This is a vicious cycle.  The easier it is to get information, the more information is required to be fed into the system.  This required many people to contribute into the information system on a continuous basis.

This is a small slice of the causes of imbalance.  The work has been redesigned to be in the office, have conference calls outside the normal office hours and for what small amount of time is left is to plan for the next day at work.  This leaves us very little or even no time for self and family.  The gravitational pull towards to requirement of the company is too large for us to resist.  As Star Trek’s Borg says to their captors, “Resistance is futile.”  We are caught up in the array of getting and sharing information that it has become our prime directives.  What can we do about it?

I didn’t have the answer to this imbalance.  However, I was more fortunate than many in that my promotions were not rapid.  When I reached a senior level within my organization, my children were late teens and requiring lesser of my time.   When I traveled, my wife accompanied me on most of the trips.  This is a worthwhile personal investment.  Regretfully, I neglected myself and the community.   In my earlier blogs I wrote about them.  One being “I goofed, you shouldn’t.”  At that time, my work and family were the most important.  I didn’t think much of dedicating time to myself and contributing to the community.  Now it is “payback” time.

I struggled with what you can gain from reading this post.  Everyone has different goals, different priorities, different situations, different challenges and therefore different ways to deal with their work-life balance.  I am responsible for my balance and its consequences.  In the end, I just left it to you, the reader.  You will have to create your own balance.  You may gain some insights from the experiences of others but it is all up to you.

For me, I position myself as the pivot of the balance.  I determine how large each piece on my balance is.  They varied from period to period.  In my early career, I had only two pieces – work and family.  In the later career years, work became larger than family and I faced the consequences as they surfaced.   So my balance varied from phase to phase in my life.  It was not easy but I had to take time to review them.  My reviews cycles were once in 6 to 8 years.  Now, work is the smallest piece, then community.  Family is now my largest piece.   I am looking forward to my next review at the end of the year.

Good luck in your work-life balance.

Amazing Entrepreneurship!

Vision for Success

On a recent drive from Penang to Kuala Lumpur on the Malaysian North-South expressway, my wife and I stopped at our usual rest area.  We have been stopping here as long as I can remember and have always patronized this one stall.   On our previous stop here, a couple of months earlier, we ordered our usual plate of curry noodles and chicken rice.  We didn’t see the man who normally took our order and I didn’t recognize any of the staff in the stall.  When we ate the food, we were surprised that they didn’t taste as good as it used to.  So we decided that we have to buy our meal from another stall.

During our stop this time, we walked down the stalls and were having difficulty deciding what to eat.  We found an empty table and sat down.  I walked up and down the stalls again.  On my way back to our seat, I saw this familiar face in the stall that we used to buy from.  I was excited and told my wife that the man is back.  She then quickly went over to the stall and I can see her having a conversation with the man.  She returned with a tray with two bowls of curry noodles.

She told me that she complained to the man that the food didn’t taste good the last time.  She inquired where the man went and he said that he was away developing another stall somewhere else.  The man offered to treat my wife and me to hot drinks.  I saw him going into the drink stall and soon, he came to our table with 3 drinks.  He sat down beside me and a wonderful conversation started.

Firstly he apologized for the food during our previous stop.  Then he began his story.  He told us that he had a total of 6 stalls along the highway.   He tendered for a stall when the highway opened in 1994.  Very few people wanted to bid for the stalls in the rest stops.  The thinking then was that people will not want to pay to travel of the toll-way.  Stalls were practically given away free.  He told us that his parents were upset and didn’t want him to slog it out.  He said humorously that they even offered him the money not to start his business there.  He knew that there was great opportunity cooking halal Chinese cuisine.  If the taste is good, he catered for nearly all races and religions in Malaysia.

