Work-Life Integration…. Mixing Business and Pleasure Successfully

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By Chutisa BowmanProfessional-networking-advice featured

Why are some women executives able to mix business and pleasure more successfully than others? They do it because they are able to achieve better integration between work and the rest of their life. They function with the awareness that work and personal life are not competing priorities but complementary ones. In essence, they never lose sight of the fact that their personal lives have an impact on the way they approach their work.

Whether you have already reached the C-suite or are still working towards it, your ability to mix business and pleasure successfully is essential for personal effectiveness, peace of mind and success. Work-life integration is apparently a better choice, cognitively, than trying to balance between the two, according to research published in the journal Human Relations and the Harvard Business Review.

While the C-suite requires commitment, mixing business and pleasure should not be impossible. This is not about work life balance. It is about creating a life style that gives you whatever it is that you need in your professional and personal life. It’s about finding the combination of work and play, business and pleasure that works for you.  According to the Medical Daily, keeping work and life separate is not best for wellbeing and performance. The most successful executives are those who have an ability to achieve professional success without always having to sacrifice the things that matter in their personal lives.

So how do you know you have what it takes to mix business and pleasure successfully and achieve work-life integration? A good place to start is to acknowledge that work and personal life are not competing priorities but complementary ones. You must stop being fixated on balance. Instead, put your energy towards integrating what makes your heart sing, what’s fun for you and what you love to do, into your daily life.

Here are three things you can do to develop this ability:

Assess your current position. Looking at yourself as you really are and your life as it is now, is the first step in restructuring your life. To truly integrate work and life successfully, it is crucial to become aware of where you are functioning from, that is creating the life you currently have. The moment you take the initiative to become aware of your points of view, habits and behaviours, you are on the path to having true work-life integration.

So, first ask yourself these questions –

  • “Do you feel physically exhausted, mentally stagnant or find yourself without close relationships?”
  • “Do you react to everything, including things people say and to conditions outside your control?”
  • “Does everything become an emergency in your life?”
  • “Does your life feel chaotic, messy, topsy-turvy and has taken on an erratic flow?”
  • “Would you call yourself a workaholic?”

If you answer yes to any of these questions, your life and your work are probably out of conscious integration.

Clarify what is important and what will work for you. Do you know what you want to create as your life? What do you really want to create as your future? What are your priorities (business, work and personal)? It is super-essential to be clear about your personal interests and concerns—to identify where work falls in the spectrum of your overall priorities in life.

To mix business and pleasure successfully you must cut through the charade about priorities. Begin by making your work priorities crystal clear, and define them in terms of possibilities, priorities and in terms of outputs. Simultaneously, set the important priorities, concerns, and demands outside the office that require time and energy. The target is to have a clarity about both the business and your individual priorities and then to construct a plan for fulfilling all of them.

To know what will work for you, you need to take into consideration that life is constantly changing. The right mix for you today may not be the right mix for you tomorrow or next week or next month. Over time your priorities change. The one way to know you have an integrated work-life is the feeling of accomplishment, fun and happiness you enjoy every day.

Make a conscious choice and commit yourself to embrace work-life integration. To make a conscious choice to create a meaningful existence where enjoyment exists amongst all areas of your life, you have to make a demand of yourself: “No matter what it takes, no matter what it looks like, I am going down this path.” Be willing to be vulnerable and to stay open to the new, the unfamiliar, and the unknown.

Be open to all possibility and be willing to look at what you can do that will generate different possibilities. Choose to be ever aware and mindful, ready to shift strategy and tactics as the situation requires. Having this awareness will prioritize the activities necessary for success. Priorities make it easier to say no to distracting initiatives.

Chutisa Bowman is a Pragmatic Futurist, author and curator of Generative Woman Blog. She is best-known for her work in strategic awareness, benevolent capitalism, prosperity consciousness, Right Riches for You and conscious benevolent leadership. Right Riches for You is a speciality program of Access Consciousness.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily thhose of theglasshammer.com

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The Long Hours Game

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woman working late long hours featuredBy Aimee Hansen

The 24/7 hour work week marches on and on. The get up and go and keep on going. The long hours game. We all do it from time to time.

How can you have a healthy, sustainable lifestyle and build your career?

The action-packed day of the executive continues to be a glorified image of leadership, and arguably one that is dangerously unsustainable and at best questionable in effectiveness. At theglasshammer, we’ve covered how the 24/7 work week is not only disastrous for gender equality on a whole, but also diminishes your personal leadership effectiveness and your health.

The Atlantic has noted the tendency of elite, wealthy American men to be “the workaholics of the world,” but just because long hours are the status quo doesn’t mean it’s the key to successful business or career development.

