Using Your Professional and Inner Value to Get What You Want
I know a woman in the print and broadcast news business, also an author, who was at the top of her game by the time she reached her early thirties. Throughout her twenties she’d written for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, had a column in Glamour, was on the original team that launched Time Inc. on the web, and was a playwright. At twenty-seven she was senior editor at US News & World Report; at twenty-eight she was cohosting and cowriting a popular technology show for public television. At thirty she was married, and at thirty-one had her first child. When her daughter turned three months old—at the end of her maternity leave—she got a call from a bigwig producer recruiting her to be an anchor at a major cable news network.
It was a big job. Possibly the big job. But then she looked at her little cutie kicking her little legs and thought, Can’t do it. She called back and demurred. She would, instead, freelance for magazines and newspapers, write a book or two. And she was fine with that decision. Sure, she would keep a hand in her field, but more importantly she really wanted to be a hands-on mom.
The woman is journalist Susan Gregory Thomas, author of In Spite of Everything: A Memoir, and my collaborator on this book. Now forty-six, her plan didn’t go as expected. Susie, as her friends call her, is divorced from her daughters’ father, remarried, and living with her family of five, all of whom somehow huddle into a two-bedroom apartment (the adults sleep on a couch in the living room, and the kids divvy up the bedrooms). She has elevated her professional value and expertise as an observer of generational differences—Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials—and has also managed to get great book deals over the years. Still, she has spent the past seven years trying to keep her family afloat on a freelancer’s and book author’s earnings. And it has been far from easy.
Now does she wish she’d taken that job?
“I knew as soon as my daughter was born that I would have to divide myself into two people to keep my professional value growing at the kind of turbo rate at which it was careening along back then—and I just couldn’t do it,” she said to me. “I would have been miserable—eaten up with regret. So I’m still glad I made the decision I did. But life hasn’t been easy financially. On the contrary, it is very, very scary. I have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place, and even so, there’s been a lot of backsliding, particularly during the recession.”
Our experiences are so different yet spookily parallel. Where I sacrificed a great deal of my inner value as a mother and wife to feed my growing professional value (and, along with it, getting my financial worth), Susie went exactly the opposite route as a TV journalist and author. I, on the one hand, had seized my “big job” moment with Morning Joe; I love my job, and I’m compensated well for it. But I am haunted by the time I’ve missed—and still do—with my family over the years. On the other hand, Susie had turned down the big TV morning show host offer to be with her children, and she is happy with her work. But she’d lost one marriage and a substantial income in spite of it anyway. We both have enjoyed major gains. And we both have suffered major losses.
So do I dare ask the question that’s on my mind? Hell, yes: Who made the better decision? Or, phrased another way: Who is more successful in merging her inner and professional lives?
I was interested in a point Susie had made about how her work and home overlap. “Since I work from home, it’s possible that my professional self and my mom self are ‘integrated’ to a greater degree than working mothers who have that clear line between office and home. My children are at school mostly when I’m working, but when you’re a freelancer, the work clock never really stops. So my children see me working. And they have to deal with it. Because Mommy has to work,” she explained.
“There have been times when I’m interviewing someone for a magazine story or book, and for scheduling reasons the interview has to happen at dinner time or just around bed-time. My kids start to squabble or laugh too loudly, and I have to say, ‘Excuse me, could you pardon me for just a moment?’ I’ll mute the phone and bark at my kids if they don’t zip it now, we’re going to be living on the street starting tomorrow morning. They know I’m joking, but at the same time, they get that it’s serious.” Does she feel guilty that she has to shunt her kids to the side for work, at home, when family time is supposed to be happening? “Sometimes I do, if I’m really in crunch-down, deadline mode. But at the same time, all of us know that my work keeps the ecosystem in balance,” she said. “What I mean is: we’re like an ecosystem. I may be the dominant animal in it, but all its constituent critters and activities are vital to our habitat’s health and functioning. All of us are constantly adapting to each of its changing needs.”
The concept of the family as ecosystem really appeals to me as a model for working families. I know that I, for one, am grafted to the old idea that the home has to be a castle, a haven away from work, a family-time-only zone. But I run into a lot of problems because of it. That dictum puts a lot of pressure on working parents to transform into a completely different person at home—I would argue, particularly working mothers. You go from being, for example, a hard-driving executive at work, where you can’t talk about home life, to being an understanding and devoted mother and spouse, where you’re not supposed to talk about work for more than five minutes after you first walk in through the door. You have to check a major cross-section of yourself at the door-way at work as well as at home. Your professional value and inner value are completely split. You can feel as if you’re schizoid.
