Work/life balance: What it does and doesn’t mean

Dear Bob …

My boss just explained the “facts of life” to me. My opinion: His facts of life are a thin disguise for pushing people (including me) way too hard.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob points out the fine line between an ambitious employee and a presumptuous one. | Keep up on career advice with Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ]

The situation is this: I’m ambitious. My goal is to reach the executive ranks by the time I reach 40 (I’m 32 now). I’ve been in my current (lower-middle management) position for three years. In my admittedly biased opinion, I’ve done a very good job at it. I bust my hump here. Some of what I do is work only I can do — nobody else knows how.

I think I deserve a promotion. My boss disagrees. When I asked, he cited two reasons. The first is that I sometimes miss deadlines on special assignments. The second is that I leave the office every day at 4:30 p.m. sharp.

The two are partially related. I leave every day because I strongly believe in the importance of work/life balance. For example, I’m responsible for dropping my kids off at school in the morning and picking them up from their afterschool care program. I do frequently bring my laptop home with me, although there are limits to how productive I can be until my kids are in bed.

What this means is that when my boss gives me a special assignment, it’s hard for me to spare the time for it, given that I work a full week on my normal day-to-day responsibilities.

Sometimes I have to make judgment calls about priorities, and his special assignments aren’t always at the top. His response when I explained this was barely concealed anger — he told me that when he tells me an assignment has a deadline, the deadline isn’t optional, and his judgment about that supersedes my own.

Talk about lack of empowerment.

He also told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I expect to reach the executive ranks on my timetable that I should expect to put in more hours than I currently do. Seems to me he’s telling me I have to donate money, in the form of free labor, to my employer in order to be treated fairly.

What do you think? Does my boss have a leg to stand on? Or is he just a slave-driver?

– Driven

Dear Driven …

Let me get this straight. Assuming you take a half-hour lunch every day, you work little more than a straight 40-hour week and call that busting your hump. You’re a lower-middle manager, yet there’s work you haven’t cross-trained staff to do — I’m surprised your boss didn’t explain that in addition to everything else, you’re unpromotable and will continue to be until someone else knows how to do everything you know how to do.

Your boss gives you an assignment with a hard deadline and you don’t get the job done (and reading between the lines, I’m guessing you didn’t warn your boss in advance that you weren’t going to make it).

And you think you’re doing a very good job and are ready for a promotion? If you’d been working for me you’d have received a documented verbal warning by now — at a minimum.

I think you misunderstand the nature of work/life balance. It doesn’t mean you get to do the minimum and your employer treats you the same as someone who goes an extra mile or three.

If what you want is a job — work 40 hours in exchange for a paycheck and that’s it — then your current performance is more or less in balance. If you want a fast-tracked career, you need to earn it. More to the point, you need to out-compete all those other lower-middle managers who are willing to work 50-, 60-, and sometimes 70-hour weeks when that’s what it takes to get the job done (I’m willing to bet your boss works those sorts of hours as well).

Your competitors aren’t thinking they’re donating free time to your mutual employer. They’re thinking they want to get ahead — of you. And they’re probably grateful you aren’t doing more to make yourself look like the sort of manager who’s ready to take the next step.

My advice: Stop thinking of yourself as an employee who deserves something and start thinking of yourself as the company named you that’s competing with lots of other companies for your employer’s business. It’s up to you to win the business you want.

With that in mind, here’s your new balance: Your first 40 hours of hard work let you keep the job you have (maybe — in a lot of companies, 45 to 50 hours is the new normal). The remaining hours in the week are where you have to figure out the trade-offs between doing what you enjoy right now and demonstrating you’re the right person to promote.

One more suggestion: Take a hard look at the hours your company’s executives work. Most likely, it’s a lot. People get a lot of rewards and perks when they reach the executive ranks. Certainly, there’s a point at which executive compensation is excessive. It’s also true that whatever else you say about most of those who reach these ranks, something they have in common is having logged a lot of extra hours, without anyone having to insist on it.

If you don’t want to work those sorts of hours, you’ll fail as an executive if you do become one.

– Bob

This story, “Work/life balance: What it does and doesn’t mean,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com or subscribe to the Advice Line newsletter for the latest wisdom on managing your IT career.