It’s a rising argument in the context of today’s information age workplace, in which we tend to be knowledge workers conceiving of and implementing ideas, that a five hour work day would be a business hack for more productivity and profitability.

So what’s with the persistence – and over-valuation – of long hours in the corporate world?

A Man’s (Ego) Game

According to Professor Joan C. Williams in HBR, the long hours fascination is underpinned by an elitist male value system based on class, status and morality. As sociologist Michèle Lamont states, ambition and a strong work ethic are “doubly sacred – as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity.” Along these lines, commitment is “‘singular’ devotion to work,” where it must be the central focus of one’s existence.

Within this elitist moral construct, “being consumed” by one’s work is both a status symbol and moral badge. As Williams writes, “‘being slammed’ is a socially acceptable way of saying “I am important.” Whereas fifty years ago, the elite working class showed their status by displaying their abundant time for leisure, today it’s about displaying your extreme schedule.

Research has found that the long hour craze is also yet another masculine test of endurance and perceived heroism. When it comes to what’s really behind the persistence and glorification of putting in the midnight oil, Williams writes: “It’s not productivity. It’s not innovation. It’s identity.”

So what does this ego-driven identity booster do for business, really?

Productivity or Priorities?

Across a 9.4 hour work day, we often only do 2-3 hours of real work, while working excessive hours hurts our productivity. After 50 hours, our productivity decreases and it plummets at 55 hours, with studies showing no discernible effect between working 56 hours and 70 when it comes to creating results.

As David Bolchover writes in an FT thought leadership piece, a decade long McKinsey study found that when senior executives were experiencing a ‘state of flow’, they were five times more productive than during other work hours. Senior level leaders felt especially more productive when they achieved flow.

Flow is akin to being able to immerse, focus, and apply your core abilities to a given goal or challenge, but most people only feel they are in that space 10% to 50% (at the very high and rare end) of the time. Sleep deficit or screen fatigue is not conducive to having an immersive focus. Bolchover writes, “Clearly, there is an inverse relationship to exploit: more focus for fewer hours.”

In fact, an over-abundance of time and resources can actually be a downfall for business. “When you spend too much time on an activity, just as when you have too large a budget, your priorities can become murky. You risk losing the precision and focus that come from having limited resources,” writes Chairman of JetBlue Airways, Joel Peterson. Peterson argues it’s not the hours we have, but the clarity of priorities we set, that drives productivity.

Worse for Women

While there are many studies showing how overworking adversely impacts health on a myriad of measurements for everyone, a recent study involving 7,500 people over 32 years from Ohio State University found that working long hours is far worse for women’s health than men’s.

Within the study, “fifty-six percent of the people studied worked 41 to 50 hours a week, 28 percent worked 30 to 40 hours per week and 16 percent worked more than 51 hours per week.”

Working 60 hours or more per week on average for three decades was found to triple the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble, and arthritis for women. Risk increased after 40 hours, and became heightened after 50 hours, for women, but not for men.

The researchers hypothesized that this was reflective of the multiple roles women juggle and disproportionate pressure at home. In fact, when men worked moderately longer hours (41 to 50 hours), they had lower risk of heart disease, lung disease, and depression than men who worked under 40 hours, at least when it comes to early onset disease.

However you feel about the results, it’s yet more proof that chronically playing the long hours game is no path towards gender equality or thriving personally. “Being consumed” – even when it comes from a place of intrinsic motivation – often ends in burning out.

The Smart Hours Game

If not by playing the long hours game, how can you strategically use your time to build your leadership qualities?

What you could do, rather than work endless hours, is model a leadership strategy of carving out prioritized, focused time. Here’s a tip based on top leaders such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey: spend an hour or day (or five hours a week) in some way engaging in active learning – whether reading, listening, experiencing, experimenting or reflecting.

The long hours game is too often misguided. It’s time we moved from the long hours game to the smart hours game. To do this, we need companies to get “it” and according to Inc., it’s the difference of valuing improvement (not just productivity and not just presenteeism) that will set you apart as a leader.

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Are Moms the Original Project Managers?

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As both a mom and a project management trainer, I can’t help but notice the amazing parallels between the two universes. Since I was a project manager long before becoming a mom, I assumed that my project management skills were just amazingly convenient as I juggled the complex labyrinth of motherhood. But as I mingled with other moms years later, I started to notice that the best moms seem to have almost innate project management skills that help them not just survive but thrive when faced with the day to day challenges and complexities of managing life’s most important project – raising our kids!

