Nine Balancing Acts – Part I

by Paige Churchman (New York City)

How many times have you and friends, equally frazzled, fantasized about a three-day (or shorter) workweek? Something’s wrong with this picture because maybe like me, you actually love to work. Maybe throwing yourself into a project invigorates you, makes you feel important, connected to the world and happy.

So what’s wrong? A flame needs tending. It needs fuel to keep it going and it needs to be kept in check so you don’t burn out. First on my list of fuels is the work itself. I have to believe in it. My other fuels all start with P -pride, prestige, power and, yes, the paycheck. What keeps the flame from burning me up are the things that ground me and keep me human: good fresh food, sleep, nature, movement, music, meditation, family, friends, new ideas to bend my mind and lots of creativity. But when I’m burning too high, I often don’t know it.

How wide is the gap between how you live and your ideal? Does your work feed or drain you? How do you give your career everything it needs and still know who you are? The Glass Hammer took these questions out into the corporate world to see how some top women find their balance or, if they haven’t found it, what they dream of. We talked to someone in a company known for its quality of life (Cisco Systems, number six on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For ), someone in an industry known for its long hours (law), and seven women in an industry that’s hurting (finance).

The Cisco Kid
Cindy Villanueva-Allen is Cisco Systems’ senior manager of IT Flexible Services, an in-house marketing communications agency. “I liken it to a small business with a very big safety net,” she laughed, a warm relaxed chuckle that bubbled up five or six times in our 30-minute talk. Cindy’s been at Cisco for three-and-a-half years, after 20 years in marketing, most recently for Cisco competitors in Silicon Valley, her birthplace.

Two years ago, she and her husband uprooted themselves and moved to Austin to open their own mixed martial arts studio . Her husband does most of the day-to-day business of the studio, but Cindy teaches eight classes a week there and also does the books. She puts in about 20 hours a week for the studio, on top of her fifty to sixty hours for Cisco. Her day starts at 6:00 AM with a 20-foot commute from her bedroom to her home office. She packs in a couple of hours of conference calls with her UK direct reports (the other half of her team is in San Jose). A little before 8:00, she takes her eight-year-old to school and teaches a kickboxing class. She’s back online at 9:30. By this time, her San Jose folks are in. “We have a couple of hours where the entire team can do a lot of meetings and we use every bit of technology Cisco provides,” she said.

Twice a year, she flies back to San Jose for some face time with her team and her manager. This means riding the Nerd Bird, American Airlines’ Austin-San Jose route, populated by techies hard at work on their laptops. For an important meeting, she’ll drive to Cisco’s Austin office to use TelePresence. “Amazing. There’s no way to tell you’re not sitting across from someone,” she says. You may have seen TelePresence in news clips and not known it – earlier, this year, Cisco set up systems in Wal Marts and military centers in Iraq so soldiers could talk to their families. Cindy uses TelePresence for all-hands meetings about once a quarter, for performance reviews or meetings with her manager.

How She Does It:

• Cisco sets up every employee, not just telecommuters, with great technology: a laptop with collaborative applications like WebEx, secure virtual private network tools, IP communicator software (lets you use your office phone extension through your laptop) and cell phones that get email.. Everyone can log in from home as easily as if they’re onsite.
• Cisco walks the walk. “I’ve worked in Silicon Valley many years,” said Cindy. “A lot of companies build the gear to telecommute, but the corporate mentality is ‘Don’t use it. We want you in the office.’ Cisco isn’t that way. It sees this as the wave of the future. How we work today is not at all how we worked 20 years ago or even five years ago.” Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior has also said, “We no longer go to work, we simply do work, wherever we may be.” (The Wall Street Journal named Warrior one of the Top 50 Women to Watch.)
• Working at home allows her to eat well. “Because I’m at home, I can take ten minutes and make myself a salad. I am fanatic about what I eat. As a fitness professional, it’s hard to get in front of my students and not eat well. When I give them an extra hard workout they say, ‘Did someone give you a cookie or something?’”
• She has an excellent manager. “Sheila Jordan is fabulous. She has been an amazing mentor, coach and friend to me for the last three years,” said Cindy.

Wish List. Cindy gets tired by the end of the week. “I’m not 25 anymore,” she says. In fact, she’s a grandmother. She’d like a little more sleep. When pressed, she said she’d love to do more hiking or take her kayak to Lake Austin, but all in all, she feels blessed. “It’s really about knowing what your dream is and having the courage to jump in and do it,” she said. “Cisco provided me with the opportunity to do that. I have a great job that I love with fantastic people in a company I respect while we’re building our dream -I couldn’t ask for more.”

The Bite of the Billable Rate
Cyndee Todgham Cherniak doesn’t remember why she worked a record 120 hours one week. No wonder. But she has been known to come into her office on a Monday morning and not leave again – or sleep -until Thursday night. She’s a free trade attorney, one of three women in Canada who hold this distinction, and works at Lang Michener . One-hundred-hour weeks happen more than she would like. That’s on top of her Friday/Saturday gig as an adjunct law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, slightly more than an hour’s flight from her home in Toronto. She also writes a law blog and, as a free trade lawyer, travels the globe constantly. She loves what she does.

She knew she wanted to be a lawyer since she was tiny, and she was captivated by free trade agreements even before entering law schools. Note the “s” on that last word. She got two simultaneous law degrees: one in Canada (University of Windsor) and one in the US (University of Detroit), bouncing back and forth across the river to attend classes in two countries. She went on to get her master’s, while practicing as an associate.

In 2007, she took a sabbatical, went to China, reviewed 100 free trade agreements and wrote a 900-page report for the Asian Development Bank. “I get tired,” she admitted. “I’m human. It does affect your health. If you spend too much time in the office and you’re eating junk food for lunch and dinner, it’s hard to be healthy. You’re not able to work out. You’re not able to get so many little things done.” It’s December, snow is imminent in Toronto, and Cyndee has not yet raked the leaves in her yard.

How She Does It:

• “An understanding husband and a very forgiving dog.” The husband is an investment banker and understands long hours.
• “An amazing secretary. If you can rely on your secretary, then you can delegate a lot of the work. I like to think my secretary enjoys helping me and that we’re a team. When she helps me through the day we’ve both succeeded and we both get out early.”
• Expert and generous colleagues. Lang Michener has the largest group of international trade lawyers she’s ever worked with. “They’re extremely giving of their time, their experience and their ideas. They’re wonderful, friendly, outgoing people. It really makes a difference. Without them, I’d be less healthy, more stressed and show more fatigue.”
• Diet Coke and chocolate get her through the all-nighters. Clients sometimes arrive for meetings with both fuels in hand for her.

Wish List. She’d like to see support staff paid more, not less. “It surprises me that firms want to pay less and less for assistants and cut back on benefits. When you get good people and when assistants feel part of the team, they want the firm to succeed, and we all benefit. It could be the best couple of thousand dollars you’ve ever spent.”

She’d like to see some of the places she rushes through on business. A dream for life after law is to rent a flat in Florence for six months and immerse themselves (Cyndee and husband) in art, history and architecture. Then they’d come home for half a year before trying life in other places on their list: Paris, Tuscany, Rome, and Prague. “I’d love to be a citizen of the world and learn more about other cultures. I’d love to be able to spend significant time there and leave an impression by doing something important.”

Watch for Part II this afternoon!