The way we all earn a living now—even if we’re not working from home—means that work invariably enters home. And it shouldn’t be seen as evil. Of course, workaholism is a different issue, but for most of us work is simply a vital part of life, of the ecosystem, and it should be seen that way. If you’re at home and you have to spend half an hour answering an important e-mail or you have to check a text coming in from a different time zone—so what? If you come home and your professional personality is still going at full tilt, what’s the problem? Why should it be so terrible that your partner and children see you in work mode? Kids often have a different persona with their friends and at school—in the public domain—from their persona at home. Isn’t there an argument for working parents to be transparent so kids learn that it’s natural to shift between different styles of interacting in the full spectrum of life circumstances? I find myself pretending to be Mommy at home and Mika Brzezinski at work. Do I have to hide them from each other? Can’t the two overlap without me going into an awkward, guilty dance?
I look at Susie, and I see someone who passed up an opportunity to get paid her worth and, more, to invest in her professional value and secure her future. I see an exhausted woman who’s always working twice as hard, as she herself says, to stay in the same place. But I also see a talented author who has gotten to write fantastic books that she’s loved working on, as well as a mother who is completely comfortable and loving with her kids.
When I look at myself, I see a wife and mother whose relationships with her family seem hinged together by gum and paper clips or whatever spackle or surrogate I can grab at any given moment. But I also see that I am earning my professional value, growing my professional brand, and, through my work helping women to understand their worth, developing a discrete but vibrant part of my inner value. Neither one of us has balance in her life. Neither one of us can be said to “have it all.”
The question is not about who made the better decision; instead, we should ask what we can do, as working women, to grow our value overall so that we can be as successful and fulfilled as possible. How can we take features of our needs and goals and deploy them in the marketplace and vice versa? Can we work our professional brand into our personal lives? How can we bridge the two in ways that make us feel truly successful as a whole? Ultimately we’ll know we’ve been successful when our two declarative statements about our professional value and inner value are one. We’ll be earning what we’re worth. We’ll accept our regrets, even if they linger. We’ll define and exert our boundaries and limitations, even if they’re pushed. We’ll feel at peace both at work and at home.
But how is that going to happen?
VERY MUCH ME
We’re not there yet. According to our Working Women Study Poll, although the majority of breadwinners in the United States, regardless of gender, agree with the statement that “it is possible to have it all,” one in four (22 percent) female breadwinners and 13 percent of male breadwinners disagree with it. What does a statistic like that tell us?
I know what it tells me. I’ll bet if you were a fly on the wall at their houses or over coffee with their friends, you’d get a much, much higher number. I mean, when you talk with working women and men on the ground, in ordinary conversation, do you ever, ever hear them gloat, “I’m having it all! My work life and personal life are in complete balance!” Are you kidding me? Statistics like the one our poll turned up say to me that this generation of successful working women and men—raised in and around the Feminist Movement—are putting on their game faces and striving for that nonexistent balance.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the generation, after all, who spends as much time with their children as possible to make up, in part, for their own “home alone” childhoods. I don’t blame them for wanting to believe they can have it all—that there are no consequences on the home front for pursuing their careers. To admit that there are holes in the system would be tantamount to admitting that, at least to some degree, they’re repeating their own childhoods with their own children.
It doesn’t feel emotionally acceptable to say this out loud, especially for women. We’re the ones who are supposed to be making the feminist dream come true. We don’t want to fall short. We don’t want our kids to live through anything remotely like what we did. After all, 40 percent of children under eighteen growing up in the 1980s were latchkey kids, wearing the keys to their homes around their necks so they could let themselves in after school because no parent was at home—often, it was their single, working moms who were absent. We don’t want our kids to feel abandoned because of our careers, the way we did, for better or for worse. Who wants to admit this? Only some working women are willing to say “having it all” isn’t going as planned—to the not-insignificant tune of one in four.
