How many people are you trying to be?

Rethinking the notion of work-life balance

By Tricia Brick. Photo by Barry Chin/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Goats on boats top the agenda for Elaine Philbrick’s Tuesday morning meeting. It’s a crisp winter day and she’s in Boston to figure out how to get her goats across Boston Harbor. The ever-hungry ruminants are the living engines of Philbrick’s business, the Goatscaping Company, and they’re being considered by the Commonwealth’s Department of Conservation & Recreation (DCR) to clear poison ivy, brambles, and dense brush from Peddocks and Bumpkin Islands.

In the year since she founded the Goatscaping Company—“just what it sounds like!” proclaims the firm’s website—Philbrick (MBA’99) has gone from ferrying four goats to a local golf course in the back of her Toyota SUV to overseeing a business of 30 animals that spend the spring to fall chomping their way across the rocky, wooded green spaces of a full roster of customers: residences, car dealerships, municipal parks.

Philbrick (main photo with Goatscaping Company co-owner Jim Courmier) had been dressed in her usual Tuesday attire of jeans and work boots for the morning routine of seeing her two kids off to school and the DCR meeting that followed, but a wardrobe change would be needed for the next item in her schedule: a client meeting at her consulting company, Derivative Advisors.

For Philbrick, this is what a balanced life looks like. “When I get tired of getting scratched by briars, it’s lovely to sit in a clean office and type away at my laptop. When I get tired of sitting and never venturing outside, it’s bliss to walk around the farm or golf course and have fun with my goats,” Philbrick says. “I am happier as a better-rounded person who gets to use different skill sets, and it keeps me from getting burned out on my ‘day job.’ I love my first job, but there are other things I want to do also, and I’m happy to be an example of not having to lose one to get the other.”

At a time when companies like Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch make the news for suggesting junior employees take off at least four days a month—four weekend days—the idea of work-life balance may seem a pipe dream. Indeed, a 2013 Pew Research Center study found that fully half of parents have difficulty balancing family and job responsibilities. And parents are not alone in experiencing these stresses; amid continued high job instability and high unemployment, people in general are feeling both insecure within organizations and powerless to forge careers off the beaten path.

But two BU School of Management scholars argue that within this precarious environment, it is all the more essential for individuals to be proactive in building careers that not only are professionally fulfilling but also allow a sense of balance in the entirety of their lives, wherever priorities may lie.

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior Erin Reid is exploring the ways in which workers’ productivity and sense of personal fulfillment are affected by employer pressures on how their work and nonwork lives interrelate. Douglas T. Hall, Morton H. and Charlotte Friedman Professor in Management, continues to break new ground in the study of what he calls “protean careers,” the pursuit of success as defined by individuals rather than by an organization or even by society as a whole.

Together, their research suggests that the very notion of work-life balance is founded on an obsolete dichotomy. “Industries grew up around men with stay-at-home wives, men who didn’t have to take care of their children,” Reid says. “Now there are women, and men, who have these nonwork commitments—but the model of what it means to be a successful person in these industries hasn’t changed.”

In offering new models that more accurately reflect reality for today’s workplaces, these scholars are changing the way we think about the place of our jobs in our nonwork lives (and vice versa) and how we manage our staff. In doing so, they are opening the door to new solutions to enable individuals to live more productive, integrated, and personally meaningful lives.

Having It All

Hall has been studying protean careers—careers designed primarily by individuals rather than by organizations—since he coined the term in the mid-1970s. In the intervening years, he has watched as a restructuring of the global economy has resulted, on the personal level, in the destabilization of individual career paths. No longer do most of our lives hew to a linear model of career progression, created for a time when the typical worker was a man, with a wife at home to manage children and household, who would spend his working years moving up the ladder of a single organization.

In place of this outdated paradigm, Hall proposes an “entangled strands” model, in which work, family, personal needs, and community are ever-shifting factors affecting the dynamic evolution of our careers—and of our lives. In this model, individuals do have significant autonomy to shape a career, but are operating within a complex network of relationships and circumstances, all while navigating conditions and events largely beyond their control.

