If you're passionate about your career--and about being a great mom or dad--you're facing an ongoing struggle for at least 18 years. But you can learn techniques to reduce the stress and successfully balance your professional and family roles. The author, an executive coach who specializes in helping working parents, suggests that you start by identifying the kinds of challenges you're confronting. There are five core types: those involving transitions (such as returning to work after parental leave, or hiring a new caregiver); practical challenges (dealing with errands, appointments, and all your other responsibilities); communication issues (conversations and negotiations about working-parent matters); feelings of loss (fear that you're missing out at work or at home); and identity concerns (uncertainty about your priorities and how you define yourself). To mitigate these challenges, the author recommends five powerful strategies: (1) Rehearse to prepare for transitions; (2) audit your commitments and plan your calendar so that practicalities don't overwhelm you; (3) frame your working-parent messages effectively; (4) use "today plus 20 years" thinking to put losses into perspective; and (5) revisit and recast your professional identity and brand.
Parivar, an IT services firm with a long history of attracting talented people with its family-like culture suddenly faces a spate of resignations among rank-and-file employees. As the vice president of HR tries to figure out what's behind the exodus, the CEO wants to create a brand-new function charged with reinforcing the company's culture. As Parivar prepares for global expansion, is emphasizing the family-like atmosphere the key to retaining employees, or has the company's approach started to become a liability? David A. Garvin, of Harvard Business School, lays out the fictionalized case. Expert commentary comes from Ganesh Natarajan, the vice chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies (on which the case is loosely based), and from Daisy Dowling, the head of talent development at Blackstone Group.
Parivar, an IT services firm with a long history of attracting talented people with its family-like culture suddenly faces a spate of resignations among rank-and-file employees. As the vice president of HR tries to figure out what's behind the exodus, the CEO wants to create a brand-new function charged with reinforcing the company's culture. As Parivar prepares for global expansion, is emphasizing the family-like atmosphere the key to retaining employees, or has the company's approach started to become a liability? David A. Garvin, of Harvard Business School, lays out the fictionalized case. Expert commentary comes from Ganesh Natarajan, the vice chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies (on which the case is loosely based), and from Daisy Dowling, the head of talent development at Blackstone Group.
The chairman and CEO of DineEquity, the restaurant company that owns the Applebee's and IHOP brands, says the key to managing for performance across more than 3,300 sites is to turn the workplace into a classroom. "When employees feel like they're learning," she says, "they become more enthusiastic about their work, and that shows through to the customer in a hundred different ways."
The CEO of Chanel recalls her days as a young merchant, when she was taken to task by a powerful executive for not listening. Twenty years later, his words still profoundly affect the way she thinks about her company's products and interacts with customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
The president and CEO of Travelocity remembers how her father built his environmental-engineering start-up into a business with 300 employees, in part through a striking degree of care for and interest in them as individuals. Peluso has 5,000 employees - and a global organization - but she's learned to scale up her father's techniques.
The chairman and founder of Bright Horizons Family Solutions heeded the wisdom of visionary real estate developer James Rouse: Make your passions central to your life. By doing that, she has created a highly successful company with employees who are driven by its mission to give children the best possible start in life.
Breitfelder and Dowling are two recent Harvard MBAs who have worked in fields typically chosen by alumni of esteemed business schools: strategy consulting, investment banking, you know the score. Ultimately, however, these promising young professionals decided to do the unexpected and enter human resources. They switched gears not to achieve work/life balance or avoid tough challenges but to get in early on a good thing, as any smart value investor would. HR sits, according to the authors, in the middle of the most important competitive battleground in business. Finding and retaining the best talent has become an increasingly vital competitive advantage, making HR a truly strategic function for any company today. Breitfelder and Dowling have seen this shift firsthand in their work at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and MasterCard-and have had it confirmed by their colleagues and former classmates at other top-tier firms. Such companies recognize the real value of excellent, motivated employees and are investing time and energy accordingly; in the process, they are defining what the authors call "the New HR." This HR of the future has five characteristics: It, like a business school, promotes active learning; it serves as an engine for both savings and revenue; it hatches and harvests ideas across organizational boundaries; it makes big places smaller by connecting people intimately and often; and it focuses on the positive, moving beyond fixing problems and enforcing rules to enhancing employee engagement and capitalizing on people's strengths. If that's what HR is becoming, why wouldn't you go into it?
The chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group reflects on the advice of his high school track coach, who continually reminded him that the person who is most prepared is the one who wins.
The president and CEO of Estee Lauder Companies learned the importance of time management back when he worked under U.S. treasury secretary Donald Regan. The lesson sounds simple, but it has shaped his approach to strategy and his philosophy on motivating people.
The managing director and CEO of PIMCO fondly remembers a boss who helped him find solace in failure. Bolstering your high performers when they fall short, he says, is the key to maximizing their potential.
The head of Infosys Technologies talks about the power of a well-placed word of encouragement and what it taught him about the CEO's toughest challenge--motivating people.