Work-life Balance: Path to Success | Stew Friedman

Work-life Balance Over the Decades

Dan Loney: The balance between the time we spend on the job and the time we spend living our lives has been a very important area of study for quite some time now. But just how different is that balance now from a couple of decades ago? Pleasure to be joined in studio by Stew Friedman, who is emeritus practice professor of management here at the Wharton School. He also founded the Work/Life Integration Project here at Wharton and is founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program.

Stew, this has obviously been such an important area of focus for you for many years now. Let’s go back in time. What was it that first had you thinking about the connection between work and life?

Stew Friedman: I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the early ‘80s. I sort of minored in the field of role theory and adult socialization, and how people figure out how to piece together the different roles that they play in life. But my main emphasis in my research and teaching and practice was on talent management systems, and the succession and development of leadership talent in companies.

But when my first son was born in the late ‘80s, I had a very profound reaction to his arrival, to meeting him, and thinking, “What do I do now to ensure that the world that he grows up in is is one that will be one that encourages his flourishing, his safety?” It was a question that I hadn’t really given enough thought to before I actually met him. But it was a question that I couldn’t get out of my head after that moment. And I asked everybody — my parents, my friends, relatives. When I got back into the classroom about a week or so after that, I asked my students. I kind of cleared the deck of what we had planned to study that day, which had to do with motivation and reward systems. I said, “We’re going to put that aside because there’s something else that I want to talk with you about. And that is, how are you as future business leaders going to cultivate a world in which people can be the people they want to be outside of work, as parents, as friends, as members of their communities?”

The reaction was intense. There were people in the room who were thinking, “Why is he doing this when we we prepared a case for today, right?” And that was in the days when students would prepare for class. They were ready to go, and I was putting that aside. They were also saying, “How’s this relevant for us right now? We’re a business school. Why are we talking about children and families? Professor, nobody really cares about your family.”

But there were others in the room who kind of leaned forward and said, “Yeah. Let’s talk about this.” And in response to my question, what are you going to do as future business leaders to shape a new world, one of them said to me, “Well, you’re the professor. You tell us.”

That caused me to shift my attention. In the late ‘80s, I shifted my interest and started to focus more on and using what I had learned in graduate school, and the tools that I had developed there at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. How could I study this question and produce useful knowledge for people to help them figure out what it was going to take to integrate the different parts of their lives?

Loney: Thinking about it from the corporate perspective and the employee perspective, how have they developed in the last 30 years. And where do you think we are going with this?

Friedman: That’s a great question, Dan. There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that the world has changed in many positive ways in terms of the role of women in the workforce and the increasing authority and power that women have, which has changed the dynamics of the domestic lives of people, and forced a new kind of questioning and experimentation with different ways of approaching how men, women, everyone, figures out how to integrate the different parts of their lives for mutual gain. That became our challenge and our task.

Today, you have many more young men interested in having fulfilled lives beyond work. And you have many more women in positions of authority who are also helping to drive innovation and change. I started the leadership program at about the same time that I started the Work/Life Integration Project. There, we were developing new models for how people learn what it means for them to lead and how to grow as leaders.

Thirty-five years ago, this wasn’t standard fare. Now it is. And now it’s standard for organizations around the world to be asking the question, how do we help our people grow as people? Not just as components of our productive machines. They’re more than that. And the really good news is that we now have a body of evidence that shows that when you take care of the whole person in a way that serves the interests of the person, their families, their communities and your business — you can all win. Now, it’s not easy to do that. Of course, there’s conflict between work and the rest of life, and you’ve got to deal with those, having to do with time and other constraints. But when you ask what can be done to make things better for you and your family and your community and your business, people come up with ideas for innovation that you wouldn’t have thought.

Loney: Should I be surprised that maybe the corporate world has taken the level of interest that it seemingly has in this topic? Because it feels like, going back decades, this was not on the radar of the C-suite or the corporate world in general. Now, obviously it very much is.

Friedman: Back in the day, not only was it not on the radar, it was an idea that was suppressed. Indeed, when I shifted my focus of research and practice and teaching to this issue, I had senior people, saying, “Stew, what are you doing? This is a women’s issue that nobody cares about. Why are you shifting your attention in this direction?” But I could foresee that things were going to be different. I’m not saying I had a crystal ball, but it was clear that changes in the roles that men and women wanted to play in organizations, and the increasing flexibility that was going to be possible, and the supports that we were seeing in Europe — especially northern Europe — that were being provided for people’s lives beyond work, particularly their families, was creating pressure for organizations in the United States to respond.

