Unfinished Business (24 page)

No one at a memorial service will ever remember if you answered all your email. Quite the contrary. When I worked in the State Department I noted an inverse relationship between how high up people were and how much email they actually answered—they simply had more important work on their plates. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, read all her email but did not respond unless a response was absolutely necessary, and then she had it down to one letter—“k” instead of “okay.”

Email is just the most obvious manifestation of a much bigger issue: the 24/7 work culture and its associated feelings of responsibility and guilt. Many of us try so hard to respond to an ever-increasing set of demands from an ever-growing number of people who can now reach us at all hours. The key is to stop long enough to think through what your real priorities are. What's really most important to you? If you don't set your own priorities and draw the boundaries that will help you achieve them, no one else will do it for you.

I
F
CEO
S, SUPERVISORS, AND MANAGERS
want to avoid missing out on the next great wave of productivity increases and morale improvements, they too need to adopt policies that provide true
flexibility. It might seem daunting, but all it takes is understanding, vision, and a little bit of nerve.

When I took my first big management job as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School in 2002, our sons were five and three. If one of them had a problem—from falling sick at school or daycare to a more sustained learning issue that might require diagnosis and outside assistance—that family matter came first.

The situation I've just described probably confirms many managers' worst fears about hiring a mother. But since I had no doubt about my own commitment to my work and my ability to focus, reason, and lead while I was a mother, and since I was the boss, I rejected the stereotype. After some trial and error, I found that if I attended to the family issue first, subject of course to meeting important obligations that could not be postponed or delegated, then I would be far more focused, productive, and determined when I turned back to my work.

Once, during a daylong meeting I had with the Woodrow Wilson School's advisory board, I told the board members that my associate dean would take over from eleven to noon while I went down the road to attend a teacher's conference. It would've been better, of course, to schedule the teacher's conference on a different day, but for whatever reason that was not possible and it was important that I be there. The world did not come to an end; my associate dean was perfectly capable of taking over; and although some of my board members may have been bemused, others recognized that missing one hour out of eight with them mattered far less than missing a crucial hour with my child's teacher.

Over time, I developed a slogan: “If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together.” This slogan applied equally to me, my colleagues, and my employees. If anyone working for me had a family issue—with a child, a parent, a spouse, a
grandparent, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, or cousin—she should attend to it. We, her managers and co-workers, would cover for her and support her in any way we could. In return, we expected her to take responsibility for meeting her professional obligations, for making up any work she could not delegate, and for ensuring that important issues or assignments did not fall through the cracks.

I have applied this philosophy at the Woodrow Wilson School, at the State Department, where I managed some thirty-five people in the Office of Policy Planning, and now at New America. Indeed, within my first year at New America, on the eve of a trip to Chicago to meet with the head of a foundation that funds our work, the director of one of our programs wrote to me to say that his wife had been covering for him with their children for the past two weeks but she now had an important case and he simply had to step up.

I could have told him that this was an important trip (it was) and that he could not simply bow out on such short notice. It would have been completely within my rights as president of the organization going to meet a funder. But as a working spouse myself, I knew exactly the kind of interspousal negotiation he was going through and thought better of him as a husband and father that he was doing his fair share. His presence at my side was a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have; the trip went off fine without him. For him, however, the entire incident affirmed his commitment to New America as an organization that lives its values and allows him to be both a family man and a working man. He is a very valuable member of our team, and I now know I can breathe a bit easier the next time a headhunter calls.

I certainly cannot claim to be a perfect manager; management is a process of continual learning and course correction. But I've witnessed firsthand that when I create the space for all the
people who work for me, regardless of rank, to put their families first, their work never comes second. They put the two together in a way that both get done. Responsible people do not limit their obligations to the workplace. Indeed, I would not hire a job candidate who told me that his work would always come before his family. I would question his character.

T
HE MOST EXTREME FORM OF
flexibility that I have come across is
the results-only work environment, or ROWE, an approach pioneered by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, authors of
Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution
. As they describe it, ROWE means “people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.” That means no set hours at all. The only thing that matters is that your work is getting done, and getting done well.

ROWE is harder than it looks, and, inevitably, has some unintended consequences and problems of its own. To begin with, some employees have jobs that require them to be physically present at designated times, and even when work can be done effectively at home, lots of empty offices, particularly those of managers, can erode morale. Worse still, a two-tier class system can quickly develop whereby lower-level employees resent having to be present to do their jobs when higher-level staff can stay home.

ROWE has also had mixed reviews in large companies. It was famously adopted by Best Buy but was stopped later by new CEO Hubert Joly, who thought the approach was too one-size-fits-all. In an op-ed in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
he wrote, “
This program was based on the premise that the right leadership style is always delegation [to the employee]. Anyone who has led a team
knows that delegation is not always the most effective leadership style.” On the other hand,
the Gap adopted ROWE and has claimed remarkable early success with the program.

