Unfinished Business (21 page)

A
FEW YEARS AGO, AS
I waited in line at a coffee shop near my house, I overheard a snippet of conversation that has stayed with me. A woman who looked to be in her late fifties was saying to a friend that her last child was leaving for college and she was “beginning to think about phase three.” Not retirement, not some part-time volunteering, but the next active phase of her life.

In every job, every profession, some workers will choose to be hares, ready to put in longer hours, take more trips, be available 24/7. And they will be promoted faster and reach various peaks earlier than those of us who choose a different rhythm.

That's only fair. People who choose to marry their work or who manage, one way or another, never to have to make a trade-off between competition and care—either by having a full-time caregiver at home and accepting the price of rarely seeing their loved ones or through some combination of money, a farsighted choice of jobs, and good fortune—will be able to advance faster to top jobs. Others may be perfectly content to stay in the middle, knowing that they are valued as managers and team players. The point is not to ensure that everyone who competes reaches the finish line at the same time, but to ensure that those who choose a slower path will still have an opportunity to compete on equal terms if they want to, whenever they're ready.

And why not? If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she'll be a healthy, smart, and experienced sixty-nine when she's elected.
For all the excitement about her potentially being the first woman president, I think it's equally inspiring that she would be the first grandmother president. She has had many phases in her career, even though it appeared that she had subordinated a successful early career as a children's rights lawyer to her husband's political ambitions. She ran for senator after her husband finished his presidency and, equally important, after Chelsea went to college. After losing a presidential campaign, she took on a job she never expected to hold, as secretary of state.

Clinton was following in Madeleine Albright's and Condoleezza Rice's footsteps as secretary of state. Albright was named the first woman secretary of state at age fifty-nine; she had already made careers for herself as a professor and a congressional staffer while she was still raising her daughters as a single mother (she and her husband divorced). Since leaving office in 2001, she has become an author, entrepreneur, and businesswoman. Condoleezza Rice has already had multiple careers as well, beginning as a professor, taking a position as a staffer at the National Security Council, becoming a provost at Stanford, then national security advisor and secretary of state, and now principal in her own strategic consulting group, while often being touted as the next NFL commissioner.

Clinton, Rice, and Albright lead very high-profile lives. But any of us could think about sequencing intervals of competition and care much more strategically. If you are married, consider Hanna Rosin's vision of “
seesaw marriages,” where couples take turns being lead caregiver or lead breadwinner. If you have children, plan for the day they leave home. We often talk about empty-nesters as if they are sad mother birds flapping forlornly around the nest, wondering what on earth to do now. I prefer thinking about phase three as a second surge, a time of renewed energy, focus, and commitment to a professional goal.

Who knows? Some of us, and certainly our children, may be thinking about phases four and five.

F
ARSIGHTED EMPLOYERS ARE ALREADY BEGINNING
to incorporate the interval training concept, albeit under a different name and without the same focus on the needs of caregivers. In
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman and his co-authors Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh describe
a new model of employer-employee relations that is sweeping Silicon Valley. The book starts from the premise that the lifetime employment model and the employee loyalty that it generated is dead. Millennial workers understand very well that they will hold many jobs over the course of their careers, leading them to limit their investment in their employers just as their employers have little incentive to invest in them.
The Alliance
proposes a very different model in which both sides, as the name suggests, ally to advance their mutual interests.

Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh discuss how the old model of work broke down in the 1970s and 1980s. The pressure to compete globally created a scenario in which workers were treated as disposable. As they put it, companies insist that “ ‘
employees are our most valuable resource.' But when Wall Street wants spending cuts, their ‘most valuable resource' suddenly morphs into their ‘most fungible resource.' ” This attitude bred an understandable distrust among employees.

The way to regain mutual trust is to create a framework in which job contracts aren't seen as open-ended commitments; they're seen as tours of duty that have clearly defined goals and finite time spans. After your tour is up, you might go on to another
tour within the same company or go to another company entirely. But neither party feels used or abused in this scenario. The employees feel like they are learning new things and they're not at the mercy of an unfeeling market; the employer feels like its investment is worthwhile.

The authors are careful to note that even though this approach was engineered in the flexible wonderland of Silicon Valley, its main lesson will work in any environment in which “
talent really is the most valuable resource, and employees are treated accordingly.” Companies like GE and the global nonprofit Endeavor already use a tour of duty framework. The most distinctive feature of this approach is that it allows jobs to be customized for each person and his or her specific relationship to an organization at a specific time in his or her life. Though lower-level workers with less bargaining power and desired skills still need government protection to make sure that they are not being exploited, the tour of duty notion looks like it is a possible new way forward.

