Why Jack Welch is Good for the Work-Life Debate
July 17th, 2009
Does work-life balance exist?
By now, you’ve probably gleaned that former General Electric (GE) chairman Jack Welch doesn’t think so. On June 28, during a speech at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference, Welch said, “There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” Welch also said those women who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if “you’re not there in the clutch.”
The work-life debate has raged for decades, but Welch’s comments are making people focus on the ongoing discussion now because he is a corporate celebrity as well as a respected management guru. (Welch, who is currently in the hospital for a spinal infection, is also a BusinessWeek contributor.)
I also think the work-life topic is under intense scrutiny right now because of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s workaholic ways.
I actually agree with Welch that we need to stop talking about balance and shift the conversation to another framework. So do many of the experts I know in this field. For example, Work+Life Fit’s Cali-Williams Yost says: “The quicker we stop thinking there is a right answer or “balance”, the quicker we will begin to see that every one of us has a different work+life fit at different times in our lives.”
As I’ve said before, work-life balance needs to be redefined. Unfortunately, it’s hard to change the conversation. The working public still prefers to describe the way they mesh out-of-office life with their jobs as “work-life balance.” Some 46% of respondents said they like the term “work-life balance” best in a 2008 poll conducted by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network, a research center for work and family issues at Boston College. The runner up? “Work-life integration” with 25% of the vote. (“Work-life juggle” came in third, with 8% of the vote.)
Enough about semantics.
What’s more important here is that Welch also raises the notion that women cannot get ahead unless they make sacrifices. Indeed, we know from research that the Motherhood Penalty exists. As the MamaBee notes, mothers earn 27% less than their equally qualified male counterparts. “While there are women who leave the workforce, that doesn’t explain why only 2.4% of Fortune 1000 companies have female CEOs; for the most part women in the running for those jobs are not taking significant time off,” she says.
Even so, Ann Carlsen, founder and CEO of Carlsen Resources, wrote on the Wall Street Journal’s Juggle blog that people who have espoused work-life balance, not to mention the rights of women in the workplace, should feel thankful for Jack Welch’s comments.
Welch and his peers are a fundamental reason why this country finds itself so in need of such balance. Old-school, war-is-hell corporate types like Welch often seem to long for the days in the American workplace so lovingly portrayed in “Mad Men;” when men were men, women were accessories, and work and play operated under the same basic principle: if it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right. And now, with the recession challenging so many of our current, more enlightened beliefs, while at the same time threatening many of the advances we’ve made in the American workplace, I can’t help feel that Welch took the occasion to speak with impunity, and by doing so, exposed for us the dinosaur he is. It feels a little like Toto pulling back the curtain on the Wizard.
What do you think of Welch’s comments? Are you thankful that he is raising these issues now? Has it made an impact on the work-life balance debate?
UPDATE: After I posted this, a colleague pointed out that Jack’s wife Suzy said (via Twitter): Jack “certainly would NEVER say all/none. It’s a pity WSJ insisted on running story w/o Jack comment and over my objections.”
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