Regardless of whether ROWE works as a formal, detailed program to be implemented, I find that the ROWE mindset has a positive impact on how managers manage. Ressler and Thompson
insist that supervisors be clear about their expectations for employees as well as how results will be measured. Overseeing who comes in on time (or better yet, early) and leaves on time (or better yet, late) is much easier than thinking hard about how to set goals that can be met precisely. That process, in turn, requires setting clear priorities and communicating those priorities to your team, with measurable benchmarks and deadlines against them.

Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto Software, has applied these principles to her workplace with great results. Although the firm did not officially roll out ROWE, it uses similar principles. All of Parsons's employees have flexible schedules. “
We very much focus on results and setting real tangible goals and objectives for every job and every employee,” she says. If you work for her, you're “judged on what you do, not how many hours you're at the office. We think people do better work and more innovative work if they come in fresh every morning.”

Parsons is a mother of three boys, ages ten, eight, and five. She has taken her focus on results a step further, transforming the workplace itself. When her children were infants, she brought them into the office, and she has allowed employees to do the same. Though Palo Alto employees get three months of maternity leave, a handful of employees have wanted to come back earlier, and they are allowed to bring their infants with them. “
We've given them a place for the baby to be,” Parsons explains. It's primarily
a place of work, so if an employee had a colicky or special needs infant, Parsons says she would work out some other arrangement, whether it was working from home or something else. But otherwise, as long as employees can get their work done, why is an infant snoozing away a problem? Parsons's commitment to these principles has paid off: her company has grown from twenty-eight to sixty employees in the past three years and their revenue has increased 40 to 50 percent each year.

Thinking and working this way requires an even deeper mind shift about how we get good results in the first place. It's a strange analogy, but I always think of my rice cooker. Traditional rice cookers operate on clear input and output principles—one cup rice, two cups water, thirty-five minutes' cooking. But mine determines the cooking time based on the quality of the rice, the weather, and any other factor that might affect the outcome.

It sounds odd, and requires additional calculation on the part of the machine, so the cooking time always varies. But the result is so much better! So too is the work that is done when we determine assignments and time based on the quality of the work we need done and the individual characteristics of the people who are going to do that work.

T
HE FINAL STEP TOWARD CREATING
a workplace in which all employees can be their best and most productive selves requires managers and executives to see caregiving itself as an asset. Radical as it may seem, it's time for CEOs, supervisors, and team leaders to assume that the experience of caring for children, aging parents, or any loved one will give your employees experience and insights that will help them on the job. To begin with, they will be extremely efficient; working caregivers do not have time to waste.
And remember, from
chapter 5
, all the attributes that care helps develop: knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope.

Believing that care is just as valuable and formative an experience as competition means making paternity leave mandatory, or at least the default option, so that new fathers would have to opt out of taking it rather than opting in. It also means welcoming whatever arrangements allow workers who are also caregivers not only to stay on the job, but also to stay on a leadership track, even though their rise will likely be slower and more irregular than workers who are not caregivers.

Even more important, managers must recognize the enormous talent pool of women in their late forties and fifties who have taken time out for caregiving.

The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2020 the world will face a “skills gap” of nearly 40 million people, meaning that employers will need that many workers with a college degree or higher than the global labor force can supply. In their words, “
Businesses operating in this skills-scarce world must know how to find talent pools with the skills they need and to build strategies for hiring, retaining, and training the workers who will give them competitive advantage.” Part of the answer is right in front of them. All those women currently missing from the ranks of top management—the ones who keep disappearing between entry level and the C-suite—are actually still there. You just have to have eyes to see them and the foresight and wisdom to give them a real chance and hire them again.

So take some risks and invest in caregivers. Even more broadly, invest in care itself: in the many ways that our caring sides and our competitive sides can come together brilliantly and productively. Take your cue from Bill Gates, who amassed one of the world's biggest fortunes before being influenced by his wife,
Melinda, to give most of it away. One of the key moments for me in writing this book was reading a speech that he gave at the World Economic Forum in 2008, where he identified self-interest and caring for others as the twin forces of human nature.
He sees those same forces as the drivers of what he calls “creative capitalism,” the harnessing of market forces to lift billions of people out of poverty. Figure out how to mesh competition and care in your own business, and create the perfect workplace of your own.

We Americans love self-help.
The New York Times
devotes an entire separate bestseller list to self-help books. Manuals that tell us to lean in or stand up or climb over others as a way to enhance our personalities, overcome our flaws, and assure our progress speak to a national religion of self-improvement. After all, if it's only up to us, then change is within our control. It doesn't depend on organizing or mobilizing others within a political system that many of us see as dysfunctional.