The tour of duty concept fits perfectly with the idea of planning your career in terms of intervals of different intensity: these tours will only work if you can either get back in or ramp back up after a down interval. I see an enormous talent pool of women in their late forties through their late fifties coming out of just such a down interval, ready and waiting to throw themselves into full-time work again as their kids leave the house. Men will increasingly need and want those options as well.

My sister-in-law Laurie is a great example. She was a magna cum laude graduate and thesis prize winner at Princeton who made senior vice president at a major auction house by her early thirties. When she and my brother Hoke had children, one of whom has moderate special needs, they felt that it was critical for one of them to be at home full-time. Given the travel necessary for Hoke's job and the income it generates, the responsibility fell
to her. In the conventional narrative, Laurie “sacrificed her career for her family.” In fact, she's a woman in her early fifties who has combined an impressive professional track record early in her career with logistical abilities, management skills, and personal resilience, all strengthened by her work as a mother. She's ready for her next tour of duty.

The military—where the term and concept of tour of duty originates—is itself finding ways to let its members step out and step back in, precisely because they spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and expense in training their employees and thus suffer enormously if they cannot retain them. Beginning in 2009, the U.S. Navy launched a program called the Career Intermission Pilot Program (CIPP) to determine, in navy speak, “
if retention in critical skills sets can be enhanced by permitting temporary inactivation from active duty and providing greater flexibility in career paths of service members.” The program provides for a onetime temporary transition from active duty to the reserves for a period of up to three years, with a means for “seamless return to active duty.”

The air force is planning to launch its own CIPP in 2015, hoping that with their program they'll be able to retain more female airmen. “
Some women leave the Air Force because they want to start a family,” air force personnel chief Lt. Gen. Samuel Cox told the
Air Force Times
. “So why don't we have a program that allows them, in some cases, to be able to separate from the Air Force for a short period of time, get their family started, and then come back in?” Exactly.

In the civilian sector,
McKinsey has a program that allows its consultants to take up to ten weeks per year away from the office between projects. It's called Take Time, and employees have used it to travel, take care of family, and embrace hobbies. These programs are just a few years old, so it's hard to know what the long-term
effects are going to be. However, McKinsey has reported that in the near term, Take Time has helped with employee retention and recruitment. Take Time participants report that they return to work feeling refreshed and engaged, instead of burnt out and bitter. These are baby steps in terms of the enormous need for greater career customization on the part of millions of American workers, but they are steps in the right direction.

It's still up to
you
, however, to start thinking now about what might happen later. A frequent comment from young women I meet goes something like this: “When I read your
Atlantic
article I thought it was interesting but not really relevant to my life. But I just got married [or ‘we just had our first child'], and suddenly I get it. I'm trying to figure out what to do and it's a lot harder than I expected.”

I sympathize, believe me. But don't wait. Assume that if you are expecting to have a family, or if your parents are sick or aging, you will face times when it will be very hard to focus intensely on your work. Start imagining the kinds of trade-offs you may need to plan for. Here are a few hypotheticals to help you anticipate what life likely has in store, compiled from actual situations a wonderful mother I know has faced:

A
FTER
I
GAVE A SPEECH
to a roomful of eight hundred women and men—mostly women—at a conference hosted by the Women's Leadership Center in northern Virginia, a young woman asked me about my claim that women who wanted to be at the top of their professions while also having a family would likely need a
supportive spouse on the home front in the same way that male leaders do. She asked what to do if she and her boyfriend
both
wanted high-flying careers. As I began to answer, her boyfriend came over, saying that he certainly wanted to listen as well. I said that they might both be able to reach the top of their chosen professions and have a family, but not at the same time; that they would have to recognize that trade-offs and indeed sacrifices would be likely at various points; and that they should discuss how they would plan to make those choices up front. I could tell it was not a message that either of them particularly wanted to hear, but you can't run away from it.

In the past far too many couples simply never had that conversation. They put off planning before marriage or having a child, and then, when the time came, as it so often did, that they realized their children—or their aging parents—were going to make it impossible for both of them to travel and work with the intensity their careers demanded, it was already too late. It may be hard for young men and women to believe, but many of the couples even of my generation, coming out of school in the 1980s, pledged themselves to full equality. We were determined to create different gender patterns than the ones we grew up with. But once children arrived, most of us discovered that we had to make choices; the choices we ended up making systematically disadvantaged the women's careers.

Now it's your turn. You are a young woman in a relationship. He says he fully supports your career, and he was raised by a working mother, so of course he believes in full equality. What more do you need? (
This hypothetical applies equally if you're a young man in a relationship with another young man or a young woman in a relationship with another woman, although lesbian couples seem to have a somewhat easier time with the division of labor.)