What Smart Moms Could Teach the Even Best Project Managers

Always Have a Backup Plan

Image via Shutterstock

Image via Shutterstock

The best moms know that if it can go wrong, it probably will. Of course, it’s better to hope for the best but plan for the worst and that includes having a solid backup plan – whether it’s an extra sippy cup, a change of clothes, an alternate lunch option, or a favorite toy just in case little Johnny misses his nap and loses his “pleasant personality”. Likewise, project managers can’t just rely on their project plan/schedule as written no matter how much time was spent generating it – they must plan for technology failure, losing a key team member, product delivery delays, etc. from Day 1.

Avoid Theoretical Time Estimate/Pad the Schedule

Every experienced mom know that a trip anywhere (to church, school, play dates, etc.) almost always takes longer than you’d think on paper. Yes, GPS may say that grandma’s house is only a 20 minute drive, but that estimate doesn’t account for the almost predictable traffic jam, the last minute potty trip/diaper change that definitely can’t be rushed, and of course the extra 5 minutes it takes to load everything into the car (race back for whatever you forgot), buckle car seats, settle any arguments, etc. So often project managers fall into the tempting trap of calculating “theoretical task estimates” that also don’t take into account some of the not so unpredictable delays and snags that we should proactively consider when building the timeline.

Temperature Check Regularly

As a busy mom, it’s so tempting to get caught up in the practical day to day minutia and really miss the important connections with our kids. I’ve noticed that moms seem to naturally “check in” with their kids periodically to find out what’s bothering them, what’s their favorite game/song, who’s their new best friend at school, etc. Similarly project managers can get overwhelmed by day to day administrivia and should remember the importance of checking in with the team to assess morale and see what’s working and what’s not. Whether it’s periodic informal lunches or round robin meeting debriefs, you can’t put the team on autopilot – checking in proactively is key!

Build Broad Networks and Firm Up Relationships Before You Need Them

Moms know that “it takes a village” – no one can do it all on their own. So, they actively reach out to establish their village early whether that includes extended family/friends, play groups, before/after care programs, etc. Moms also know the importance of nurturing those relationships constantly so that when she has the last minute babysitting emergency, her favorite nanny is more likely to come over asap – no questions asked J. Similarly, project managers are ultimately responsible for delivering project results on time on budget but are often completely reliant on others (including distant stakeholders at times) to get the job done! They absolutely need to build a strong extended team to help support the project – particularly during times of crisis. But the key is don’t wait until there’s a crisis to try to build the relationship J

Dana Brownlee is an acclaimed keynote speaker, corporate trainer, and team development consultant. She is President of Professionalism Matters, Inc. a boutique professional development corporate training firm based in Atlanta, GA. She can be reached at danapbrownlee@professionalismmatters.com. Connect with her on Linked In and Twitter.

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Why it’s a bigger Issue than work-family conflict

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By Aimee Hansen

The culture of chronic overwork isn’t working in many ways, but there’s one way it works too well: upholding gender inequality.

Professor Robin Ely of Harvard Business School, co-author of a recent study released by the Gender Initative, tells us “It is the culture of overwork—not women’s work-family conflict—that locks gender inequality in place.”

According to Ely and her co-authors, the focus on work-family conflict is a gendered diversion from the bigger 24/7 work week problem that deflects long hours as a women’s issue. We spoke to Ely about the dilemma, what needs to change and what women can do.conflict couple

The 24/7 Work Week Strains Both Sexes

In an interview-based study of a global consulting firm, co-authors Ely, Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University found that men had the same turn-over rates as women and reported the 24/7 hour work week was just as compromising to their family lives, too.

Reid wrote in Harvard Business Review that men reported feeling “overworked and underfamilied.”
Yet despite much evidence that overwork backfires for employees and companies, a culture of overwork continues to remain the norm for being seen as competitive.

Ely noted, “For employees, being needed 24/7 is like a symbol of status; it means we’re important.”

In fact, the researchers found often the extra hours are spent on proving importance. Ely shared, “in the case study, many people said that they actually wasted a lot of time; for example, they spent a lot of time perfecting their work product, not because the client needed it to be perfect, but because it was a way to prove how smart they are to each other. That kind of work doesn’t contribute to delivering value but it does perpetuate the 24/7 standard.”

With both men and women struggling with the 24/7 expectation, what differed was how women and men cope and the resulting impact on their careers.

Women Are Overt In Coping, Men Are More Discreet

Women tended to make transparent and formal arrangements, such as reduced hours or other family-friendly policies which often come with a “flexibility stigma” and backfire to derail their careers. Reid wrote that men who were transparent about difficulties in managing hours were also penalized, harshly, for not being perceived as a devoted employee.

Men, however, are much more likely to cope informally to handle time pressures under-the-radar, while still appearing to be fully devoted. In research with the same firm, Reid found that nearly a third of the men interviewed used discreet hour-cutting strategies such as lining up local clients, building alliances with colleagues, not revealing their whereabouts between phone calls, and “passing” at working 80 hour weeks when they simply weren’t.