When I was a man at the Wharton School talking about families and kids in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I was decidedly strange. I mean, I still am in a lot of ways. But there, I was a distinctive messenger. Because at that time, it was almost only women talking about this issue, and it wasn’t really on the radar, as you say, in most business school curricula. With the advent of the internet, of course, and then with the pandemic and the radical shift to working from home, there’s all kinds of new models for how to figure out the ways and means of how we get things done in the different parts of our lives.

How Can Companies Take Care of Their Employees?

Loney: It’s incumbent on companies to have this as a component of their health profile for employees, of making sure that they are doing as much as they possibly can for the employee. Not only for the bottom-line benefit of the day-to-day work, but for keeping the employee who may be very valuable.

Friedman: Yes, and that is the good news in the story. After launching the leadership program here and doing the research on what does it take to integrate the different parts of life from mutual gain throughout the ‘90s, the CEO of Ford Motor Company hired me to be the head of leadership development for the company worldwide. I went there for a few years. Took a leave from my post here at Wharton. And there, had the opportunity, with an incredible support of remarkable executive sponsors and great team — we created a program that we called Total Leadership, which brought together what we’d been learning about the growth of leadership capacity and the integration of the different parts of life.

What we demonstrated there was that when you help people to articulate their values, what they care most about, to be real, to act with authenticity by clarifying what matters most to them, by helping them to be whole, by identifying who are the most important people at work, at home and in the community, and what do they really need from you, and what do you need from them? And looking at your whole life as a social system that you can navigate and influence, and using that fresh knowledge, in a peer-to-peer coaching environment, to come up with ideas for innovation that are designed to produce what I called a four-way win — and that is demonstrably improved performance at work, at home, in the community and for yourself— people are able to do that. And they overcome the guilt and the fear of trying something new when they realize that what they’re trying to do is not just for themselves, their families, their communities, their businesses, but for all four.

When you take that view that it’s possible, if you put on a new set of lenses and look for ways to make things better in the different parts and experiment with that, then you can actually make those things happen and get support. Using leadership principles to create change, to become a leader that is capable of producing sustainable change because it works for all the different parts of your life — we call this Total Leadership. And we, for the last 25 years, have been doing that both in coursework here at Wharton and with companies all around the world.

The good news here again is that our evidence shows that when you take this approach, people work smarter. They’re less distracted when they are at work, and they actually produce better results at work while spending less time at work, which is a paradox that my economist friends wonder about.

Loney: Are we going into a time that requires a little bit more focus because of the fact that we’re seeing companies start to call people back into the office full time? And there are some people that are fighting back against that. Or not staying with the company. Or making a choice that that balance that they’ve had for the last few years, especially during the pandemic, is more valuable to them than being in the office five days a week.

Friedman: Yeah, having control over your life is something that more and more people are claiming. In the current labor market, it’s hard to predict what is coming forward. But what we have found — and the evidence is pretty clear — is that when you trust people and verify that what they’re doing is good for you and for them in their lives, and you let them know that they can and should be experimenting with different ways of getting things done that are good for you and for them, and you measure that, and you support that, that you’re going to get a big return in terms of retention and loyalty. But you’re also going to get better productivity.

The blanket policies of, everybody’s coming back, and everybody’s got to be there all the time — I think that’s going to backfire. Because the norms for today’s workforce are very different than the ones that I grew up with and the ones that you grew up with, too, a generation after me, Dan. There is going to be pushback. But in a tighter labor market, it’s hard to know. I don’t think anybody can really predict. But clearly, the trend is in the direction of greater freedom, greater sense of control, greater belief that people want to be productive in the different parts of their lives. And when you give them the tools and the support to do that, the returns are great for your business.

Loney: Where can people find out more about the work that you’ve done in the past and how this is progressing?

Friedman: It’s kind of you to ask, Dan. The Total Leadership website is probably the best place to get free information, videos, book chapters. It’s totalleadership.org, and you can learn all about our history and impact there.