Still, to admit that there are problems with that premise takes real guts. In a period of US history fast becoming the Age of Women, I think it takes a lot of courage to say publicly: “This isn’t working for me.” Interestingly, however, our poll did ferret out a lot of “this isn’t working for me” responses by rephrasing the question. When they were asked whether or not they enjoy being the breadwinner, fully two-thirds (63 percent) of female breadwinners said they don’t enjoy being the primary earner or that it is a “mixed bag,” compared with four in ten male breadwinners (38 percent). Not only that, but female sole earners are twice as likely as male sole earners to say that their role as the breadwinner in the relationship is a “mixed bag” or one they do not enjoy (79 percent versus 39 percent). My guess? Women are, as Susie said, working twice as hard to stay in the same place.
That does not sound like “having it all” to me. Women cannot possibly have it all if our professional values and inner values aren’t closely allied and aligned.
For some of us those values do coexist and intertwine—even if it has taken a lifetime so far to get there. Me, for example. I spent decades trying to be what I thought people wanted me to be at work and then having nothing left when I got home. I had no sense of my professional or inner worth. After years of trial and lots and lots of error, now what I do for a living is very much me. I am myself on Morning Joe. I am very much myself in passing along the message to women of knowing and growing your value. It’s in doing this work that my values converge. Helping women talk and learn about this is something that I do not just for the sake of expanding business, but because it is a natural facet of who I am. Writing books about women’s value and helping them get what they’re worth. Hosting live conferences, where real women join me onstage to struggle through articulating their value. My professional bona fides as a straight-dealing (and kind of funny, or so I’ve been told) news talk-show host overlaps with the part of my inner calling that cares about working women, empathizes with them, and wants deeply for them to flourish. In this area of my life I can honestly say that I feel successful.
The discovery along the way of who the inner and outer Mika are and encouraging them to be friends is not a chore for me—it’s what I want to do. It’s my most favorite thing to do. Even better, my girls are getting involved with this movement I’m trying to build, and I am getting involved with their lives in a very real way. As they wander into adulthood, I am finding that they think their mom is useful, possibly even cool. This feels really good. It is helping them question early on what the substance of their inner value and burgeoning professional value really are. And I finally feel like I’m doing something for my girls. It is all coming together for us as a family.
I had an amazing conversation about integrating personality and professional value with Cindi Leive, editor-in-chief of Glamour. “I remember when, pretty early on in my career, I was in some ways a very ambitious young editor, but I wasn’t really thinking about the job I wanted to end up with. I just always knew that whatever job I had, I wanted to get to the next one. But I didn’t necessarily think of myself as someone who would become an editor-in-chief. . . . I was sort of senior-editor level, and most of the editors-in-chief were quite a bit older than me,” she said. “There was an editor-in-chief position open at a magazine at a competitive company, and I had heard about it—I had engaged in gossip about who would get that job. It literally never once occurred to me that I should raise my hand for that job. I remember a friend of mine e-mailing me, a former colleague, someone who had been a mentor to me, saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you know that the editor-in-chief position at such-and-such place is open. You should go for that. You would be great.’
“And it was like this light bulb went off in my mind. . . . It literally had not occurred to me that even though I knew about that job, thought it was a great job for someone else, but that that someone else could be me. It seemed so obvious afterward that yes, I was a completely legitimate candidate for that job,” she said with enthusiasm. “I didn’t get it. It probably was a little bit of a stretch for me to apply for it. But not a big stretch. A teeny stretch of the sort we should all be doing every day. And it’s like that classic thing they say about how women have to be tapped on the shoulder and asked seven times before they run for office, before they do it. It was not until someone literally, virtually, tapped me on the shoulder that I thought, ‘Oh, duh . . . why not me?’”
Now, as editor-in-chief of one of the most successful women’s magazines of all time, Cindi reflects on how one aspect of her personality that she’s always had has helped her in her career: native cheerfulness. “A part of succeeding in any kind of top job is being confident, being fairly optimistic,” she said. “[You can’t] run a successful business if you are pessimistic or cynical, because there are going to be things that go wrong every day. You have to believe that you are going to find a way out of them, that your team is going to find a way out of them.”
IN A ROOM WITH REALLY SMART PEOPLE
Cindi went on to deploy that same confidence and sunny personality in order to learn how to network. This process contributed to her vision as a leader and confidence as a woman. “I think one thing that women don’t do enough of to grow their value . . . [is the] relationship-growing that . . . happens outside of the workplace and in trade organizations. I think it took me a while in my career to know that being on boards, plugging myself into other great things that were going on in the industry, being out and about, just building great relationships with people both in my industry and women and men I might want to cover in the magazine,” she explained. “All of that was good for my career and good for whoever was employing me. I think there’s a certain amount of kind of guilt that some women feel when you sneak off to network . . . and also women feel they’re being disloyal to their employer if they do that,” she pointed out. “But if you are growing your value that way, you are much more valuable to whoever signs your paycheck. You are a more plugged-in employee; you’re more savvy. You know what’s going on in your industry. You can explain things to people that you work with.”
