A lot of us raised this question when we look for a job opportunity at a company and a lot of companies "advertise" about their wonderful work-life balance as a 'selling point' to candidates. During company presentation or informational interview, we hear "testimonials" from current employees at that particular company who said that they are VPs or senior leaders of some kind yet they still have time to take vacation, take their kids to school, take care of their sick relatives - basically do whatever "normal" people do while still hold those high-paying jobs and perform well. Seduced by these convincing messages and lured by the lucrative compensation they could get at that level, we then sign the job offer and embark on our career journey in the hope to get the best of both worlds: executive level job with top dollars and happy, fulfilled personal life.
Several years into our career we started to realize that things are not as easy and as rosy as we thought. We spend the typical-corporate-America-60-hour-per-week on the jobs and we see that our managers spend 70 hours per week and our manager's manager spend even more. We see that the senior leaders/VPs are always at the office bright and early at 7 am every morning and no one knows what time they get home since usually they 'disappear' into their meetings during the day and nobody sees them when we leave for home at regular hours. Where is the work-life balance that they were bragging about when they were to recruit us ? Does it exist or is it just some company propaganda designed to lure high-potential, ambitious candidates to bite the bait and join the crowd ?
To me the answer is "yes, it exists" but it really depends on how you go about it. It's not a straightforward answer (nothing ever is, isn't it ? :), so here is my explanation. The key word here is "balance". I think work-life balance will be different for every person. Some people spend 80% of their time working and only 20% enjoying their personal life and still feel that they have work-life balance. Some people choose to limit the number of hours they spend for work in order to give 'more balance' to their work-life balance. Of course there are consequences for any of these choices. Those who choose to spend lots and lots of hours for work will have a better chance in getting to the top and climbing the corporate ladder. Those who don't will have to "settle" for something else. Hence I think work-life balance exists and people make choices on how they want to 'balance' their work and personal life.
Just like in everything else in our life, we make trade-offs in our career and nothing is easy. If you want to be at the top of the company, no matter how big or small the company is, you need to make sacrifices to get there. It is important for some people to be at the top and they are willing to do anything to get there. They enjoy working and being at the top makes them happy. But for some other people, their personal life is more important and they don't want to sacrifice that to be in a higher level of position. For these people, they enjoy spending more time with their family or pursuing their hobbies more than working. Different from the first group of people, doing something for their personal life is what makes them happy and they couldn't care less if that means that they cannot be a VP or if that means that they can "only" be a director of some kind.
So next time you hear a senior leader explains how they can achieve work-life balance, the question you need to ask is how they define 'balance' and dig deeper into their 'pristine' examples on how they manage it. They probably do take vacations, but they still take work-related phone calls during their vacations. They probably do have time to take their kids to school, but they might miss a bunch of their kids' games or plays. They probably do take care of their sick relatives, but they need to check emails often while doing that.
And next time you see those people who have worked for the company for more than 10 years and still be a director, you might want to think again if that career move actually suits you better than being at the top of corporate ladder.
Everything comes at a cost. The choice is yours (and of course mine !).
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