Men Want to Have Fun, Too | In-house Access

That’s all they really want
Some fun
When the working day is done
Girls – they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have fun

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about how women can achieve a better work/life balance in their careers. Starting with a provocative piece in the Atlantic Monthly, the conversation has now turned to the in-house profession and its amenability to women being able to grow professionally and in other spheres of their lives. This blog post is about making sure that the conversation, which has been quite fruitful thus far, doesn’t forget about the many men who would like that work/life balance as well.

I’ll start with my own experience. After clerking for a couple of years, I joined a high-power Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice here in Washington, DC. My goals were clear: 1) argue a bunch of Supreme Court cases; 2) become a federal judge. To make a long story short, my wife and I were blessed with a second child, and I took a long, hard look at my life and decided to try something different.

After a zig and a zag, I joined the United States Chamber of Commerce as an in-house lawyer managing their extensive Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice. And now, I’m at the ACC representing the in-house bar and have an amazing front-row seat to the dramatic changes occurring in the legal profession. So, I’m not complaining.

That said, I’ve learned a few things along the way about trying to maintain a good work/life balance. So, in my best David Letterman voice, here it goes:

10. You — not your job, not your career — make work-life balance happen. You can’t delegate away that responsibility.

9. Work/life balance is more difficult with the billable hour model. There are a lot of things wrong with that method of compensation. This is just one of them.

8. It’s the team, stupid. When you’re looking at job opportunities, one key ingredient — beyond what’s written in the flexible workplace policy — is the kind of people with whom you’ll be spending your time. Life is better when work doesn’t take more than its pound of flesh out of you.

7. Upward mobility is way overrated. Find something you enjoy doing and stop worrying if it will lead anywhere.

6. 80/20. An Italian economist came up with this formula, which I now will distort as follows: Focus on what drives the most return on investment and don’t sweat the small stuff.

5. Work/life balance is not just for women. As I wrote in the lead, both women and men want it. I sure do.

4. Having a fulfilling personal life makes me a better worker. Self-explanatory, but have you ever worked with somebody who doesn’t have a life?

3. I really love my wife and kids.

2. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs. If #3, or some variant thereof, matters to you, well, you have to pick. You can’t have it all.

1. The biggest enemy is guilt. Banish it now. Something, or things, will suffer. That’s OK. What’s not OK is a lawyer’s inborn capacity to stew about it for ages.

I know what you’re thinking — that left you as fulfilled as one of Dave’s Top Tens. Since I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon, no worries. With that said, I would love to hear, and learn from, your top ten lessons in the comments. Until then, I’m off to have a bit of fun.

Elisa Garcia

#7–Upward mobility is way overrated is so true, especially in the in-house context. We have a very flat organization and I have trouble understanding what drives a fixation on becoming a VP. If the work is interesting, if you continue to grow and your salary is fair and has bonus potential, that may have to be enough (or consider a move to the business side). I guess that is easy for me to say, I am the GC.
http://www.LegaleExecutiveLeadership.com/ Susan Hackett

Hey, Amar!

I’m so glad you wrote your piece – all true. I’ll just toss one more thought into the bucket for conversation and consideration: as most folks fight for some form of balance, there’s a strong temptation for managers to translate that desire into a request for fewer hours or less responsibility. It’s been my experience that men and women looking for balance don’t want that: what they want is flexibility … the ability to work by remote, or have hours that vary, or to have their work assigned by tasks that need to be completed by Friday, but which will be judged on the quality of completion, and not on the number of hours they spent at the office getting it done. In other words, balance will eventually flow more evenly when our workplaces move from assigning value to lots of activity, rather than assigning valuing to the outcomes delivered. In order to move toward the latter, we need as managers to think about asking our staffs to deliver defined products that can be measured, we need to set targets and goals and then set workers free to accomplish them within the guidelines we agree upon, and we need to compensate and promote workers according to how well they performed.

Sounds like our favorite New Normal arguments for moving away from billable hours, doesn’t it? There’s a reason. :-) I’m all in for efficiency and results over stacks of hours anytime!

The real challenges in balance for me have to do with the coordination and project management of collaborative teams – many of whom include folks who would like to work outside of traditional 8 am – 6 pm office hours, or in virtual fashion,and many of whom are not on duty when the client calls and demands it now, or a surge of work explodes without warning…. Far too often, the reality is that when those of us who’ve made an effort to craft a flexible schedule for ourselves succeed, it is still on the backs of those who are left to man the office without that kind of flexible balance. Is that rectified by adjusting comp? Can every member of the team enjoy balance and flex? And if not, won’t the only folks who achieve more desired balances be the folks at the upper end of the food chain? I don’t know, but I hope we continue to move toward better models at all levels. We’re only just now getting enough experience with these concepts for the debate to move forward informed by learnings from practical application …. I’ll be interested and watching. As they say, no one ever finds that magical place called “balance”: the nature of the effort is to spend our lives seeking it – day by day and matter by matter. Hopefully, we get better and better each time we try.

-Susan
Barbara Lander

I completely agree with your list. Along the same lines of #7, I’d add, Don’t let anybody else dictate what you want in your career. When I worked as a summer associate in a large New York firm, the lawyer who ran the program asked me, “Do you want to make partner here?” I answered, “How can I possibly answer that now? I just got here.”

Well, apparently that was the wrong answer. And that was definitely the wrong place for me. But the truth was I didn’t know whether I ever wanted to be a partner at any law firm, let alone that one. Am I the only person who ever answered that question truthfully? Office politics has never been my strong suit. But your career is your career. Don’t worry about what you’re supposed to want.