This totally spoke to me. When people talk about “the boys’ club” in any industry, we all know that they’re talking about men networking outside the office walls to make connections, to get ahead in their careers. And what do women do? As Cindi said, they feel guilty because if they network with a competitor, they think that could conceivably be seen as being a disloyal employee. Are we kidding? It reminds me of my daughters’—and my own—junior high girls’ tacit social regulations. If you were friends with Amanda and her friends, for example, you could not sit next to Liza and her friends at lunch. Ever. Even if it were to find out where Liza had bought that cute sweater no one else could find at the mall. Translated into the world of professional networking as working women, as Cindi pointed out, even if we’re collecting valuable information on behalf of our organization, we feel as though eyes are on us in the lunchroom—that someone’s going to get back to Amanda and tell her what a two-faced you-know-what you are.
To grow our professional value we absolutely have to stop thinking this way. We need to graduate from junior high. Because just as alliances and group formations shift quickly and dramatically with girls of that age, so do companies, trends, and the industry stars of the moment. As Cindi pointed out, it is up to us to know that, although we owe allegiance to the company for which we’re working now, ultimately we’re always brand-building, gathering knowledge, and making connections that keep us current and essential to our employers—and on the job market. It positions us as active, ambitious players in our fields; that is, we are not only women who have a job at a certain company but also who have our own particular professional brands that are becoming well known and, if we work it right, respected by and attractive to the industry at large.
Cindi went on, ruminating on how networking had not only improved her inner value by making deep and lasting personal connections but had also helped her strategically steer Glamour during a time of flux. “I spent a couple years as president of American Society of Magazine Editors, and I feel like not only did I make relationships with some of the best brains in the media business and longtime friendships and relationships that have lasted over a decade, but I intentionally did it at a moment when the magazine industry was changing. It was right at the advent of digital, and everybody in our business was kind of looking around and—excuse me—going, ‘Holy shit! Is the Titanic going down, or are we all going to become speedboats and it’s going to be okay?’” she recalled. “And being able to place myself in a boardroom with really smart people once a month for an hour and hear how they were coping and what they thought . . . really broadened my horizons and made me a much better editor-in-chief, a much better member of the media community, and gave me a ton of ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I think it’s easy to suffer from that career myopia where you’re just head-down at your desk doing whatever gets handed to you that day.”
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRAVE AND COCKY
Cindi nailed it completely. I cannot stress it enough: if we are going to grow our professional and inner worth, meeting people who either are or could one day be valuable associates, potential future colleagues or bosses, connectors, collaborators—and also personal friends—is simply essential. I see every moment out of my house (except when I’m on vacation) as a networking opportunity because I almost always get something out of every encounter. There should be nothing wrong about that.
But there is one thing I don’t do anymore. As I stated earlier, I do not do people-pleasing.
Networking is not about trying to get everyone to like you. It’s not about making close friends. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: people-pleasing is poison. It is enemy number one for women who want to grow personally and professionally. It actually saps your value. If you are trying to be all things to all people, you will not leave a solid impression on anyone nor will you make any genuinely useful contacts. If you keep it up, eventually you will be seen as a sycophant, someone not to be trusted or taken seriously. People can usually sense an acting job, and that will make them uneasy and unsure about what your motives and intentions are. At best you won’t be seen as a serious person; at worst you’ll be looked on as vaguely devious and untrustworthy. In addition, people-pleasing will run you ragged. Networking, however, is seeing that there may be a useful connection between two people. It is either there or it is not.
Even more importantly, if you are playing to the crowd, you may be giving them what you think they want, but you will not be getting what you want or need. To network effectively you must communicate who you are and what you have to offer. This is not to say it’s permissible to be rude; it is never permissible to be rude. But it is permissible—in fact, it’s advisable—to be powerful, open, fearless.
For example, at a women’s awards event I met a woman named Nadja Bellan-White, an executive at the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather. We got to chatting, and it turned out that she was in the running to head up Ogilvy Africa. “When the CEO of North America warned me I was about to get called into the offices soon, and my first reaction was, ‘Oh boy . . . what client situation has occurred now?’” she said.