I was amazed that this man had such a great strategy when he was expanding.  As he grew from one stall to two, he took staff from his first stall to start off the second stall.  This was a promotion for the key staff in stall one.  In this manner, the stall started being profitable quicker with the right staff.  When he started stall 3, he picked his key staff from stall one and two.  The third stall became profitable even quicker with the right staff.  He continued this process with his stall 3, 4, 5 and 6.  His start-up time became amazingly short.

He also mentioned that he partnered with another person to open a halal restaurant serving Chinese cuisine in a nearby town.  His partner, a chef, was nervous when he mentioned his intention.  However, on opening day, his partner was a busy man cooking dishes for a good crowd of appreciating diners.  He had worked with his network to help bring customers to his opening.  He organized buses to ferry them to his restaurant and back.  As a good gesture, he did not charge for his food during this day.  It is like his appreciation for their intended patronage.  Today, that restaurant is very successful and well known among the community.  Customers still come from the nearby factories and offices to patronize his restaurant.

This is an amazing man.  He left the academic world at 11 years old to help his father in his business.  This bright young man is a graduate from the “School of Hard Knocks.”  What impresses me is that if you meet this man on the street, you would not have even suspected that he is a successful entrepreneur.  I can say that he works hard managing the stalls and the restaurant.  He is highly successful because he is willing to invest in his people and partners to make them equally successful.  He is also generous in remunerating good people.  His staff trusted him to make them successful if they are equally willing to work diligently.

Who Should I Be?

The articles I have posted appeared to be a random selection of my life stories.  I hope that each story has helped you with some ideas or another option on how you can deal with your situation.  I know our situations are never identical but as long as the stories help being a catalyst to an action, I am delighted.

You may have noticed that each article has labels.  There is a structure to these labels.  The website arranges the labels in alphabetical order, but upon rearranging them, the labels look like this

• Knowing Yourself
• Aspiration
• Career Planning
• Managing Yourself
• Career Conversations
• Managing Others

When I started working, I had not figured these out.  I now have the hindsight and hopefully others can benefit from it.  Throughout my journey and until now, I have had the blessing and fortune of meeting people whom I could reach out to for help.  To these people I am thankful.  Many of them are written or will be written in my stories.  With this knowledge I have helped my coachees and those who seek my help with this process.

There are two areas that I have not touched on yet.  These are:

• Career Execution
• Constant Review

You may have your own algorithm for a successful career planning and execution.  If you do, congratulation! You are ahead of many that I have spoken to. 

For me, my career journey starts with knowing myself well.  Who am I really?  What am I capable of?  What are my strengths, my weaknesses?  How do I find out?  Knowing myself better will help me articulate my aspiration.  Sometimes a person should have more than one aspiration.  In fact I think everyone should have a plan B.  This will help make the career planning more robust.  Just like a game of chess, you may plan many moves and execute some of them.  The aim is the same – being successful.

Now that you know more about yourself, where you want to go and have made your plans to get there; the next action is to take the first step to begin the journey.  You need to manage yourself so that each step taken is aligned to your competencies and aspirations. Some steps may include gaining additional skills and knowledge. From time to time, during your journey, someone may present you with an opportunity.  How do you evaluate these opportunities?  Will the opportunity move you closer to your aspirations?  Will it help you gain additional competencies?  Opportunities may not always be presented to you.  Sometimes you need to seek them out.  How do you seek them? A good network and great career conversations will help you find out.

There will also be obstacles and derailments in your career paths.  How does you minimize these?  How do you get out of it?  Managing yourself and others well will help.  I think of others as those I come into contact with – my boss, my staff, my peers, my friends, my family members and my network.  The way you interact with them will determine your success in managing yourself and others.

Finally, one needs to get feedback constantly.  You need to know if where you are going have changed and if you have deviated from the planned path.  You must to know if you need additional tools, skills and knowledge to continue.  There are many things you need to know.  To find out, you will need to seek constant feedback and reviews to move forward.

As you read my stories, reflect on the labels (or steps) too.  I hope that both the stories and the steps can help you as you create your own exciting career journey.