Philbrick speaks enthusiastically about the benefits of integrating the various threads that are most important to her: her work at Derivative Advisors, her family, and now her side business in goatscaping. “It’s been good for all of us, my kids included,” she says. “They can’t be part of my other job; they’re not going to understand derivatives—they’re 8 and 10 years old. But they can help feed the goats; they come with me on jobs. They told me they’d like to take the business over from me.”

Philbrick is quick to add that the fact she is her own boss—that she has Tuesdays off from her job at Derivative Advisors; that she can leave the office to deal with a goat-related emergency if necessary—is a key to why she has been able to successfully balance her various priorities. “I own more than 50 percent of both companies, so I can give myself flexibility,” she says. “If I were working for a boss . . . well, I would need a very understanding boss.”

She’s not alone in wondering whether a certain set of privileged circumstances are necessary to build lives that are both personally and professionally fulfilling. It’s a belief reflected in the recent backlash to the “do what you love” movement, whose guiding maxim has been pilloried among progressives as the smug self-empowerment mantra of affluent dilettantes (and condemned, in publications like Forbes and Inc., as poor business advice).

Hall, who also teaches organizational behavior, argues this is a misconception. “One criticism of this idea of the self-directed career is that it’s a nice luxury for people who have jobs, who have resources, who have the means to make these choices,” he says. “But we’re finding that you don’t have to be in a privileged position to be able to be proactive and craft your career in a direction that fits with your values. In fact, we’re finding that for people who don’t have those means, it is even more essential that they be really proactive, that they really utilize their social network and their developmental network, even more important that they develop coping strategies to help them find employment.”

In an ongoing study of unemployed people in Australia, Hall and his coresearchers have found that unemployed people with a strong “protean career orientation”—those who are self-directed, aware of what their personal values are, and determined to make choices that are true to those values—tended to be reemployed the fastest.

Still, the context of this study provides a potent reminder that autonomy is not the only factor at work in determining the shape of a career: though the individuals with the strongest protean career orientations seemed best positioned to reenter the workforce after losing their jobs, the unemployment itself was not part of their plan.

Indeed, the “entangled strands” model underscores that much individual agency occurs not in a vacuum but in response to external circumstances—those “unexpected” events that in fact can be counted on to occur in every life.

Employers downsize, merge, decline. Children get sick, parents grow older. Accidents happen. Any of these events can lead to powerful career repercussions. But Hall has found that a sense of resilience, and the determination to learn from the challenges one faces, allow people to adapt more successfully to events beyond their control. Also protective is the existence of support networks, both personal and career-related.

Elaine Philbrick’s founding of Derivative Advisors exemplifies how circumstance and self-direction—shaped by an individual’s evolving priorities—can interplay to alter the course of a career. Philbrick hadn’t planned to start her own business; she was preparing to return to work as a director in the capital markets group at FleetBoston following her first maternity leave when Bank of America bought the company. She was one of some 17,000 people reported to have lost their jobs in the wake of the merger. While another parent might have seen in the layoffs a chance to stay at home with her new baby, Philbrick says she felt the time wasn’t right. “I was in my thirties, in the prime of my career, and I wasn’t done yet. And, of course, leaving the job wasn’t my choice.” At the time, few banks were hiring in their derivative rooms, so she contacted a few colleagues who’d also been laid off and together they started Derivative Advisors.

While Philbrick wasn’t ready to become a stay-at-home mom, the new baby did change the shape of her career, leading her to build her company according to a different model than is the norm in the financial industry. She established the firm’s offices in Rockland, Massachusetts, not far from her South Shore home. She worked a four-day week, with Tuesdays to be home with her daughter and, later, her son. “I’m at their bus stop every morning, and I am at their bus stop every afternoon that they don’t have an after-school activity. Because it is my company, I have flexibility. I can work a little bit from home,” she says. “Thanks to the Internet, being able to save files in the cloud, getting email on a BlackBerry or iPhone, clients don’t need to know where you’re calling from.”

Tangled Timelines

Even as the rise of telecommuting, 24/7 email access, and social networking over the last two decades has liberated many individuals from the office, it has also created new kinds of tethers. A 2008 Pew Research Internet Project study found that nearly half of BlackBerry- and PDA-using workers must check email when they are not at work. A similar percentage of all email-using workers said they check emails when they are on sick leave, and 34 percent do so on vacation.

