50/50 the Dual Career Life

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Sharon Meers. Earlier in her career she was the managing director at Goldman Sachs. She's currently the VP of business operations and product marketing at HP-Palm. And somewhere in between, and that's what we're going to talk about today, Sharon is the author of Getting to 50/50.

Sharon, it's really a pleasure to have you on this call. I know one of my colleagues in particular was so excited because she heard you speak. The whole concept of getting to 50/50. How does 50/50 fit into a 24/7 world? That's where we sit right now.

Sharon Meers: Anita, that's a really great question. And I will tell you, the origins of this book for me are probably really way before I even was ready to have a family. And, you know, I, like many of us, you know, jumped into a career that prizes very hard work and being available around the clock. And I was very proud to be able to serve and do what was expected of me and try to do you know, that much more.

And I assumed that that entailed responding to every call and every email, no matter what hour of the day or night. Certainly, you know, a standard culture in many big companies today. And what I was kind of shocked to discover slightly after I was given my first group to manage, was there's another way of looking at it.

My firm at the time had just gone public and had hired a number of really interesting management experts from different big business schools. One professor was visiting with me in my home office, and he was looking at this massive amount of activity that was going on. We were in Silicon Valley—this was 1999—and he looked at me and he said, if you can't get your job done in 10 hours a day, there's something wrong with you or there's something wrong with your job.

Anita Brick: Interesting.

Sharon Meers: It was like a mic drop. That's blasphemy. You know, you can't be serious, but it did get me thinking, because this was not said casually and it was not said without data. What this gentleman did was to begin to open my eyes to the fact that there are lots of folks at places like University of Chicago and Harvard and Stanford Business School who have been analyzing how we white-collar workers approach creating excellence in whatever we do.

Anita Brick: It seems almost impossible. In fact, there was an Exec MBA student who asked this question: I completely agree with the 50/50 split—50/50 with family duties, responsibilities, job involvement, and sharing the risks. It's about personal and professional accomplishment. There really need to be two winners. Nevertheless, when I speak to some of my male colleagues, they're scared to share the risks and to rely on someone else.

Should that person be their spouse or their partner? Do you really think things are evolving? And I think that's where we wanted to talk a little bit about getting to 50/50. And I think secondarily, I mean, it's a second part of it, you know, are we moving in that direction? And if we are, where are we seeing some of those pockets?

Sharon Meers: So I guess to start, you know, getting to 50/50, what we meant by that is it's really about a mindset, a core belief that women need good jobs, just like men do, and that dads are equally important to kids as moms are. So that means men need time with their kids, just like women do. We don't have to believe that men and women are exactly the same.

Clearly, we're not sure. Of course, nature and nurture, but there is enough common ground in terms of what we need and want that if we focused on that, we could improve the collective good of men and women quite a bit.

So, you know, in response to that question, which is a really good one, you know, what we found … We did a survey of 1,100 working mothers and then drilled down into several hundred interviews with men and women in dual-career couples, in lots and lots of different kinds of jobs. What we found was, you know, it's not like people have to completely throw out their self-reliance and say, you know, I'm going to depend on my wife now.

It's simply creating enough room so that your wife or your husband really can be successful in their job. Putting aside this idea that—and this is where the original comment from that management expert comes in—which is probably your first hour of work is well spent, your second hour of work well spent. But by the time you get to your 12th, 13th, 14th hour of work, are you making the right decisions about what you're working on?

And is the average quality of work in that hour anywhere near as good as it was when you first arrived at the office?

Anita Brick: Well, it's a good point. So how do you do that, practically, if the rest of your team or the rest of your company is just slogging it out?

Sharon Meers: We heard a number of people approaching this in different ways, but in my mind, there are three essential parts. One is, focus on what matters. We profile a woman who worked at Microsoft and at some point was a little frustrated, and went and sat down with her direct boss and really kind of interviewed him and said, you know, basically, how do you get paid? What does your boss look for in your performance, and how can I contribute to that?

And she then came up with a list of three different things she could measure in her job: number of calls to big clients, number of new companies that she was bringing in who hadn't been part of their client roster before. You know, in addition to looking at, you know, what her ultimate revenues were, you know, kind of looking at what the contributors were to her ultimate success or pipeline, in addition to, you know, what actually came in month to month that gave her boss a much clearer view of how hard she was working and how well she was working, how focused she was.

We heard lots of people doing that. If you can be really, really clear about how your boss thinks about your performance—and very frequently, line managers aren't encouraged to think that precisely about what they want from their direct reports. But if you can help your boss do that, it's a lot easier to remove from your list of activities a bunch of stuff that's really marginal, the XYZ committee that nobody really cares about but you get assigned to anyway.

So that's point number one. You measure what matters into a ton of that. The second is the flip side of that, which is really be religious about triaging and getting rid of things that we pay lip service to or are just not valued. How many recruiting dinners do you need to go to in a year? I mean, I come from a company where it is the gospel that you need to go to on campus recruiting.

You spend a lot of time on it. You're to spend tons of time talking to new recruits. Very valuable experience for me, and important to the firm. But you know, at what point is your investment too large? You start to look around and you find there are a lot of very successful people who are more disciplined. It's not that they don't participate in recruiting at all. You may be allocating six hours a month, and they're allocating one. Things like that. Having an investment discipline, in effect.

Anita Brick: It almost seems like you need to be able to separate. In a sense, if you really love recruiting, then you have to realize that if you spend those six hours rather than one, you're paying a price for that.

Sharon Meers: Absolutely. And so frequently we're working so hard we don't even notice. What I really got a lot out of is I went around to the organizational behavior departments at big business schools, where there are a lot of people really saying, hey, if we want top performance out of white-collar American workers, we have to help people think about this, bring it into consciousness and get it under control.

Which gets to the third thing we saw people do, and this is incredibly well supported by research. There's a phenomenal professor who's at Harvard Business School who spent the last 20 years doing time diaries of white collar workers in consulting, investment banking, and technology. Her name is Leslie Perlow. She's got some very interesting pieces, including a Harvard Business Review piece about her work at Boston Consulting Group, which came out in August 2009.

And it points out that if we can think about not only what we work on, but how we work on it, that makes a really dramatic difference. So in the Harvard Business Review piece, she talks about how at Boston Consulting Group, which is clearly an enterprise devoted to excellence, they ran these experiments where they told partners and senior people to check out of work—in some cases, you know, after 6:00 at night and in some cases for a whole day a week—which then forced those people to hand off work to other people.

The benefit of that was that people had to think a lot harder about what was supposed to get done in that blank in their week—you know, that time when they were not allowed to call in or communicate with their team or their client—and the discipline of that meant that they helped everyone else in the team understand what was important to the clients and anticipate problems.

The ultimate performance evaluation of the projects that were run this way—a smaller number of hours per week—those teams actually turned out to perform significantly better than the average teams working in a more normal way, which is sort of shocking, I think, to most of us who have always assumed that the more you throw yourself at something, the better it's going to turn out. But Perlow and others also talk about things like study hall. Everyone now talks about how if you multitask, you are probably wasting about 25 percent of your time.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Sharon Meers: Back and forth is actually really high, no matter how clever we think we are. It's much better to do things like create a block of time—one hour or two hours at different points of the day—when you're really going to turn off email and not respond to calls so that you can process quickly through the real thinking work in your job. There’s pretty interesting data coming out that says that if we're willing to open our eyes, there are ways for us to be wildly more efficient and effective.

Anita Brick: Well, you know, it's interesting— the weeks that the Exec MBAs are here, I actually sit down on the third floor and there's no phone in the office that I'm using. And the first week I was there, I just noticed that I got two big proposals done, even though I was still doing the same number of hours of coaching. But just not having the phone created this study hall for me, which was very welcome. I had to get those proposals done.

Sharon Meers: It’s one of those funny things where it's typically an accident that we get these oases of time and calm. But the interesting question is, can we build them into our day? And that, you know, I will certainly say in my own life I find it enormously hard, but when I do, it makes a pretty dramatic, measurable difference.

Anita Brick: There were three things that you had mentioned: focus on and measure what matters most, triage and eliminate or at least decrease the things that aren't valued. And then look at how we work in addition to what we work on. Is there anything else?

Sharon Meers: Those are the key ones. But one of the things I talk about a little bit, I just did a bunch of leadership columns for the Washington Post, and one of the things that was occurring to me really does get back to this 50/50 theme. You can apply what I just talked about, in terms of being smarter and how we work, to a life where you are not engaged in family at all yet.

The interesting thing you do get with a spouse or kids are people who are quite invested in how you spend your time. Very frequently, I know I would roll my eyes and say, oh, they don't understand how important this is. You know, I have to get this email off or this memo has to be done now or whatever it is.

Well, I must say, I still have trouble in the moment appreciating family complaints about my, you know, being on my BlackBerry. I think I've come to believe that listening to the people who have a critique of how I use my time actually has value. You know, it's sort of like the whole concept of if you have limitless capital, you'll probably waste it.

Anita Brick: True.

Sharon Meers: And similarly, if you think your time that you can devote to work is unlimited, you will probably waste it. Having people around who remind you that time has another value is useful. And when I began to realize that, that can be a very valuable way of helping me get more realistic about how I use my time. And in fact, a couple we profile in Getting to 50/50, a husband and wife who both happen to be partners, you know, in a national accounting firm where they each were called upon to fly to different parts of the country, and they talk about how every week they would sit down with each other's calendars and give each other feedback on, you know what? I've met with those people. That's going to be a really valuable meeting, or I've met with those people. That is not going to be a valuable meeting. Either cut it to 30 minutes or send somebody else.

We don't all have the privilege of having our spouse know our working environment that well. But I thought it was a really interesting way to look at the world. When your spouse says, “Hey, I really need you to come home for dinner,” instead of saying, “Oh, they just don't understand how important what I am doing,” say, “I wonder if they could help me figure out, you know, how I could restructure my day or week or whatever so that I can make that happen?”

Anita Brick: Well, that's I think, a very interesting point, because if you do it in isolation, it will never happen. It really does need to be collaborative. I mean, I know some people who actually bring in their children as well. Sometimes the kids can have some ideas that parents may not even think of.

Sharon Meers: I think that's absolutely right.

Anita Brick: Just a follow-on to what we've obviously been talking about. There was one alum who said that she had gotten to this 50/50 place and was very, very happy and then got promoted, she said. Then everything changed. Please read this as heated up. More hours, more travel, just more. What are some things I can do to regain my equilibrium and move back toward 50/50?

That's an interesting question, because I think that happens a lot. When you get used to the rhythm of your job, you can move in that direction. But if the rhythm changes, it's hard to regroup. What do you advise people to do?

Sharon Meers: So I think that's one of those really tough ones. And one of the things we do in chapter 10 of the book is talk about what we call baton passing. We talk about a number of couples in our group where one spouse became a CEO or had a job that required the family to move or had, you know, some significant promotion that created a disruption for the other spouse.

What seemed to really help was having an explicit discussion about it—being clear that, yeah, it's wonderful to have NASA say, I need you to move to Houston because you're going to work on, you know, the Mars launch or whatever it is. And it may seem obvious that you can't turn that down, it may even be obvious to both spouses.

The real question is, have you articulated how much that's going to cost the spouse that doesn't work for NASA? And thought about how long they should be paying that cost? You know, I think if we can do a better job of anticipating how hard it's going to be, and I'll tell you, in my life, I'm terrible at this, but I might try the under-promise, overdeliver mantra we all have about how we deal with clients. If you can warn your client about all the things that could possibly go wrong, it's more likely you'll provide a better customer experience. They'll feel you outperformed. And similarly with our spouses, when we know that taking a promotion is going to have a cost for the rest of the family, trying to parameterize how big that cost is and put yourself on some kind of budget.