Faking it worked and these men did as well on performance reviews as those pulling long hours. What mattered was performance coupled with the perception they were overworking. In other words, being an 80 hour devotee mostly has to do with appearance.

“Passing” is Tempting, But Not The Real Answer

If you’re beginning to think you could become skilled at “passing” yourself, there is a gender trap. Even if deception was the secret to career advancement, it’s harder for women. It’s easier for men, in Reid’s words, “to stray while passing as fully devoted.”

The bigger issue, Ely emphasized, is an underlying culture that holds up 24/7 as the norm, and implicitly disadvantages women by doing so.

“Despite the increased flexibility that technology has allowed, many organizations continue to reward ‘face time’ as well as the appearance of constant work (emails sent late at night, for example),” said Ely. “Couple this practice with the fact that when women do take advantage of flexibility, they are presumed to be doing so for family reasons while men are more often assumed to be leaving the office early to, say, meet with clients, and you have a situation in which employees feel compelled to be “present” (whether in the office or online) all the time and women are seen as less capable of meeting that demand.”
“Passing”, while covert defiance, isn’t as easy for women and falsely reaffirms the 24/7 norm is necessary to performance.

What Can Women Do?

Overwork is a cultural and industry-level issue but women can get savvy to their surroundings.

“Women, specifically, should look for signs of whether working mothers who take advantage of family accommodations experience career derailments,” Ely told us. “Companies often tout flexibility policies that appeal to women with children, but in practice taking advantage of those policies means being seen as lacking leadership potential.”
Ely advised to ask critical questions: “Can women who use family accommodation policies maintain the careers they want, or are they shunted into less prestigious, less powerful roles?”
“Ultimately, women need some key supports,” said Ely, “including organizations that don’t equate having children with a lack of commitment to our jobs and managers who give us opportunities to develop and shine even if we’re not available 24/7.”
She also iterated the importance of supportive family and partners, and not necessarily putting your career second. “We need to visit and revisit the social contract with our partner to make sure that we each are living a life that is consistent with our individual and collective goals.”
The work-family discussion is too small if being a 24/7 employee remains the benchmark. This issue is bigger than gender, because it’s not only women who suffer, even if it’s their careers that do.

“Research indicates that companies can be productive and competitive without demanding constant availability from their employees,” said Ely, “if we could start to see that realized in practice, more and more organizations might be willing to break this mould.”

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Why working less can help you get ahead and get in control of your work

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working from homeIn many organizations, there is a culture in which people brag about how many hours they work. Working so hard that you can barely keep your head above water is a badge of honor in those cultures. “How have you been?” is often followed with a confident and proud “Busy! I haven’t had a minute to catch my breath …” As women climb the ladders of success, this pressure to always work can get out of control. Many women also feel pressed to outdo their male counterparts, just to be competitive with them, making the problem even worse.

However, women do themselves a disservice by competing on sheer numbers of hours put in. On one level, it may be unhealthy – a recent study published in the Lancet shows working more than 55 hours a week is associated with a 1/3rd increased risk of stroke. On another level, working that long is actually counterproductive.

Working non-stop is a relic from the days when work needed far less creative and cognitive capacity. Working around the clock is based on a misguided attempt to maximize efficiency. If you’re dealing with a factory assembly line, you can increase output by eliminating any downtime – by making it more efficient. But human beings don’t work the same way. Eliminating downtime actually makes us less productive.

However, human beings can do something that machines can’t – we can have brief periods of fantastic productivity, when we set up the right mental and physiological conditions for it. In those brief times, just a couple of hours of excellent focus, we can get more of the truly important work done than if we had been wearing ourselves out by working around the clock.

Here are three of the science-based ways you can set up those conditions for brief periods of fantastic productivity, and in the process regain work-life balance:

  • There are times to skip something on your to-do list. Suppose you have a big client meeting in the afternoon and you have to win them over. You know that when you’re at your best, you’re in control and nothing can stop you. However, when you got to work this morning, there was a fire to put out, a ton of back emails, and a goals report due. So you stayed at your desk for hours getting it all out of the way before heading to your client meeting. It may have felt like an efficient use of time, but every time we make decisions – even unimportant ones – we fatigue our brain’s decision-making resources. So after a morning like this, you’re likely to walk into that client meeting unable to make quick decisions, and struggling to think about ideas that would be clear and easy for you, had you focused on refreshing your mental energy right before the meeting. Actually skipping something on your morning list, to give you 20 minutes of mental downtime right before the meeting can help you succeed at what actually matters, the client meeting.
  • The best way to stay focused for long periods is actually to let your mind wander when it needs to. Our brains’ attention systems are not designed for continual uninterrupted focus, but instead to tell us what’s changing. This is adaptive, and if your mind drifts every 15 or 20 minutes, that means everything is working as it should be. However, what you do when your mind drifts can have a big effect on how quickly you get back to work and how effective you are when you do. One option is to fight it. That will only backfire because you’re drifting for a reason, and it will keep happening. Most people will aim to take a break – something “useful” like checking email, or something fun like checking facebook or shopping. Doing so harms productivity in two ways. One is the obvious one, that it’s easy to get sucked in and lose a half hour or more. The other is counter-intuitive. All that information tracking blocks important background processes that can help us be more effective when we return to work. Rather than switching to something fun or useful, like shopping or email, when you let your mind wander – e.g. staring out the window, and wondering about the lives of people walking by – you create a mental scenario in which the brain can shift away from what it was focusing on, but in which there is not so much new information coming in that it takes too many cognitive resources. Mind wandering has been shown to improve creative problem solving for whatever you were working on before wandering, to help us sort out future plans, and to help us find ways to delay gratification. Just a few minutes of staring out the window can help your mind wander. And because it is somewhat boring, we tend to snap out of it after a few minutes. So you can get back to work far quicker than if you had gone online, and also be more effective when you return. So when your mind wants to wander, let it, and you’ll be back to work in minutes ready to stay focused and get through the work that matters most.
  • Use exercise as a productivity strategy. Most of the exercise advice out there is about the long-term benefits: look better, live longer, and so on. Those are nice things to have, but there’s no immediate reliable effect. It’s more of a long-term game. However, there is a totally different side to exercise that is seldom talked about, but for which there is a great deal of research. This is the short-term consequences. Moderate exercise (working up a little sweat, maybe 20 minutes on the treadmill) is a highly reliable way to reduce anxiety for the next few hours. If you need a reset in the middle of the day, there’s nothing like it to get you back into a mental space where it is easy to concentrate and easy to let the small stuff go that doesn’t matter. If you have an important and tough project, make moderate exercise part of your preparation for that project. You’ll be able to take a project that could have dragged on, and instead be far more present so you can bring your best mental energy to it.

Rather than simply aiming to put in as many hours as you can, you can get a leg up on the competition by setting yourself up for brief bursts of peak productivity.

I describe these and other science-based strategies to regain control of your work while increasing work-life balance in my new book, Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done.

Guest Contributed by New York NeuroLeadership Institute Research Director & NeuroCoach Josh Davis, Ph.D.

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Why Being a Working Mom is Good for Your Children, Not to Mention Gender Equality

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Working motherAt work, or on your way? You may be helping your daughter’s professional future (and we’re not just talking college fund) or improving gender equality in your son’s future household.

As part of their new Gender Initiative, which seeks to “change the conversation around gender and work”, Harvard Business School released a study of over 30,000 adults across 24 countries which explored how having a working mother as a child affects educational, economic, and social outcomes as an adult. A working mother was defined as a mom that ever worked (part-time, full-time, etc) outside of the house before her child (the survey participant) was 14 years old.

Across the 24 countries, daughters of working mothers grew up to be more likely to have completed more years of education, to be employed, to be in supervisory roles, and earn higher incomes than daughters of non-working mothers. Sons of working mothers grew up to spend more time on household chores and taking care of family members than sons of non-working mothers.

Particularly, daughters of working moms in the USA have half a year more education, are 36% more likely to have a supervisory role (33.4% v 24.6%), and earn 23% more ($35.5K vs $28.9K average) than daughters of non-working moms. Sons of working moms spent 7 more hours caring for family members and 15 minutes more housework compared to sons of non-working moms.

According to lead researcher Dr. Kathleen McGinn, “This is as close to a silver bullet as you can find in terms of helping reduce gender inequalities, both in the workplace and at home.”

The Impact of Alternative Parental Role Models

Exposure to role models is critical for women in the workplace, in order to be able to envision yourself in a role which otherwise might not seem accessible. The working mom effect also comes down to alternative role modeling, the opening of possibilities around roles and responsibilities.

The researchers were not concerned about the nature or intensity of a working mom’s work, whether it was full-time or part-time, but rather simply how it played out when children were exposed to “a role model who showed you that women work both inside and outside the home.”

According to McGinn, “What it’s about is modeling alternatives for your children, letting them see that there are multiple roles that women can play and multiple roles that men can play in their lives at work and lives at home.” As the study showed, experiencing alternative role models that “aren’t constrained by really tight gender stereotypes” had different impacts for daughters and sons.

“What daughters of working moms see is that it’s okay to go to work, it’s completely normal, that’s something that women do,” said McGinn. “Sons see something really different and that is everybody has to pitch in here. There’s no good way to maintain a management of a life outside of the home and a life at home unless everybody at home is working together.” Previous research has shown that sons of working moms are also more likely to be married to working women.