I moaned in complete sympathy. So typical of us women, isn’t it? We’re such people-pleasers that if the higher-ups want to talk to us, we expect that we’re in trouble rather than assume that good news is coming our way. I gave her my one-minute lecture on the importance of knowing her value, told her about my experience negotiating my salary at Morning Joe, and encouraged her to pick up my book before she went into further discussions with the muckety-mucks so she could make sure to get her money’s worth while considering the offer. She read the book that night.
Next thing you know Nadja’s e-mailing and calling me to tell me about how she’d negotiated the Ogilvy Africa CEO position. “I went from thinking ‘why me?’ to ‘why not me’? I stopped apologizing. Still, I was afraid. Can I do this? Will I have the resources to get the job done?” she told me. “[Your] book was about succeeding, so I started thinking, ‘What would happen if I succeeded?’ I think that kind of bravery is frowned on in women. But there’s a difference between being brave and cocky, and I think that’s a line that men don’t seem to negotiate as finely as professional women.”
To that end Nadja told me that not only had she worked her professional value to negotiate an appropriate compensation package, but she had also protected her inner value by speaking up about what she would need for her family to make such a major move for the job. “I became brave enough to speak up about things like, would my kids and husband be okay? If you’re a working mother, these are the things you talk about. Will my family adjust? Is this too much for them? Should I just not do it? My son is twelve and a half, has a promising career in baseball,” she said. “I wrote up three columns of what I felt we needed. Management, for example, wanted us to visit the kids’ school virtually. And I negotiated for a trip for my kids to visit their school in person. By the third round I felt like I was getting there in terms of my confidence and competence level.” In the end Nadja got almost all of her requirements met, and she accepted the position as CEO of Ogilvy Africa. She was brimming with excitement when she told me the news. “Your book inspired me to ask for what I deserved!” she exclaimed. I explained that this was great, but Nadja ultimately got the job due to her competence, drive, and ability to communicate effectively for herself.
Think about what a powerful experience of networking this is. By making a simple connection at an event, Nadja and I exchanged experiences, and I encouraged her to learn from mine. She ended up reading my book and using the advice to reach an incredible deal as CEO of Ogilvy Africa. I, in turn, got to hear and learn from her amazing story. She then recommended my book to her network of contacts here and around the world. (I think she is starting a movement in Africa!) Now we both have a powerful personal and professional contact in each other. And I firmly believe that our networking connection worked because she was frank about questioning her professional and inner value, and I was clear in communicating mine to help inspire her to take the next step. To her point, if either one of us had been cocky rather than brave, our meeting might not have been so fruitful.
AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE A ROLE MODEL
Networking with other professional women isn’t always just a chance opportunity. At some companies women’s networking is stitched into the corporate fabric. At General Electric, for example, the in-house “Women’s Network,” founded in the mid-1990s by pioneering female executives, not only provides a safe place for women in the company to discuss issues they face at work but also serves as a talent pool for recruiting and advancing women to different positions across the entire corporation. In so doing women who are part of the Women’s Network are able to grow professionally as corporate employees interested in advancing at GE as well as personally as working women and mothers in what was a traditional male workplace until the group took off.
Denice Biocca, a senior human resources leader within GE Oil and Gas, owes the growth of her career to GE’s Women’s Network, having been an active member since its start. “I started in a manufacturing facility providing human resources support to hourly employees. . . . I was the number two in the plant of two [HR reps]. . . . My manager who hired me into the company was pretty instrumental in assimilating me into the company, and shortly after, my manager moved on to another position, and her position was open. At the time I had been about a year at the company, and I didn’t know how to advance my career at GE. So naturally the job I thought I wanted to do next was her job,” she said during a phone interview.
“So she left me in the role, and I’m helping to interview candidates to replace her and coordinating visits for my potential new boss coming in, and at the same time, I raised my hand and said that I would like to be considered for that job. And I was told, ‘You really don’t have the experience that we’re looking for.’ As things go, it takes some time before you fill a job, and while I was acting [HR leader], our general manager, who was really one of the foremothers of our GE Women’s Network, was my first sponsor. She stepped up and said, ‘Hey, I’ve interviewed these other candidates that you’ve sent down here for me to take a look at, but I think Denice is stronger than any of them I’ve seen. I know we’ve said she’s not ready for this level of job yet, but . . . I am an advocate for her, and I want her in the job.’ That was my first experience in GE of having a very personal sponsor who stepped up and said they wanted me for the job even though arguably I didn’t have all the experience. . . . I had met her as she was coming into the job, we were starting the Women’s Network at the time, and she had asked me as the HR person on the site for my ideas and opinions on some of the ideas she had been bouncing around.”
