Andrew Carnegie founded the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, better known as TIAA, as a pension system for educators. More than a century later, it still provides retirement financial services, and these days it has nearly five million individual customers and around $1.4 trillion in assets under management.
So it was no surprised to hear TIAA’s president and CEO break out a finance metaphor when she gave her take on the ever-popular leadership topic of work-life balance.
“Work-life balance: It’s a lie,” Thasunda Brown Duckett said earlier this year at the Global Leadership Summit. “I tried that thing, but I am in finance and it never reconciled.”
My road to the CEO office began as an accounting major at Penn State and included time as a Chief Financial Officer, so I can relate to Duckett’s need to see things reconcile – on the balance sheet, but also in life.
There are several problems with the typical view of work-life balance, but among the biggest are that it implies two things that aren’t true. One, that there can be an even split between “work” and “life” with each getting an equal share of our time and energy. And two, that work is somehow separate from “life” rather than part of it.
To get “balance,” in other words, we have to pull “work” out of “life” and then put them on opposite pans of a scale in a way that comes out weighted 50-50. Who can do that? Who would want to?
In reality, So Duckett — and, again, she leads a financial services company – likes to view priorities as an investment portfolio. What we need, she said, is a diversified portfolio with a long-term strategy.
“Think about everything that matters to you — I am a CEO, I am a philanthropist, I am a mother, a daughter, an aunt, a sister, a friend, and I have to have some self-care — and allocate,” she said.
Keep in mind, she added, that no one has more than 100 percent to give. “It’s only 100,” she said, “so allocate accordingly.”
You can’t allocate 100 percent to your children and 100 percent to your work and 100 percent to your hobbies and 100 percent to all your other interests. In fact, she said allocating 30 percent to her children was pretty high. But, she said, “By telling myself the truth, I became a more present mother.”
Why? Because that 30 percent was just for her kids. She wasn’t multitasking on five other things while trying to spend time with her kids in some misguided effort to give all her priorities 100 percent at the same time.
Another thing about good portfolio management is that the allocations can change with the circumstances. Life’s version of market volatility might require us to give more time to work challenges for a period and less to friends and family. Or it might be like when Duckett’s brother died unexpectedly and she felt like she needed to be more present as a daughter, sibling, and aunt than as a wife.
Seeing life as a diversified portfolio gives us permission to respond to volatility and reallocate to address changing realities.
It also helps us keep a healthy perspective when we feel like we are underperforming in one area, because a portfolio plays the long game.
“If you live your life like a diversified portfolio, everything that matters to you is in it,” Duckett said in summarizing her approach. “And over time, you will outperform this thing called life and have joy. You will give yourself grace. And you will understand when you are over-allocated on something, even when you love it, and you have to recalibrate to give space to something else. I’m living my best life because everything I love is in my portfolio, and I give myself a ton of grace.”
I don’t know about you, but that approach reconciles nicely in my book.
