Work-Life Sanity Blog

IN the opening chapter of The Art of Possibility, Roz Zander writes about a life lesson she learned on a white water rafting trip.

The rafting company put people through substantial training before going out on the water.  One key element of the training was “Toes to Nose.”  When you fall out of the raft into the thrashing water, they were taught, bring your toes to your nose and look for the boat.

Toes to nose keeps your feet from getting caught in the rocks below and brings you to the surface, where you can grab an oar or rope from the boat closest to you.  The trainer drummed this mantra into people’s heads til they rolled their eyes.  It had to be completely automatic, he said.

During the actual rafting trip, Roz was thrown into the roiling water.  The sudden shock of cold water, the absolute roar in her ears, the darkness of being submerged!  In the midst of massive sensory overload and the adrenaline rush of mortal crisis, she remembered and executed toes to nose.  Presto!  She was suddenly at the surface, visible to the instructor on the sweeper raft, who pulled her out of the water.

There is great value in having a survival mantra such as this for your everyday life. When crises and demands pile up and you are suddenly underwater . . . it can be a lifesaver to have an automatic instruction for yourself.   The instruction has to be simple enough that you remember it when you’re completely overloaded.

For a software engineer with a work crunch at work and approaching finals in her MBA program, the mantra she finds most useful is “‘Good enough’ is good enough.”  This simple slogan helps her manage her shrill inner perfectionist, who wants perfect results on all fronts, 24/7.  In real life, that’s neither an option nor a requirement.  For example, she doesn’t really need to ace her finals.

An executive director I know recently recognized how drained, miserable, and resentful she is of all the other people she takes such good care of: her staff, clients, board, and husband.   Her new survival instruction is, “Take care of yourself too!”

For an investment banker who takes work home every night but doesn’t do it, much to her own growing panic, the directive that makes a difference is, “Do what you have to do first.  Then do what you want.”

In a post-event interview, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was asked, “How did you feel after you doubled the triple axel?”  She responded (and I paraphrase), ”I’m trained to go right on to the next move.  I don’t have the luxury of thinking about what I just did.  I just moved on.”

I personally am benefitting from ”Just move on.”  There is always time for analysis later, if that’s appropriate.

So . . . what’s your life-saving mantra, and in what situations does it serve you?  Consider drafting a candidate or two to test over the next 6 weeks: simple instructions which could offer you some safety when you get bounced out of the raft.  See if you can come up with your own “toes to nose” to deploy into the New Year.

Would you like to take a look at one company’s bold and effective response to employees’ changing needs for flexibility over the course of a working lifetime?  I have a fascinating book to recommend: Mass Career Customization, by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg. 

Benko and Weisberg write about how their company, Deloitte, has implemented a very new approach to flex.   

Deloitte has long been a standout leader in creating policies and practices that accommodate people’s needs for myriad forms of flexible work.  They started down this path many years ago as a means of stemming their costly turnover rates, particularly for their most talented women.  They were losing highly talented women from the partnership track at an alarming rate, mostly during the years when these women had young children.    Deloitte became the poster child company for family-friendly policies, and they reaped phenomenal savings in dollars and morale by dramatically increasing retention across the board. 

Now they’re taking it to the next level by implementing a broad system of customizing employees’ schedules and workloads a year at a time, based on the employee’s needs.  They call this dynamic “mass career customization” (MCC) , and this is the book that tells the story. 

Deloitte is normalizing the need for flexibility: it’s no longer seen as an accommodation or a one-time need that will evaporate at some point (and the sooner the better!).   Rather, Deloitte is acting as if anyone could need an  unconventional schedule or workload during any or all of their working years, so better to be nimble enough to roll with these needs rather than lose the employee.   The result is a robust and committed workforce with extraordinary capacity.   Because the company benefits, I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future.

According the Professor Myra Hart of Harvard Business School, ”With an MCC approach, corporations are not saying, ‘I want only your good years or the years in which you can make a maximum contribution.’  Instead, corporations are saying to  employees, ‘We really want a lifetime contract with you.’  This is a very new approach to employee retention.”

Shelly Lazarus, Chairman & CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, writes, “Finally, a book recognizing that the needs of today’s knowledge workers are far from a women-only issue. Mass Career Customization provides an incisive analysis of what’s really happening on the talent front and a comprehensive approach of what to do about it.”

I can’t say it reads as fast as fiction, but it’s a great read.  You may think you’re reading fiction when you see what’s going on at Deloitte.   Check it out.