Unuttukça hatırlamak için kayıtlara geçsin:
http://hbr.org/2012/10/no-you-cant-have-it-all/ar/1
No, You Can't Have It All
Imagine that a company needs two volunteers for a high-profile, out-of-town project. Who should go? Everyone has pressures and commitments to consider. There’s the young manager eager for his next promotion but worried about leaving his wife at home with their toddler and newborn son; the rising star who’s already juggling long hours at work, a part-time MBA program, and the planning of her wedding; the mid-career executive who just joined a nonprofit board and doesn’t want to miss his first meeting; the single colleague who would relish the assignment but is about to move her father into a nursing home; and an overweight team member with a family history of diabetes who knows the travel will cause him to blow his new diet and exercise routine.
Platitudes about the importance of work–life balance don’t fully capture the complexity of those employees’ situations. The pursuit of a meaningful, multifaceted life involves endless choices about both short-term tactical issues (“Should I volunteer for this project?”) and long-term strategic ones (“How can I position myself to advance in my career?”). Howard Stevenson is an entrepreneur, professor, philanthropist, former chairman of Harvard Business Publishing, husband, and father who has spent four decades studying, teaching, and advising leaders in all types of organizations. He likens the challenge to walking on a balance beam while trying to juggle an egg, a crystal glass, a knife, and any number of other fragile or hazardous objects. As you progress in your career and life, more responsibilities and opportunities are tossed at you. And so at some point, to maintain your balance, you’ll have to drop something. The key is to decide consciously what to relinquish instead of unwittingly letting go of the most important item.
It’s hard for high-achieving people to accept that they can’t have it all. Even those who recognize the limits on their time often still expect to be energetic and efficient enough to excel in every role: productive employee, inspiring boss and mentor, supportive colleague, active community member, and committed spouse, friend, parent, and child. It’s a natural response to our upbringings; after all, in school we’re taught that hardworking, intelligent students can get straight A’s. But in the messy real world, it is impossible to do everything perfectly at the same time. You cannot pursue all your goals simultaneously or satisfy all your desires at once. And it’s an emotional drain to think you can. Instead, you must focus on long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities.
This article presents a framework that I have developed in collaboration with Howard. It’s based on his experience teaching and mentoring students and on the lessons I’ve learned navigating my own career and now running Axcess Worldwide. The framework is designed to help people—particularly ambitious executives—understand their limits and make the tough trade-offs that can lead to more-satisfying careers and lives.
You, the Ongoing Process
We all know that it’s difficult for a company to make good strategic or tactical decisions without a mission in mind. The same holds true for individuals. Think of a jigsaw puzzle: It’s much easier to put the pieces together if you look at the front of the box. But life does not come with a picture that shows what success looks like. Most of us start walking and juggling on the balance beam without thinking holistically and explicitly about what aspects of our lives we value most and how we value those things in relation to one another. Those assessments are not easy, but they are central to defining your goals and your desired legacy. It helps to carefully consider all the dimensions of your life. Howard and I have identified seven:
· Family (parents, children, siblings, in-laws, and so on)
· Social and community (friendships and community engagement)
· Spiritual (religion, philosophy, or emotional outlook)
· Physical (health and well-being)
· Material (physical environment and possessions)
· Avocational (hobbies and other nonprofessional activities)
· Career (both short- and long-term perspectives)
For each dimension ask yourself three questions: Who do I want to be in this part of my life? How much do I want to experience this dimension? Given that I have a finite amount of time, energy, and resources, how important is this dimension relative to the others?
As you consider the answers, it’s important to recognize two points. First, each dimension presents distinct challenges. It’s crucial to tease them apart so that you are facing not an overwhelming whole but discrete issues that can be addressed individually. Second, your evaluation can and will change. The idea is to develop an aspirational picture of yourself for the present and a legacy vision for the future as a guide for deciding how to spend your personal resources. This is especially important when you feel you’re losing your balance or are about to fumble.
Can You Really Achieve Your Goal?
Two of Howard’s own life experiences offer potent examples of how to use this aspirational vision to shape decisions both large and small. The first is from the time when he was building Baupost—the money management firm he cofounded—as well as teaching at Harvard Business School. At that point, he couldn’t spend as much time as he would have liked with his young children, because he was working long hours and traveling a lot. The situation reflected clear decisions he and his wife had made: He would sacrifice the family dimension of his life for a while in order to create the best long-term outcome for all of them. But Howard employed a tactical fix that honored his vision of himself as a committed husband and father. Whenever he was at home, he was fully responsive. Regardless of what else he was doing—catching up on work, reading a book, cleaning out the garage—if one of his family members asked for help with something or just wanted to talk, he would stop and engage. He knew that the emotional value from the interaction—for him and his family—would be far higher than the value of any other task. He applied clear-headed analysis to an important challenge: how to be a good father, husband, and provider while maximizing the professional dimension of his life.
Several years later, when Howard was in his late 40s and thriving at both Baupost and Harvard, he faced a much more complicated set of choices when his marriage ended. He realized he could regain his own and his sons’ equilibrium only by rechanneling personal resources from his career to his family. And so he gave up his leadership role at Baupost—a job he loved, and one that might have given him an income in the tens of millions of dollars. “I needed to earn a consistently good grade as a father for an extended period,” he explained. “I couldn’t risk having some aspect of my family responsibilities slip through my fingers. Sure, my ego and my wallet both took big hits. But the value of having more time and energy for my kids far outweighed any incremental monetary value.”