Having experienced firsthand the power of the Women’s Network to provide connections, Denice became further involved with the group. In its nascent stages the Network’s goal was to help women at the company learn how to present themselves and their accomplishments so they could better put themselves in line for advancement. This was a way for women who had learned the ropes to help those with less experience to polish, promote, and grow their value at the company.
Denice said that as the Women’s Network grew, so did its reach and influence throughout GE. As she herself moved up in her career at GE over the next sixteen years, she came to regard it as a forum from which she could, as an HR executive, not just look for talent but also use as a test for innovating and structuring new woman-friendly work policies. In addition, she could network there to keep smart, hard-working women at the company—and to keep them happy.
“By the late 1990s we were trying to retain talent, and we wanted to use the Women’s Network as a tool. We hosted round-table discussions with women, and I led many of those discussions. We asked three questions: ‘One, what brought you to GE? Two, what’s going on that makes you get up and continue to come back to GE? And three, when you think about leaving GE, what’s happening?’ It was an unbelievably simple initiative. You could go to a safe space with eight to ten other women and you could talk about what was going on,” she said. Everyone from junior-level women to those who had been at the company for years felt comfortable opening up, Denice said.
Before long the top-line issues for women on the job began to surface. “The themes that were coming out were: ‘I’m working in isolation’; ‘I’m the only woman in my engineering group, and I want to do more, and I keep getting told to do my job. How do I show my manager that I can do more when I’m working on a team that’s very structured?’; and ‘I need some flexibility because I have a brand-new baby and I’m afraid to ask for permission to leave early.’”
Important personnel and corporate culture changes came out of the frank conversations Denice and others in the Women’s Network facilitated, many of which are embedded in the company today. “One [of them] is having a buddy system where you can call on someone else and say, ‘Have you ever had this situation before, and what did you do?’” she said. “At a broader level, as an HR professional, I was able to draw on some of those themes and shape change for work flexibility, intervening on a personal level or being a part of changing policies. The biggest [policy changes] are around how we do flexible work arrangements . . . now we’re working on the culture, so flexibility is inferred.”
Speaking of flexible work schedules, a few years after the Women’s Network launched, a subdivision grew out of it. The Network launched a small group peer mentoring program called myConnections. From that group’s outset grew a GE Working Moms’ Group that attracted more than a hundred women in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The group raised issues such as onsite day care, breastfeeding rooms, and flextime. Today, Denice said, thanks to the popular and influential group, she can leave early twice a week to take her son, who has developmental needs, to therapy without special dispensation.
Denice said, “Those of us in senior positions have an important opportunity to role model flexibility”—streamlining their professional value as executives at the corporation with their inner value as mothers who needed flexibility to take care of their children. The opportunity soon presented itself. She was in a big conference room meeting at the end of the work day, she said, when the presentation was running long. Denice knew that it wasn’t just her who was getting worried she’d be late to pick up her children, but that there were also several other women junior to her in the meeting who were looking nervous about the same thing—something she knew because those women were part of the Working Moms Group.
Realizing that she was the senior executive in the room, Denice decided to take action and show the other mothers as well as everyone in the meeting that senior leadership considered it important to honor employees’ family and personal commitments—that this was definitely part of GE’s work culture. “I stood up and said, ‘We’re going to wrap this up because we’re already twenty minutes over, and I know that they are at least three of us in this room who have to go pick up our kids,’” she said. What a powerful example of “crossing the streams” of professional and personal power!
Denice’s path to leadership and GE’s senior management’s willingness to support the Women’s Network and families’ needs is very impressive. Hearing about how this cooperative corporate effort encourages simultaneously the growth of women’s professional value and their inner value gave me great hope for the possibility of integrated life at work. Communication was the key to making it all work.