Don't get me wrong. I've bought as many of those books as anyone else has—from how to lose weight to how to find inner peace. But when we're talking about the kinds of changes I am calling for, the only way each of our lives is going to get better is if we work together. We can't do it on our own; we have to exercise our collective political power to change the system. We've done it before, and we can do it again now.

I'm trained as a lawyer and a policy expert; I know as well as anyone that “policy” is just another word for a set of guidelines as to what we should do in a particular situation—e.g., “Honesty is the best policy.” Public policy means the principles we decide as citizens that we want to live by, principles that our elected representatives
translate into regulations and laws. It's the crystallization of what we can do if we come together and decide how we want our tax dollars to be spent. We can renew America, in line with the best of our history and ourselves, as a country that values work and family equally and enables its citizens to live full and happy lives.

B
USINESSES CANNOT COMPETE AND CREATE
value for themselves and society as a whole without roads, bridges, tunnels, ports and airports, railroad tracks, electricity, water, waste disposal, and, today, high-speed broadband. That is what “infrastructure” means: the skeleton of a functioning economy that everyone needs but individual citizens either cannot or will not provide on their own. The infrastructure of travel and transport—either through physical or virtual space—is the infrastructure of economic competition. We need an equal infrastructure of care: a set of arrangements and institutions that allows citizens to flourish not only in the pursuit of their individual goals but also in their relationships to one another.

We used to have an infrastructure of care: it was called women at home. But with almost 60 percent of those women in the workforce, that infrastructure has crumbled and it's not coming back. We need to build a new infrastructure of care for the twenty-first century, one that meets the demands of our society and our economy. Writing about the “elder boom” and its enormous impact on the growing need for care in the United States, Ai-jen Poo makes the point that although “
an infrastructure for care may seem different than an infrastructure for railroads, highways,
electricity or the Internet…care always comes first.” If you can't “feed, bathe, or clothe yourself,” none of the rest of it matters.

Poo talks about the “Care Grid,” just like the energy grid. I like the image. Just as we draw on different types of energy delivered through a variety of different grids, we will need many different approaches to providing and supporting care. Here are some of the possible elements of such an infrastructure, drawing on the policies of the United States and other countries:

The specifics of policy proposals on each of these issues differ from state to state and often by party affiliation and political philosophy; a comprehensive catalogue is thus impossible. But for
those of you who want to know more, you can find plenty of additional information in the endnotes of this book, including links to organizations where you can get directly involved and campaigns that you can support.

A major argument in favor of building a universal infrastructure of care by mandating things like paid leave and job protection for pregnant and even part-time workers is that it levels the playing field for those businesses that are trying to do the right thing. Putting these policies into place in an individual business, rather than achieving the same results through a tax-financed insurance program, can be expensive. In an economy of tight margins and litigious shareholders, taking on those expenses may cede a crucial advantage to the competition. A short-term advantage, to be sure, as firms determined to do right by their employees find themselves rewarded with higher engagement, productivity, and retention rates. But still, enough of an edge that we can't rely on corporations to make the necessary changes themselves, business by business. We need the kind of political change that establishes a new floor and a new set of standards to aspire to.

O
KAY
. Y
OU KNOW
I'
M A
Democrat. So if you are a Republican you may well be thinking that I'm in left-wing la-la land. But the politics of care are not so predictable. Consider Megyn Kelly, a Fox News anchor and working mother, who strongly agrees on the need for paid maternity leave.
In a live segment on her Fox show, she reminded Mike Gallagher, a conservative talk show host who had called her three-month maternity leave “a racket,” that the
United States is one of only four countries in the world that does not require paid maternity leave, adding, for good measure, that his reaction was “moronic.” “We're populating the human race,” she said. “It's not a vacation. It's hard, important work.”

Strengthening American families and supporting caring communities garners support across the political spectrum. On the left, President Obama put forward proposals to expand access to affordable, high-quality childcare in his 2015 budget. Right now, only 10 percent of children receive what's known as “high-quality care.”
Childcare workers make a median annual salary of less than twenty thousand dollars a year, yet families with two children in center-based care pay more money for childcare than they do for rent in all fifty states. Obama also called for more states to expand paid sick and family leave.

On the right, one of the few states that currently offers paid family leave (workers pay the cost out of a small increase in their payroll tax) is New Jersey, under Republican governor Chris Christie.
Republican senators have sponsored a law that would allow employers to offer employees paid leave hours instead of overtime pay; some polls show that
a majority of Republican women voters support paid family leave.
Republican senator Kelly Ayotte co-chairs a bipartisan caucus across both the Senate and the House devoted to assisting family caregivers. She follows in the footsteps of
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who successfully sponsored legislation to allow homemakers to contribute to retirement accounts the same way that salaried workers can.