So in my own case, I had a situation once where my job moved to New York and the choice was either move the whole family, and our kids were incredibly small, or commute. You know, my husband sort of recognized that it was important for me to take this position. And so we kind of agreed that for three years I would commute, and then we'd sort of reevaluate and see if it was worth it for him.

That meant I frequently had calls that on West Coast time started at 4 a.m. So if we had a small child who was waking up in the middle of the night, my husband, who thank God is a much better sleeper, would get up and put our son back down. He was not going to do that for the rest of his life, but he was willing to do it for a finite period of time.

You know, we've had times where that's reversed—he's been enormously busy at work, and he's much better than I am at saying, hey, this is going to be a disaster for six months. I need your help. If you assume that maintaining viability and strength in both careers is important, then you won't ask so much from your spouse that they can't get back up on their feet and run just as fast as you do. That's kind of what we think about when we think about baton passing.

Anita Brick: With regard to the question that the alum has, though, is there something that the person who knows that everything is heating up and they don't even want to make all these sacrifices—does that discussion happen before accepting the promotion? I mean, is it understanding what is required?

Sharon Meers: Ideally, yes. You know, you try really hard beforehand to anticipate how much more work it will be and talk about what that means. Frequently you're going to miss it. When I took a job in technology, we thought we understood what I was getting into. There ended up being some complexity in a product launch. I had meetings for a period of time that were regularly scheduled at 7 p.m. and after. That wasn't what my husband thought he was signing off for. Well, as we get through this problem, what are we going to do?

Who's going to make sure, you know, dinner gets on the table and homework gets done? And then you know what can I do to schedule meetings? Not in the middle of dinner, you know, for the rest of our lives. Right? So, you know, part of it is going to be you can plan stuff ahead, but part of it is, you know, life always is more overwhelming than you think it's going to be.

You know, one thing we talked about when we were on the Today show was this very interesting, simple thing that a lot of couples we interviewed said they did. They said, it's very easy when life gets too busy and complicated to just get annoyed with your spouse because it doesn't seem like they're helping enough. So that's exactly when you do not want to talk to your spouse.

You want to talk to your spouse on Saturday or Sunday morning. You know, agree in advance that you're going to get a good night's sleep. You're going to get up, you're going to go to Starbucks. You know, you're going to take the kids to Grandma or get a babysitter or something, but give yourself a couple of hours to go for a walk or get a coffee or something and figure out what is working and what is not working.

If you kind of have this list of what's not working, is there stuff you can do to make it better? Can you convince Grandpa and Grandma to come over and do more babysitting? So it's not such a pain in the neck that one of you is late at the office for a period of time, so can you get more hands on the situation, so the family stuff is not overwhelming? If not, how long can you bear it for? You're going to get really annoyed with each other. I think people do much better if they can have some idea of when the situation might get renegotiated. Those are the kinds of things we heard people do that seemed to help.

Anita Brick: I think that's really important because sometimes you have to tough it out for a while, and sometimes there are some things you can do right away and you won't know what those are unless you actually assess them and get visibility on them. So it's a good point. What are the risks, or are there risks to going in a 50/50 line of thinking?

Sharon Meers: There was a partner at a big law firm, a man who perhaps is still the only man in the history of his firm to have worked four days a week, and he did it for a little period of time. And he actually now runs a practice area. So it's not like it destroyed his career. But he said, you know, the real thing that you need to be successful in a dual career life is some faith that it's going to work out.

And you have to be comfortable with being misunderstood, because on the one hand, you're probably—not to stereotype, but your female relatives who will be telling you, you know, your children aren't getting enough attention, you aren't taking them to enough after school activities. You're not at every sports game. So you're going to have all sorts of people insisting that their list of what children need is the correct list.

And then you're going to have a lot of people, maybe your uncle and father—again, to stereotype—basically telling you, you're not playing golf enough with your clients and you're not doing enough business dinners, and you're not doing a lot of things that they did to get ahead in their careers. And they're worried about you because they think their path to glory is the only path to glory, right? So it takes a fair amount of courage and love of invention, I think, for people to do this happily.