McGinn told the Washington Post, “…working moms are affecting their children’s gender attitudes. They’re affecting the way they think about what’s appropriate behavior. And those gender attitudes in turn are affecting outcomes.”

Underlining the point, she says, “There are very few things, that we know of, that have such a clear effect on gender inequality as being raised by a working mother.”

No One Path For Parenting

According to McGinn, “There’s very, very little research suggesting that being raised by a working mom is bad for kids. I think that’s something we harbor.” It appears we do, and it’s exactly these notions that the research hopes to dispel.

A previous Pew survey found that while 34% of working moms felt increasing numbers of working moms were good for society, an equal 34% felt it was bad, and a further 31% felt neutral about it.When you look at the total population, negativity towards working moms gets stronger (41%), showing the influence of a strong societal belief. But when asking all adults this question, respondents with a working mom were less negative than those without.

Mothers who work full-time are also likely to be hardest on themselves when rating their own parenting, only 28% rating themselves as a 9/10 (about same as dads at 26%) versus 41% of part-time workings moms and 43% of non-working moms.

As Gender Initiative director Robin Ely points out, “So much of what people think they know about gender is simply not substantiated by empirical evidence but instead is informed by gender stereotypes.” The objective of the initiative is to break the conversation from the stereotypes.

In the HBS study, working mothers actually spent equal time caring for their children.A meta-analysis has shown that children of working mothers have less depression and anxiety and recent research found that quantity of time with children between ages 3 and 11 matters less than the quality of your presence when you’re with your children.

McGinn is quick to point out that this doesn’t mean moms should work, just that there are benefits to alternative role modeling which go against societal preconceptions.

“There’s a lot of parental guilt about having both parents working outside the home,” McGinn says. “But what this research says to us is that not only are you helping your family economically—and helping yourself professionally and emotionally if you have a job you love—but you’re also helping your kids. So I think for both mothers and for fathers, working both inside and outside the home gives your kids a signal that contributions at home and at work are equally valuable, for both men and women. In short, it’s good for your kids.”

Ultimately, it’s up to every family and every woman to make their own decisions about what is right for them and not based on societal ideas of what’s right for all families, all women, or all children.

No such “right” exists.

By Aimee Hansen

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Coping with hidden disabilities and conditions on the job: an invisible struggle

stressed_business-womanIn the United States, about 10% of Americans have an invisible disability – a medical condition with physical symptoms that might not be apparent to a casual observer. In fact, as many as 96% of people with chronic medical conditions do not outwardly appear to be disabled. While those with some invisible conditions may be protected from discrimination at work by the Americans with Disabilities Act, whether or not they actually receive that protection sometimes turns, unfairly, on others’ perceptions of the presence of impairment.

Read more

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Six Reasons Why Women Execs Should Volunteer

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show-of-hands featuredBy Jennifer Davis

As a professional woman, you’ve probably dreamed of making an impact in the community, beyond your role as an industry leader or executive. “If I only I the time,” you might have told yourself, “I’d tackle world poverty. Or start a nonprofit foundation. Or work on a cure for cancer.”

Indeed, women are the nation’s most prevalent volunteers, with more than 28 percent giving their time, compared to 22 percent of men. Part of the reason may be that women intuitively understand that their responsibilities extend beyond payroll and profits. “Women are hard-wired to be engaged in their communities,” says Dr. Val Hannemann, a psychologist in Flagstaff, Ariz. “Volunteering connects women. They share, they compare, and they adopt new strategies to make a difference in the world.”And let’s not forget, most volunteers are recruited by volunteers and so women have a tendency to invite their female networks to engage in their projects.

Yet the reality is that many women who volunteer their time work part-time or not at all. In fact, women who are primarily care-givers or homemakers can become “professional volunteers.”On the other hand, time can be a major issue for professional women, who may have less flexibility in their schedules or priorities. If you’re like a lot of working women, you’re probably already juggling family, children, and your health —in addition to a demanding job. Yet if you haven’t carved out the time to volunteer, it may be time to reconsider. Yes, making the world a better place is important for its own sake. But it’s also a critical part of your professional development strategy. Here are six reasons why you should make the time:

  • You’ll build your experience base

    Volunteer work can play an important role in helping you get the experience you want in your career. These opportunities provide great opportunities to learn new skills, interact with mentors, and build your portfolio. And, of course, you can list volunteer opportunities on your resume and LinkedIn profile, alongside your paid work.

  • You’ll expand your network

    The old adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know” is true. Furthermore, it is really about who knows you. Volunteer opportunities allow you to build relationships outside your normal circle of friends and colleagues, helping you to broaden your network of folks who have had positive interactions with you and are inclined to think of you when opportunities arise.

