As a business professional, what comes into your mind first when someone mentions the phrase "work life balance”? Is it one of the following?
- A visual picture of a person trying to balance books in one arm and a child in another?
- An image of a big wall clock marked “8-5” as work time and the remainder as family time?
- The thought of that enviable stage of carefree retirement and sipping margaritas on some far away beach?
Whatever your thoughts they are probably much different than those you had when you first entered your working
It is much easier for us to look back over our careers and see through the many obstacles and decision points we may have faced. For those of you who are still early in your career, the challenge of defining the meaning of work life balance can be like riding a roller coaster.
For me personally, my life and career have changed, evolved, and gone through ups and downs, stalled and accelerated, hit all-time highs while also hitting all-time lows. During those times, like most others, I seemed to be constantly searching for that magical stage of work/life balance.
As an independent outsider, you can review my resume and reach your own conclusions as to how successful or unsuccessful my career has been. What a resume doesn’t show is all of the ancillary challenges connected to building that list of accomplishments. Those challenges impact the manner in which we have reached the various accomplishments on that coveted resume. Of course, a resume isn’t meant to be a dissertation of your life history, but it certainly is a reflection of your work accomplishments as well as life experiences. Often work accomplishments are the outcome of working through many day to day life challenges. Whether you are a full-time professional, part-time professional, parent, spouse, partner, volunteer, activist or other, it can be an important exercise to recognize how your life experiences and the people connected to them impact your personality, approach, attitude and overall being in your working career.
In my case I relay that a critical turning point in my career involved a very personal incident. That incident came at a time my children were 13, 11 and 4. I was diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor and faced with an unknown future. The doctors at Mayo Clinic “recommended" I write notes to my young boys due to the uncertain outcome of the next day’s surgery. It is obvious I recovered, but the many events that surrounded that recovery shaped a good deal of my future career. I went through a period of trying to determine whether my illness was telling me it was time to take a career break. But I made a conscious decision that the working world was part of who I was and that in order to fully recover, I needed that component in my life. Right or wrong, I made the choice. However, what did change was the manner in which I viewed issues that occurred in the working world. Somehow, being told you may not ever see your children again can give you a very different perspective on things that may happen in the corporate arena. That experience allowed me to take a very different view of individual circumstances, work situations, personalities and challenges. It challenged me to always look further than just the surface of working issues and working relationships. It became much clearer to me that things that happen in the work environment can often be the direct result or be directly impacted by many of the things that occur outside of our working hours.
The experience forced me to make a conscious attempt to understand the impacts of life on the people who worked for me. That understanding often gave insight into how individuals succeeded or failed in some of their job tasks and situations. Our working life is impacted by much more than the things we learn in college and our day to day tasks when performing our jobs. Those things all become components of work life balance.
From a personal perspectives, those “notes” that Mayo Clinic suggested I write became a type of therapy over the years. As I write this article, my boys are now 27, 25 and 18. After the health incident, I made it a regular practice to periodically update the letters. The culmination of my creations was given to each of my older boys on their high school graduation. Just this past week, I had the opportunity to give my youngest son his letter. Of course, since he was only 4 at the time of my tumor, his letter seemed to continue forever. It was a lot for anyone to read and comprehend let alone an 18 year old anticipating graduation day. I was pleasantly surprised that he found my “gift” on his desk and he stayed in his room and diligently read through all fifteen typed pages. I even received a “thank you mom” when he surfaced. Lesson learned…..the time and effort were worth the look back.
Back to working issues, over my career, I’ve had ample opportunity to interview individuals for various positions. My personal interview focus has also evolved just as my own career and personal life has evolved. My own life challenges seem to sneak their way into discussions with prospective employees or co-workers. In my early career days, I looked for competencies such as “technical”, “organized”, and “analytical”. But as my own career experiences evolved, I found that individuals who possessed characteristics such as “communication”, “socialization”, “adaptability”, “team focus”, and “respect” would be employees who often would succeed far beyond my expectations.
Along with the increased focus on understanding more than just a prospective employee’s technical skills and talents evolved my own process around determining my personal career path. I found myself trying to evaluate whether a particular position, company or opportunity I may be looking at was a good fit for my personal goals and life. I was looking for “signs” to help me decide on which road to take.
I often look back and wonder why I didn’t recognize the “signs” before. There probably isn’t a good answer. What is evident is the job decision takes on more than just personal goals and fit. There are a multitude of external pressures compounded by the difficult job market and inability to really know a company’s culture and working style when you are only exposed to a short interview process. We must consciously look for the signs.
We often looked for the right balance to be able to give our family life and children the dedicated time and devotion we feel they need. I experimented with working full-time, part-time, going back to school, staying home with my children…. but, at the time, it seemed that there was never the right answer for the right time. The key here is the phrase “at the time”. In the past three years, I have personally undergone some dramatic work, life and career changes. As part of my personal therapy to try to “sort” through all the various things that were occurring, I chose to take a step back, evaluate my life and how I had developed into the person I am today. This effort resulted in my first book that will hit the retail shelves in October 2012.
The point here was not about my book, or how good or bad I have done in my career, or even how good or bad a parent I have been. The focus was to try to understand all the events of my life, how they impacted the person I have become and how I personally managed that elusive work life balance issue. The “lessons learned” that I took away from that task was a better understanding of my own talents, challenges and attitudes as well as a glimpse of how those things may be interpreted by others.
Whether you are in the final years of your career life, your early years or struggling as a busy parent and professional to find the proper work life balance, I encourage you to take time to evaluate your own work life journey. Take a look at your personal experiences. Examine how they have shaped the person you are and how they have impacted your personality in the work place. Have those experiences impacted the type of a team member, supervisor or peer you are? Can you determine how individuals who have crossed your work and personal life path have influenced the manner in which you have approached issues in the work place? Do you take time to try to consider the unseen influences that may surface in the work environment? In any event, I encourage you to initiate your own personal evaluation exercise. I trust it will provide you some insight into your successes and challenges as well as your inter-relationships in the workplace.
By Lynn Fountain, CGMA, CRMA, MBA