Anita Brick: You're right. And it takes resilience and, I would guess, a fairly thick skin because you're still bucking a trend to do it this way.

Sharon Meers: Absolutely. One of the things that when we give corporate talks we end on is, one of the great gifts for me of being able to go out and do the research and interviews for this was just learning. There are lots and lots and lots of people around the country who are living this way, but you wouldn't know it because it's not the standard frame that people think with.

And so what it means is that when people go to cocktail parties and the husbands are kvetching about how the wives spend all their money, and the women are kvetching about how the men don't know the names of their children or the names of their children's friends and don't know what the names of their coaches or teachers are, the couples that don't have those problems don't jump in and say, oh, why don't you try doing what we're doing? Because that seems socially awkward.

So we are left with this impression that everyone is suffering from, the man has to work too much because wife doesn't make enough money or any money and is spending all of his money. And we have the idea that men just constitutionally are unable to be as sensitive with kids or multitask as well. You know, those frames don't help anybody get better.

Anita Brick: What's interesting, I think, that this is not happening at the same pace throughout the globe. I think it is happening at different paces in different areas of the world. And I think that complicates it even more, because we may be working on a virtual team that is global. You know, in some areas of the world, there may be more understanding. In other areas of the world, there may be less understanding. Do you have time for one more question?

Sharon Meers: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: OK. And let's think about this. Where there is that variation, in some places, you may be the first person to be pushing this or to be advancing this, or you may be following along after others have laid the path. What are three things that a person could do beginning today to take the next step, or even to begin this process of creating the time and the space in the mindset to getting to 50/50.

Sharon Meers:, I think the first thing is really focusing on communicating, and what I mean by that is both with yourself and with whoever your partner is. A guy we interviewed and talked about in the book said, you know, the hardest thing in the world is to really crystallize what it is that you want. And if you don't know what you want, you can't ask somebody else to help you get what you want.

Anita Brick: Totally true.

Sharon Meers: Then you’re really frustrated because you're not getting what you want, but you never even asked for it because you couldn't get it out of your mouth. My husband and I and a lot of people we interviewed could talk about that a lot. As you're beginning to think about, you know, if I want things to be more equal or we're getting married or we're going to have kids or someone's getting a promotion, and I'm concerned that it will be hard for us both to fully pursue our careers, that's the moment to say, OK, what in my soul is making me anxious? What takes time that shouldn't take time? What am I feeling does not get time?

And really, for me, writing it down helps a lot. You know, having little files on my computer where I kind of write down, OK, these three things are not happening. Why? What would it take for me to have more time to read industry journals? What would it take for me to have more time to read novels? What would it take? You know, that kind of stuff. And then, you know, developing a skill set for discussing this stuff with your partner.

Anita Brick: What does that mean?

Sharon Meers: So I think very frequently, you know, we all go through management training at some point in our careers where we're told, for example, if you're going to give tough feedback to someone who works for you, you know, yelling at them probably isn't going to help. Being very granular about what you like in their performance and what you don't like in their performance—super specific—that'll probably help more. Again, if you can quantify it, that'll probably help more.

In our work life, we get a lot of feedback in training, at least at large companies, on what forms of interpersonal communication are likely to be more successful. We don't get that in our personal lives at all. And in a world where husbands and wives are now raised to think of themselves as equal, it's kind of tough to have two people who think they're in charge. You need a method for interacting, you know, let's just face it. But, you know, 100 years ago, you know, men were legally in charge. That was just it. Right?

And so we've come a long way from that. But we really haven't, in fact, retrained ourselves to talk to each other. You know, there's a part of a marriage or a relationship that is romantic and beautiful and fun and a friendship, and there's part of it that's just business: getting food processed and homework processed and jobs processed. And that's kind of like having a roommate or having a business partner and sort of treating that stuff with enough respect and calm and discipline and analysis. You know, it's certainly something that wasn't common, I think even 30 years ago.

