Your Work or Your Life - Excellent Article...

How to overcome the conspiracy against work-life balance.

If you want your life to be more than a series of meetings, emails and business trips, you are not alone. Balancing work responsibilities and personal lives is an objective in almost every one of my executive coaching relationships. Jack Welch has said in recent articles and interviews that he believes that great managers don't have work-life balance issues because they have the necessary "systems" in place. Even with a stay-at-home spouse and legions of personal assistants, this is a ridiculous comment. The only managers who don't have work-life balance issues are those who have given their lives to the company or who aren't telling anybody about the strain.

Your boss wants, in Welch's words, "to make your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw." You may wish that your boss embrace the "whole you" (and not view your children as competition), but most executives think of work-life balance as something that has to be "dealt with" - similar to a physical or emotional handicap. According to Welch, the typical boss is willing to "accommodate work-life balance challenges if you have earned it with performance." The implication is that you trade your life to earn the chits so that you can buy it back at some future time.

Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't really work for many of you because by the time you realize that you have problems with work-life balance, your habits, expectations, responsibilities and relationships (or lack thereof) have hardened. You have created your own "system" - that is, the combination of your organization's culture, your position and your work habits - that works well as long as you continue to put your job first and everything else second, third or not at all. This system is tuned for long hours away from home. Thus your spouse, children, church and community have become accustomed to your absence and have developed routines that require your funding but make your day-to-day involvement unnecessary.

It's important to realize that work-life balance is not about having more free time. It's about living a fuller, richer life that is more enjoyable and more significant. It means putting work in proper perspective as one of the things that you do and aspire to be great at, but not who you are. Work-life balance doesn't necessarily mean working fewer hours - everyone, including CEOs, works for others and has demands beyond their control - but it does mean gaining control over when, where and how work is done.

If you are one of the many whose narrowed world view consists primarily of work and sleep, the process of recalibrating your system to define yourself beyond your job is difficult. The key to regaining or retaining balance is making external commitments that appear on your calendar and treating them with the same level of dedication you give to your work. Welch speaks the truth that, within most companies, "work-life balance is your problem to solve" and "people who publicly struggle…get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, incompetent." This means that, for most of you, work-life balance needs are a dirty little secret that you need to keep to yourself and resolve on your own.

Rather than letting work expand to fill all your time, set limits. Take advantage of the fact that companies and managers value results rather than effort, figure out how to work smarter (see my previous column, "It's Never Too Late for Time Management") and how to manage up, and stand your ground. When someone tries to impinge on an external commitment, adopt the mantra "Don't complain, don't explain." Just let them know how much time you have and work it out from there.

Those of you in your twenties have the opportunity to build balance into your work-life schedule from the beginning. Continue or incorporate the extra-curricular activities that you enjoyed in college (at least the healthy ones). If you eventually get married and have children, you will need to give up some of these activities, but you will have "hard-coded" a system that will not require you to change companies, positions or a career path to become the spouse and parent you wish to be. Be aware, however, that if you do this, it will impact the companies you choose and the positions you aspire to.

A balanced life may result in a slight tarnish on your managerial star or even the realization that you are in the wrong job or wrong company - but what's the alternative? For all the passion you put into your work and the joy that you get from creating and collaborating with others, at the end of the day, it's just a job - it doesn't hug you when you are sad and it won't take care of you when you get old.

Most of us are not destined to and don't want to become the next Jack Welch. Good thing, because even he sounds a little melancholy when he says that "my kids were raised, largely alone, by their mother" and advises us that when it comes to work-life balance, to do as he says, not as he did.

Susan Cramm, former CIO and vice president of IT at Taco Bell and CFO and executive vice president at Chevys, a Taco Bell subsidiary, is president of Valuedance, an executive coaching firm based in San Clemente, Calif. You can contact Susan at susan@valuedance.com and learn more about Valuedance at www.valuedance.com.