Don’t Let Your Career Cause Regrets in Your Personal Life

• By Kenneth W. Freeman, blogs.hbr.org
• View Original
• February 26th, 2014

When I was in my early days as CEO of Quest Diagnostics, working hard to turn around a then-troubled company, my daughter suffered a life-threatening illness. She was a freshman in college in a distant city. As any parent would, I rushed to her bedside. As I stood there, contemplating her uncertain future, I was seized with regret, thinking about my frequent absences during her young life. I talked with her frankly about those regrets. Though I was relieved to hear her say that she felt I had always been there for her, I never again took for granted that the conflicts of work and personal life would somehow just work themselves out.

Now, on the other side of my stint as a CEO, what advice would I offer hard-driving executives about coping with those conflicts? Such advice is plentiful and familiar: Make time for non-work activities, exercise to reduce stress, learn to say “no,” manage your time more efficiently. All excellent ideas. And the vast literature on the subject contains many useful tips.

However, the truth is that there’s no magic formula, especially for CEOs or people in comparably demanding positions. What I would offer, instead, are some ways to think about the problem, some guiding principles to keep in mind over the long haul of a career:

Be realistic about work. In my experience, people make it to the top job by working extraordinarily hard. And once they get there, they find that there is no letup, especially today when investor expectations are higher than ever, globalization has made the position a round-the-clock job, and technology hardwires everyone to work. My guess is that burnout among CEOs is on the rise, although it’s difficult to document because they are precisely the kind of people who forge stoically ahead no matter what. But you must recognize that you cannot do everything. Otherwise, the results are likely to be both personally destructive and ultimately bad for the company.

Don’t expect perfection in personal life.  At Quest Diagnostics, we turned things around, in part, by adopting Six Sigma, which aims at a standard of perfection. Unfortunately, personal life doesn’t work that way. Expect to fall short some of the time. Then try to do better. Think of it as continuous improvement but with your inner Deming on mute. It helps, of course, if you have loved ones who are understanding and neither hold you to an impossible standard nor let you entirely off the hook.

Change the metaphor. For decades, resolving the conflicts of work and personal life has been spoken of as a question of “balance.” Yet work and life are inextricably intertwined. Work supports our loved ones; it constitutes a big part of our identities, and it often shapes our social lives. The smartphones and other devices that bind us tightly to work also keep us in close touch with our non-work-lives. For example, I keep all of my personal and professional commitments on a single, integrated calendar, treating each one of them as inviolable. The challenge is tointegrate work and personal life effectively, not achieve a separation that is less attainable than ever.

Be present. When you are with family or friends be fully there — in spirit as well as in body. No zoning out thinking about work. No relying on the discreet kick under the table calling you back to planet earth. On the other hand, don’t treat these personal encounters as you would a meeting, where you check in with each of your loved ones as you might with your executive team. 

Don’t forget yourself. What often gets lost in the push and pull between work and personal relationships is your own well-being — body and soul. You skip your workout, delay your annual physical, rarely take up a book that’s not work related, and make no time for self-reflection.  Mens sana in corpore sano — a healthy mind in a healthy body — remains advice that is both timeless and easy to ignore in favor of work or personal relationships.

In “The Choice,” the poet William Butler Yeats considers the consequences of choosing “perfection of the life, or of the work” and suggests that choosing the latter can exact a high personal cost and end in great remorse. Though perfection in either realm is unattainable, we do have the power to choose. In any given moment, we can decide what we are going to do — whether we’re going to give work its due or be fully present for our loved ones. We should count ourselves lucky that we do have a choice, unlike those who must work two jobs just to make ends meet.

Instead of feeling these choices are burdens or, worse, not a choice at all but a compulsion, we should celebrate them. Today, as dean of the Boston University School of Management, I engage in work that is both demanding and highly fulfilling. And I have a life that includes my daughter (who, thankfully, fully recovered) and son, three grandchildren, and my wife of 42 years. Who could ask for anything more?