And so one of the things chapter 7 of our book talks about, you know, building the great alliance, and it draws on not only the work of very thoughtful marriage experts like John Gottman or Josh Coleman, but also folks like the people at Harvard Negotiation Project who wrote Getting to Yes in Difficult Conversations because they will tell you that the same skill set that helps people negotiate better in, you know, ending civil wars or, and merger situations, that same skill set of taking the emotion out of things, being incredibly fact based and then trying to kind of come up with win-win trades. That's how most conflicts get settled, whether they are in government or in your kitchen meals that I'm talking about.

Anita Brick: Well, and I think it's really important because I don't think that most people even consider bringing the skills that they use very well and very skillfully at work—I don't think that they bring those skills and attributes home, either with their spouses or with their children, and it's a really good thought. Is there a third thing that you would recommend someone do?

Sharon Meers: We talk about a lot, even in professional settings, this idea of, in particular, women letting go. Very few of us have strong emotional ties to how work gets done at the office. You know, we have ideas about how to produce excellence. But we won't say, my mommy always made this kind of dinner every Sunday, and therefore I need to—that sort of thing.

People have ideas about how Christmas has to be celebrated or any other religious holiday, or this stuff is psychologically deep for us. You know how a family and a household should run. So it takes a lot to say, how much does it cost me to hold on to that belief? I had a woman in law school come up to me and say, isn't it the reason that women end up doing so much stuff at home and can't offload to the men? Is it summed up by this? She said, if there's a bake sale at school, a woman will know that the point of a bake sale is to bake cookies, and the men will go to Whole Foods and pick up cookies.

And I sort of listened, and I looked at her and I said, you know, I think that's a great story, but why are the guys wrong? I would argue the point of a bake sale is to raise money for the wrestling team or the cheerleading squad or whatever it is. It's not actually a baking contest. Why is the guy's perspective incorrect? One of, I think, the great things of men and women invading each other's realm is that we have a much more active critique of how things get done.

I know in my household and with plenty of people that we interviewed having guys say, well, if I really get to make half the decisions, I don't think these are good decisions. This doesn't seem like a good use of time to me.

Anita Brick: So that could be a little scary. For those of us who are control freaks. It might have to happen in stages.

Sharon Meers: But one of the things that we have said, somewhat dramatically, is that we as women need to fire ourselves as household CEOs. How much does it actually matter? Another guy that we interviewed said, I really want to do my part, but my wife has this religious conviction that every bed in our house has to be made every morning with hospital corners.

That takes a lot of time. I'm focused on, do we have a healthy lunch? Is it a lunch that our kids will actually eat? This guy's not uninvolved. And he said, am I a bad guy because I don't want to make hospital corners? And again, Joanna, my coauthor, and I looked at each other like, score one for the boy. The guys have got a point. I think we all have to look ourselves in the mirror and say, how many orthodoxies do we have that are really expensive? They're expensive not only in terms of how we use our time, but if we insist on them too much, it means our partner who doesn't believe it is just going to kind of shrug their shoulders and walk off.

Anita Brick: Well, and I think you're absolutely right. And I think that sometimes we know this from something we can take from the workplace back to the home. Sometimes when people come in who maybe were in a different function in a different industry, but certainly with a different perspective. They come in and they look at things, they look at processes or ways of doing things, and they're like, why is it done this way? And they bring a fresh perspective that actually makes things better. And yeah, that would help. I guess for some of us, we'll have to do that incrementally.

You know, this is really terrific. You're doing some very, very important work. I think that ultimately what that does is it makes both the home and the workplace better, because 24/7, many people say, is not very healthy. And people who do that—and one of the people, we won't have time for it, talked a little bit about guilt. But when a home or a workplace is based on that guilt, nothing really happens that's very innovative. And ultimately it squashes the growth on both fronts. Thank you for doing this work and we really appreciate you making the time.

Sharon Meers: Thanks very much, Anita.

Anita Brick: Two things. There is a chapter from Getting to 50/50 on the Career Services page. And also you may want to go and take a look at Sharon's site. It's Gettingto5050.com. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.