We Americans differ, as always, on ways and means. The specific disagreement around care is not as much about whether we should be devoting resources to caring as it is about who, in fact, should be doing the caring. Conservatives prefer family, church, and community. Liberals worry that those approaches let far too
many Americans fall through the cracks, that they reinforce inequalities for those who are often most vulnerable and in need, with no family, church, or community to turn to.

My feeling is that our problems in this arena are so severe that we need to be trying both at the same time, recognizing a role for government
and
business, church
and
state, states
and
the federal government (and municipalities too). Moreover, why not encourage a little competition over care? Left and right should challenge each other to see whether market solutions or government solutions for the care crisis work better. Different states can adopt different solutions; we can develop common metrics to see where children, seniors, and others needing care are better off. Different cities can do the same. Whatever works best.

At the federal level, Congress should be able to pass a variety of measures that will allow states and workplaces to develop competing approaches. To get there, however, we will need compromise—recognition of the validity of multiple points of view and at least the
possibility
that a plan other than the one you favor just might work better. To get that compromise, in turn, we need more members of Congress with direct experience of caregiving.

Indeed, given the wide-ranging support from everyday Americans of both parties for more government help for caregivers, it often seems as if our legislators are the only ones who aren't getting the message. There's a simple reason for that: we are electing too many men. When I write that sentence, you may well read it as a sexist, essentialist claim about how men care about national defense and the state of the stock market and women care about families and a social safety net. It's never comfortable when reality confirms stereotypes, but at least for the moment, strong empirical evidence documents that
it's the women in Congress who are pushing for affordable daycare and paid leave.
What is new is that we now have reason to believe that reaching a critical mass of women in any group that operates by majority rule, including a legislature, may well cause
men
to behave differently.

A
MERICA
'
S REVOLUTIONARY RALLYING CRY WAS
“no taxation without representation.” We still haven't really achieved that goal. Men can represent women, of course, just as women can represent men, African Americans can represent European Americans, and older Americans can represent younger Americans. Still, the radical under-representation of women in our legislative bodies has dramatic implications.

If asked why we should vote for more women, most voters would be likely to think about the distinctive qualities they associate with women over men. In
The Athena Doctrine
, John Gerzema and Michael D'Antonio surveyed 64,000 women and men in thirteen countries about what is most important to “leadership, success, morality, and happiness today.”
In all thirteen countries, people of both genders picked stereotypically feminine traits—like collaboration, sharing credit, and patience—as the ones that will solve today's global challenges. The majority also admitted to being worn out by a “world dominated by codes of what they saw as traditionally masculine thinking and behavior: codes of control, competition, aggression and black-and-white thinking.” Amazingly, to me at least,
two-thirds of respondents believed the world would be a better place if “men thought more like women.”

At first glance, these assertions seem just as sexist as claims that the world would be a better place if women thought like men. They are riddled with stereotypes that ultimately do not benefit either sex. On the other hand, after conducting multiple
experiments, political scientists Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz find that
women in politics do in fact tend to pay more attention to caregiving issues and to the disadvantaged in general. But the numbers of women in legislative bodies don't matter on their own, in terms of actually passing laws that move the needle on these issues. As Mendelberg and Karpowitz write in their 2014 book
The Silent Sex
, summarizing their findings, “
Women's percentage in deliberating bodies matters little—in itself.”

What matters is whether women speak up. If they sit in town hall meetings, policy planning sessions, and general discussions and no one hears their views, nothing will change. Here numbers do matter, but only insofar as the number of women reaches a sufficient critical mass that women are actually prepared to say what they think. Once they do, all sorts of things change.

Mendelberg and Karpowitz conducted an experiment. Participants, both men and women, were separated into groups and told they would be doing tasks to earn money. They would then be deciding,
as a group
, how much of that money to redistribute to the members of the group who had the least. The observers recorded the results and also kept track of the participants' speech: how often speakers mentioned issues of caregiving versus economic issues and how often women spoke.

The results were surprising even to the researchers. First, Mendelberg and Karpowitz found that
all-women groups were much more generous than all-male groups—the guaranteed income of all group members was higher by about seven thousand dollars for all-female groups. Indeed, “
groups chose a more generous safety net under majority rule as the number of women rose.” Unsurprisingly to any woman, they also found that
women speak less when they are in the minority.

Most striking, however, Mendelberg and Karpowitz discovered that at least in some circumstances, when women are the
majority in the group,
men
speak more about caregiving issues. In groups with one man and four women, 62 percent of the men raised the topic of children, compared with just 19 percent of men in groups of four men and one woman. Of course, an experimental lab setting isn't the same as the floor of Congress. Still, these findings underline the point that when women's voices are not heard, the issues women care about are not considered relevant or essential. They are considered separate women's issues instead of everybody issues.