Assessing Value
Notice that in describing his experiences, Howard used the word “value.” That’s because he’s an entrepreneur who knows that the only way to truly assess cost is to understand the value of one choice relative to another. For example, an hour spent reading to your daughter has a different value than an hour spent playing basketball with friends; and both have values different from an hour spent studying for a licensing exam or volunteering at a homeless shelter. The key is to differentiate between options that appear to be equally valuable by carefully considering how each of them advances you toward one dimension or another of your legacy vision. The following questions can help you in that process.
Where do your options fall on the needs–wants spectrum? Needs start with food, shelter, and health; wants include diamond necklaces, round-the-world cruises, and mansions. Needs have more intrinsic value than wants. But most things fall somewhere in the middle. So the goal is to understand, in relative terms, where your options fall on the spectrum, based on your individual circumstances at a given moment and on your legacy vision. Some wants are so strong—because of habit or even peer pressure—that it’s difficult to separate them from needs.
Consider two examples. (In these and the cases of Willie and Andrew, below, names and some personal details have been changed out of respect for the subjects’ privacy.) The first concerns a college classmate, Carin, who gets very sad if she can’t take time each day to play the piano; the hobby is so much a part of who she wants to be that it has become, in practical terms, a need, so she sacrifices in other dimensions of her life to make time for it. The second involves two former colleagues, Irwin and Bill, who work at the same firm. Both were considering buying an expensive car and a handmade Swiss watch—investments that would consume significant amounts of cash and curtail their 401(k) contributions. For Irwin, a 29-year-old trying to impress his peers, these purchases were largely wants. But for Bill, a 46-year-old who had been promoted to a senior role in the luxury division of the company and was routinely entertaining wealthy clients, the car and the watch were closer to needs: He had to present himself in a certain way to be successful.
What are the investment and opportunity costs? Almost every decision—whether agreeing to a strategic business alliance or committing to a leadership role in a nonprofit organization—involves two kinds of costs. There’s the investment cost: the time, energy, and other resources you expend. And there’s the opportunity cost: the options you forgo by investing those resources. The challenge with investment costs is to be explicit about them up front and to understand if and how incurring them will lead you to your desired, well-defined outcome.
For example, rather than blindly diving into a full-scale job search to explore new career options, which would represent a very large investment of time and energy, you can commit to spending just five hours a week for two months researching a few industries you find promising, networking with contacts who know them, and doing informational interviews with executives working in them. The goal might be to create a short list of 10 companies where you’d like to work and to pinpoint three to five roles you’d like to play at them. At the same time, be sure to weigh your opportunity costs: what you won’t be able to do because you’re spending five hours a week on the job search. Perhaps you’ll have to stop playing in the after-work softball league or decline to participate in a new cross-division initiative at your current workplace.
Are the potential benefits worth the costs? Expected benefits must be evaluated just as carefully as costs, and in relation to them. Does the benefit you’ll receive warrant the investment you’ll have to make? The songwriter Lucy Kaplansky captures this idea succinctly: “How much did it cost you? How much did you pay? And are you sorry at the end of the day?” Willie, a friend who works for a large conglomerate, was recently told by his boss that he would be well served to earn his CPA, an achievement that requires three years of coursework. “Well served” implies a benefit, but how much of one? Would he get a promotion or a raise after earning his CPA? If so, to what level? Would he be eligible to move to other divisions in the company? If so, which ones? Willie has to answer those questions in order to decide whether the costs of this particular effort would produce acceptable returns.
Can you make a trade? Life is full of trade-offs, but sometimes units of one element of your life can’t be exchanged for units of a different element. Think of Steve Jobs, who assuredly would have paid great sums to cure his cancer. But his money could not buy him health. There was no trade to be had. Many of us face similar, albeit less consequential, challenges throughout our careers and lives as we try to exchange something we have for something else that we want. The frustration arises when the two items in question can’t be traded.
Consider the case of Andrew, a managing director at a respected financial services firm. He’d spent nearly 20 years in investment banking, but thanks to the unsteady economy, the demonization of his profession, and increased regulation, he was no longer enjoying his work. He’d long dreamed of walking away from financial services and opening a small beachside restaurant, and so, at age 52, he resigned. The firm offered him a staggering sum to stay, provided he commit to a five-year contract. After a few days of consideration, Andrew agreed, but now, two years later, he’s miserable and still thinking about his restaurant. He ended up exchanging wealth for freedom, and although the money seemed very big and the freedom to be gained from his new endeavor relatively small, in the end it was a bad trade.
Can you pursue your most important goals sequentially? Howard is fond of citing a piece of advice his mother often gave him: “Remember that you may be able to have everything you want in life—just not all at once.” Consciously staggering your goals may enable you to be equally successful in many dimensions over time. Mike Leven, the 74-year-old president and COO of Las Vegas Sands, has said that he decided to focus on his work dimension later than his peers, because he wanted to be a more hands-on parent when his three children were young. So he reached professional goals at 45 that many friends reached at 40; achieved wealth later than others; and secured his first really big job, as the president of Days Inn, when his kids were a bit older. He didn’t slack off in the early part of his career, but he did give himself permission to pursue his top personal and professional goals—of being a great father and a successful corporate leader—at different points in his life, because he believed he couldn’t achieve them simultaneously.
In today’s complex, frenetic world, many of us are—like the employees described at the start of this article—struggling to chart a path toward success in our careers and a sense of fulfillment in all aspects of our lives. Any decision can be easier if you think carefully about your goals; the dimensions of yourself that are most important to you; your needs and wants; the specific costs and benefits associated with your choices; the commensurability of those choices; and whether certain goals should be sequenced instead of pursued simultaneously to give you a better chance of success. Instead of striving for work–life balance, or even worrying about juggling on the balance beam, use this framework to pursue your life’s work—holistically seeking both success and satisfaction. In the real world, isn’t that what “having it all” really comes down to?
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder