Atlas Shrugged

At a recent meeting with four other people, participant remarked about how we all had jobs that were 24/7.  Internally I bristled.  With one exception, not one of us runs a shelter, hotline, hospice or other medical facility, residential program, etc.  Yes, we are all professionals who do important work and take that work very, very seriously.  But, again, with that one exception, our jobs neither demand nor require a round the clock commitment.   If something happens on Thursday and we don’t respond until mid-day on Friday, no one will suffer or die, no catastrophe will ensue, no havoc will be wrought.  So, let’s be honest about our job really requires.

It is possible to say that executive directors are always on, regardless of the mission of the organizations they lead?  Sure.  You just never know when you might be meeting a potential donor, you just never know when you will be called upon to represent your organization at any number of activities.

Could we say the same of all members of the senior management team?  In the past two years since my son started his career as a financial advisor, I haven’t seen him in public in sweats, his attire of preference for the previous four years of college.  Why?  Because someone told him that he never knows when he will be talking to a potential client and he must always dress to give that potential client confidence in his professional abilities.  Does that make his job 24/7?

There is a difference between a job actually being a 24/7 job—doctor, police officer—and our choosing to make our jobs such.  And we should never confuse the two.  There are times when I have treated my job as if it were 24/7—checking email when I get home in the evenings, last thing before I go to sleep, on the weekends, on vacations—but I have always known that it is not a 24/7 job—and I don’t get paid as if it were.  So, more fool me for making it so.

Having a child helped me get my priorities straight; and that helped me put my job in perspective.  I’ve just returned from six days off—totally and completely unplugged.  I left with the instructions that if I was truly needed, send me a text; I got a handful, which I answered in short order.  And never once was I even slightly tempted to check email.  As far as I can tell, everyone and the Center survived—as I knew they would.

Work-life balance is, by far, the second most frequent complaint that I hear from executive directors—second only to complaints about boards of directors—and yet each of us holds the controls to that dilemma within ourselves.  We chose to make mountains out of molehills, doable jobs into undoable ones and a 60-hour a week job (already ambitious) into a 24/7 job.

That said, the message—the one that says work-life balance (equal emphasis on both the work and the life) is paramount, that it is great to be a professional and do your job within an eight hour day (and on occasion a 10 hour day), to use all of your vacation time allotted, to not be stressed to the max and exhausted, etc.—must come from the top.  Executive directors must preach that message and do it; they must model that behavior religiously.  And they must force their employees to do the same.  To do otherwise is to give ourselves airs we don’t deserve, along with ulcers and other stress-related ailments.

The truth is that working longer hours at our job doesn’t make us better at doing that job.  In fact, it is more often the exact opposite.  If we can’t do a bang-up job in the “normally” allotted time for doing a job, then we aren’t equipped to do the job at all, no matter how many hours we take.  And that is the hard fact that too many of us refuse to face.