CEOs Struggle to Practice What They Preach in Balancing Work and Family

It seems like a contradiction: the work-family balance of the CEO. Traditionally, those who make it to the top sacrifice everything--vacations, family lives, sometimes their health.

Yet even as they cope with tremendous work pressures, a progressive few chief executives are seeking better balance.

They’re doing it for themselves, often after personal tragedies. But CEOs are also realizing that if they truly want to create the family-friendly company that employees increasingly demand, they should practice what they preach.

Take Vance Brown, for example. The chief executive of GoldMine Software, a Colorado Springs, Colo., software company, slowed his frantic work pace a few years ago after his marriage nearly failed.Today he’s adamant about setting aside time for family and fun not only because he values balance in his own life, but also because he knows he’d look like a hypocrite if he promoted flexibility while exhibiting none.

“If you talk about it but you don’t live it, employees see right through that,” Brown says. “You have to be a role model.”

Brown is a rarity. Under increasing pressure from stockholders, the global economy and e-commerce, most CEOs worry much more about business.

Executives do snatch time off, but more than 80% work during vacations, according to a recent survey of 5,000 top managers by Management Recruiters International.

At work, they’re just as fixated. Asked about their most pressing management issues in the coming year, 40% of CEOs recently surveyed by the Conference Board, a business-funded research group, cited customer loyalty as their top concern. Only 1% cited “helping employees achieve work-life balance.”

Many CEOs undoubtedly like their grueling workload. After all, many are Type A’s who succeeded because they were willing to make sacrifices for the job and who expect employees to do the same.

“You lose perspective,” Brown recalls of his years of frenetic travel and work. “It’s like an addiction. It’s hard to know it’s happening.”

Some CEOs do want more balance in their own lives yet feel the responsibility of keeping a company going--and hundreds of workers in jobs--is more pressing than a child’s soccer game or a spouse’s birthday dinner.

“They believe in the magic of postponement,” says Dr. Barrie Sanford Greiff, a Harvard Business School psychiatrist who treats many CEOs and also works with them as a management consultant. “They feel the immediate pressure of the day-to-day.”

Then there are older CEOs, who usually have stay-at-home wives. Guiltily aware of the sacrifices they made to get ahead, they often stoutly resist talk of work-family balance. Valuing balance is like admitting “I didn’t live right,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of Families and Work Institute, a New York-based nonprofit group.

Younger CEOs are more apt to understand the importance of balance, often because their spouses work, says Harry Kraemer, a 44-year-old CEO of medical products maker Baxter International Inc.

“If my father wanted a glass of water, my mother would get it,” says Kraemer, a father of four who was lauded as a work-family role model for his employees by Catalyst, a research organization. “If I ever wanted a glass of water and asked my wife, you know what she would do with it?”

Younger CEOs also are increasingly women, who by tradition have been deeply involved in caring for their elders, children and homes.

Katie Smith, CEO of San Rafael, Calif.-based Mulberry Neckwear, took a lot of time off last fall to care for her elderly father and for a young son with cancer. Those dark days, she says, further underscored her commitment to having a family-friendly company.

“It’s something we talk about, striving for balance,” she says. “If someone’s going on maternity leave, I tell them to take the full four months.”

CEOs such as Smith realize that more of their employees are making work-life balance a priority--at a time when many can choose their workplace because of the tight labor market.

To stem an exodus of talented women a few years ago, the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche began radically changing its corporate culture, from one that valued overtime and hours logged in the office to one that prizes flexibility and efficiency.

From the start, the company made changes from the top down, thanks largely to the foresight of J. Michael Cook, who retired as CEO in May. Executives, for instance, learned to openly say they were having dinner at home or watching a school play, rather than saying they were “with a client.”

When a CEO isn’t afraid to openly value his own balance, employees are more likely to believe they can too.

Donna Sanborn, employee relations manager at the Birmingham, Ala., engineering and construction firm BE&K;, rattles off numerous times when CEO Mike Goodrich’s day-to-day actions proved to her that work-life balance does count there.

Once, he left a long-running client meeting to trick-or-treat with one of his children. “That says it all,” Sanborn says. “It all starts with the top.”

Goodrich knows that he’s a role model to his employees. Sometimes he deliberately makes choices based on the signals he wants to send them, such as taking his family along on business trips to show that it’s OK to do so.

Still, he says, it’s not easy being a role model, a CEO and a parent. “It’s a most extraordinarily difficult balancing act,” he says.