MAXIMIZING ENERGY WHILE MANAGING STRESS
Another corporate effort that I really admire is Johnson & Johnson’s Human Performance Institute, a team based in Orlando that hosts programs to help corporate leaders and their organizations boost their vigor and perform at their peaks. The Institute’s flagship workshop, the Corporate Athlete, is a two-and-a-half-day training program focused on expanding and managing individual energy capacity. The course helps people become more productive under pressure as well as sustain high performance both at work and at home. It’s literally designed to help hard-driving people harness their energy and convert it into personal and professional value. With more than thirty years of experience, the Institute’s team is staffed with trained coaches, physiologists, and nutritionists who have trained and learned the performance secrets of people in high-stress fields, from Olympic medalists, elite professional athletes, CEOs, hostage rescue teams, and military Special Forces. And Johnson & Johnson employees. Specifically, women.
I had the chance to talk with Alex Gorsky, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, and I asked him about why the company made attending workshops at the Institute such a top priority for women. “I believe that human energy is the currency of high performance, and training to expand and manage energy is the key to being extraordinary in work and life. And I’ve heard a lot, particularly with our female leaders, about this whole issue of, ‘How do I manage my energy across the multiple demands that I have? How am I really showing up and being there for my family? How do I show up at work, with the right amount [of energy]?’” he explained. “It’s no small feat. I think [training at the Human Performance Institute] gives you a framework and lots of practical tools and ways of managing the different components and parts of your life. We’ve put thirty-eight thousand people through HPI—including most of our senior leaders. We use it actually as a team-building exercise. It’s one of the most impactful things [we do].”
Alex went on to talk about how important he and Johnson & Johnson believe it is for women in particular to take care of themselves. “I think it’s particularly important to women. These jobs are tough. They’re demanding. Last year’s performance becomes this year’s baseline. You suffer [from] traveling . . . it’s tough to be connected. And what you don’t want to do is go twenty-five, thirty years, and you’ve given completely of yourself to your career, and you haven’t taken the time to do what can be relatively simple things to take care of yourself. And then you have some untoward health event. We know so many of the issues that we face from a disease burden or a health issue are modulated by how we deal with stress, how we deal with eating, how we deal with exercise,” he continued. “So you’ve given all this up, you’ve compromised all this, and you have some untoward health event, and your family never gets all that benefit. That’s a terrible place to be. And so we don’t only want to be the largest health care company, we want to be the healthiest and to thrive at work and home. That means you have to take care of yourself.”
I also wanted to know how the company responds to women when they need flextime because of family reasons but they still want to stay in the game. I told Alex about a conversation with the CEO of a global company who wanted some advice from my Know Your Value concept. He believed that women didn’t feel they could come in and say, “Listen, obviously you want to keep me here, you want me to stay here, but I’m going to need to make some changes because my child has special needs, and I’ve got to focus on that. I’ve got to scale back, but I want to stay on track.” Is there, I asked Alex, a reticence on the part of women who are in a management position, who are on a track for growth, to feel confident enough to say, “I need something”? He had some interesting answers.
“We do that routinely. In fact, as we go through succession planning, it is a very common event, particularly if you have a woman in her midthirties who is just about to become a director, and she’s going to be having her second or third child, and she needs to do the infamous: ‘I don’t want to get off the exit ramp, but I do need to do a stay-in-place, have a flexible work schedule for the next eighteen or twenty-four months,’ or, ‘I’m not able to relocate during this period of time,’ or, ‘I may need to have this kind of flex schedule or work-share schedule but then come back on,’” he responded. “Now, I think it’s fair to [say that] the caveat [is that we] look particularly at people who are high performers, who we see with high potential, [and then] I think that’s one of the most critical inflection points we see in women’s careers, is helping them through these critical times.
“And you’ve got to be able to look around and see that other women have done it, survived, and actually thrived. I think [it is important] when there are examples of that—where there are successful women in the organization who have done that,” Alex continued. “I think you also have to be explicit about the programs and tools and what are the areas we are going to be willing to flex when it comes to geography, when it comes to work hours, when it comes to travel schedules, to home office. This is one thing where one size doesn’t fit all. You’ve got to have multiple tools, and you’ve got to be flexible because every situation is going to be a little bit different.”
I think that Johnson & Johnson’s corporate initiative to help female leaders balance their work and home lives is amazing. And in fact, their message resonated with me so much that Johnson & Johnson is a presenting sponsor in the Know Your Value national tour with NBC, helping women ten times more than we were able to in Hartford. Contestants from all over the country will have a chance to learn from experts at Johnson & Johnson’s Human Performance Institute in Orlando, giving these women the opportunity to transform their lives and then sharing those stories on Morning Joe and on our MSNBC website.