  • You’ll broaden your perspective

    By working with a different set of people and challenges, you’ll inevitably widen your perspective. Volunteering can pull you out of your comfort zone, forcing you to tackle new problems from different angles. It can also give you profound new perspectives that can shape both your approach to life and the way you show up on the job.

  • You’ll hone your leadership skills

    As a volunteer, you can do things that an employee can’t. You can work outside the organization chart. You can seek out new opportunities for growth and involvement. And you can make connections between organizations. With the right volunteer opportunity, you’ll gain experience setting a vision, developing strategies, raising funds, motivating people, and reconciling conflicting perspectives—all essential leadership skills. And you’ll have the opportunity to practice those skills in a safe environment—and then apply them back at work to make yourself more visible and indispensable.

  • You’ll position yourself for promotion

    A volunteer opportunity outside of work is a great way to demonstrate your readiness for the C-suite. By sitting on the board of a local nonprofit, managing a community-based initiative, or organizing a volunteer program for your own corporation, you’ll be required to tackle many of the same issues faced by top executives within your company. Moreover, taking on a leadership volunteer role “send(s) the signal that you aspire to leadership potential,” says leadership coach Muriel Maignan Wilkins. Indeed, taking on the right volunteer opportunity can earn you recognition as a leader—helping you to get the promotion you desire.

  • You’ll do good for others—and for yourself

    Last, but not least, volunteering is vital to the health of our communities. You already bring so many skills to the table, and using them for the greater good makes the world a better place. At the same time, serving others gets you out of your own head and puts your own worries and problems in perspective. Research has shown that volunteering helps people feel more socially connected, wards off depression, and may even contribute to better physical health like lower blood pressure and improved memory. So, do yourself some good by doing good!

Jennifer Davis is Chief Marketing Officer of Leyard and Vice President, Marketing and Product Strategy for Planar Systems

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Is it good or bad for your career to change your name?

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wedding-322034_640Congrats! You just got married, now what? Back to work and you have a choice to carry on with your maiden name at work and in life or you can embark upon the admin that comes with changing your last name after getting married . It is an arduous one from standing in line at the DMV, calling the bank and credit card companies and changing email addresses but then there is all that personal branding work to think about. What are you going to do on social media and professional branding sites like LinkedIn?
 
There are more than just the formalities when someone who has already established a career changes their name. There is the story behind the name change and the conversation that is prompted when you first introduce yourself with your new name. An opportunity is created to talk about your personal life and recent marriage and this can serve to deepen your relationships with your co-workers and clients. Being authentic has been written about as a positive factor for building trust at work so perhaps it is a great way to get to know people better but also could reduce your visibility as people don’t recognize your name immediately.
 
Below three women share their experiences and advice on changing your name after already establishing a career.
Keeping it private
Cynthia Zeltwanger, Executive Director at the Paulson Institute, chose not to change her name when she got married in 1992.  
As a private person, she believes the topic can quickly spawn a personal conversation.
“I am a private person and I did not want to get into my personal life with professional relationships,” she said. “If you got married, it’s fine but if you are getting divorced, people could assume you got married and it creates a personal conversation with people in business that you might want to avoid.”
Zeltwanger got married when she was climbing the corporate ladder at a subsidiary of Société Générale. She remembers getting heat from her French colleagues for not taking her husband’s name but she was at pivotal point in her career and wanted to be taken seriously.
“Not so much anymore but when a woman gets married she can be seen as not as serious about her job,” said Zeltwanger. “While men are seen as more reliable when they have kids, women are seen as less committed.”
She believes that women need to be more cautious about clarifying their career intentions when making a name change.
“Be clear about your goals and aspirations and make sure the people in charge of your career progression know your goals have not changed just because you got married,” she said.“Some people will question your commitment.”
Hyphenating it
Patty Kevin followed family members into the derivatives business and worked 10 years in the industry before getting married. Afraid she would lose her identity but at the same time excited to embark on this new chapter in her life, she decided to hyphenate her name to Kevin-Schuler.
 
She said that the hyphenation was a way to make her colleagues aware of the name change.
 
“The colleagues you are close to know what’s going on in your life,” she said. “However, it’s the people on the peripheral that you need to educate.”
 
As Schuler’s career took her to the Chicago Board Options Exchange and then to her current role as Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development at the Boston Options Exchange, she felt more comfortable with her new identity.
 
Schuler finally dropped her maiden name when she got divorced because she wanted to have the same last name as her kids.
 
With the advent of email and social media, Schuler believes it is easy to notify people of a name change. She recommends adding a hyphen in your name or a note in your email signature about the transition.
 
However, Schuler says there are times when it is okay to go back and forth between identities.
 
“I still get asked if I am related to this relative or that one,” she said. “If I am talking to someone who knows my family, I will introduce myself as Patty Kevin. I admit my transition has been a fluid one.”
Embracing it
While Zeltwanger wanted to keep her personal life private and Schuler has kept her identity flexible, others have embraced their new names without looking back.
 
Nancy Stern, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at Allston Trading, remembers getting married and swiftly changing her last name. 
 
“I remember changing my name, address and phone number all at the same time,” she said. “This was before Facebook and Linked In.”
 
Starting out as a lawyer at Gardner, Carton & Douglas, Stern was worried she would lose her connections in the process and have to build up her network again.Similar to Schuler, Stern also felt like she was losing a part of her identity. However, looking back, she is glad that she made the change and believes women should embrace this right to choose.
 
“I didn’t really see this as a compromise of my feminism because I chose my husband and chose to take his name. The alternative would be my father’s name and while I had a wonderful father whom I loved very much, we cannot choose our fathers,” she said.
 
Changing your name is usually associated with a significant life event and If you are good at self-promotion and marketing yourself, a name change is an exciting reason to reinvent yourself. Have fun with your new personal branding campaign.
By Jessica Darmoni
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Working hard? How is the teamwork at home?

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arguing-couple featuredLike cars, relationships shift up and down through three gear-like phases. To move ahead together, you need to learn to recognize which gear is needed and how to change your thinking and actions in each one. When you fail to shift, at the right time, your relationship will stall or, worse, come to a painful screeching halt. Sad to say, all too often women rising in today’s competitive workplace experience relationship challenges. Why? We tend to wear more “relationship hats” than our male counterparts but more importantly, married to a man or a woman doesn’t really matter if both partners work in high-octane careers law, financial service or technology firms.

All relationships start in 1st Gear. Let’s take a romantic relationship for example. You begin slowly getting to know each other, spending leisurely hours talking about what you like and don’t like, want and don’t want so you can become good friends or even mates. Then you reach a shifting point-for weeks you’ve been so obsessed with your “startup relationship” that friends and family are leaving messages, “Where have you been?” No, you didn’t move out of town or leave the planet. You’ve been in the preoccupying, all-absorbing, time-consuming 1st Gear of Relationship!
Committed, you shift to 2nd Gear, de-focus on each other and re-focus on the rest of your lives such as projects, deadlines, appraisals, promotions and bonuses. Productive and competitive again, you work long and hard to plan your wedding and pay for it, find a home and furnish it, fund IRAs or 401Ks, buy stock, and build your client base.

Ah, it seems like you’re accomplishing so much together but actually you’re accomplishing more and more apart with taking care of your new home, starting your family, dropping off kids and picking them up, babysitting for each other so you can attend meetings and take clients to dinner. Now you’re doing more and more separately so you have less and less in common. Division of labor is what you call it but loneliness is what it feels like. And what about your plans and dreams, the unique contributions you want to make in your lives? There’s no time or energy for that now. Increasing pressures, longer hours, more disappointments, misunderstandings and arguments until you reach a choice point.

Do you choose to shift to 3rd Gear together and find solutions? “Honey, we love each other dearly. What can we do to re-create our relationship? To make time to talk for hours like ‘the good ole days’, to get to know each other again, to plan and dream our future. Can we find a regular sitter and set up a date night? Or take a class or start a project we can share and enjoy?”

A quick overview:

1st Gear is for starting and keywords include: new, basic rules, safe/dangerous, right/wrong, good/bad, should/shouldn’t, have to/must. You need to downshift to handle change, expected or unexpected… to slow down to hear about your child’s day or study for your CFA exam. Or handle accident, injury or illness… a sick child, spouse, parent or friend.

2nd Gear is for producing and competing and keywords include: more-better-faster, win/lose, longer/harder, deadline, profit, bonus. Today we spend most of our time accelerating in 2nd Gear.
3rd Gear is for creating and innovating, co-dreaming and cooperating and keywords include: Aha! realize, discover, recreate, innovate and renew.

Yes, from time to time you’ll be in the same gear at the same time and will be learning together, producing together, or creating together. But sometimes you won’t and there will be Mis-Gear-Matches so it’s essential for you to not only recognize which gear you are in, but also which gear your partner, child or client is in. What their gear-needs are and shift gears to meet them.
Now that you know more about the Three Gears and when each is needed, it is time to begin shifting up, and down, at the right time in all your relationships so you can have more fun and romance. And feel more fulfilled together at work and at home.

Guest Contributed By Susan Ford Collins

Susan Ford Collins has been called, “America’s Premier Success and Leadership Coach” by CNN. Collins is also the author of The Technology of Success book series which includes, The Joy of Success: 10 Essential Skills for Getting the Success You Want, (October 2015).

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