Kabrina Chang, assistant professor of markets, public policy & law, says the advent of social networking has further blurred the line between work and nonwork identities for many people. “Gone are the days of this clear delineation between work and home, when your personality at work could be totally separate from your personality at home,” she says. “People use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both purposes. They post about work when they’re at home and they post about home when they’re at work. In their mind, they’re commenting about their life: your life is home and work and everything else.”

This integration of work and nonwork identities has positive aspects, allowing people to be forthright about efforts to align nonwork priorities with work needs. “You hear this clichéd advice for working mothers: Don’t talk about your kids at work. Never admit you have to leave early to bring a child to a doctor’s appointment,” Chang (CAS’92) says. “Men, too, are constrained by these cultural norms, to fulfill the stereotype of the working-guy breadwinner, and might feel less able to stay home because a child is sick. But the more authentic we are at work, the less taboo that becomes, the more normalized it becomes. This is my life; this is what happens.”

From a career standpoint, these are dangerous waters. If a coworker who is a Facebook friend shows a compromising post or photo to a supervisor, it is perfectly legal if that supervisor uses that photo or post to reprimand or even terminate an employee, Chang says. In the job hunt, too, online histories can haunt candidates. “Let’s say I am a manager with a position open, and I decide to Google the top candidates,” Chang says. “I see lots of pictures: I see pictures at a First Communion, at an NRA meeting, at an LGBT meeting—all of these aspects of people’s lives. I may be the most understanding, reasonable person in the world, but I am human, and it’s hard to separate out that information.”

Making Life Work

This is what an increasingly integrated life looks like: at work, someone can be not only an engineer or an analyst but also a parent, a Catholic, a gun owner, a lesbian. But given the choice, many of us would prefer to keep some aspects of our personal lives personal. Reid is studying the tensions between workers’ preferences and organizational pressures.

Pressures may be particular to an organization, industry-­specific, or even widespread in the culture, as in the long-­standing “myth of separate worlds” that asks employees to act as though their work and nonwork identities are entirely distinct. Other pressures are inclusionary, encouraging people to “be themselves” at work in various ways—from allowing flexibility for parents to creating expectations that workers spend off-hours socializing with colleagues or clients.

When pressures and preferences are conflicting, the effects on an employee’s sense of well-being can be significant, ranging from psychological unease to stress-related health problems. Reid recalls a man who got a job at a law firm only to find that his strong Boston accent raised eyebrows in the office. He began to consciously adjust the way he spoke in order to fit in with the culture of the firm; essentially, he was concealing where he’d come from.

Reid’s research indicates that a sense of satisfaction with one’s work-life balance is most likely when employer or industry pressures and individual preferences are in alignment. But how does this alignment happen, if such flexibility isn’t already company policy? Reid has found that actively resisting problematic pressures can be an effective starting place for changing the culture of a workplace. It’s a change, she says, that can benefit both employee and employer. “When people experience misalignment, they experience psychic strain; they’re less productive; their relationships at work can suffer; and there’s likely to be a higher turnover,” she says. “Employers want to foster the kind of balance between work and nonwork that employees prefer.”

Many managers, she says, may accept the conventional wisdom that encouraging employees to bring their “whole selves” to work is better for everyone. But she advises bosses to remain aware that these preferences are highly specific to the individual, and that many people choose to keep some aspects of their work and nonwork identities separate. “I think the big takeaway for me in studying these issues is that people really struggle with this, and that it’s not just confined to work-family questions,” Reid says. “It’s about your whole self outside of work: your class, your religion, your race. Most people are put in a position where they’re struggling with how the kind of person they want to be fits the expectations of their employers. So it’s a difficult process, and yet it’s a common process. And I think it’s one that both employers and people who are working need to be more aware of and to manage.”

Workplace cultures based on performance and results rather than face-time hours, Hall says, are especially conducive to allowing individuals the autonomy to create their own balance. He advises everyone to mobilize their initiative, their ingenuity, and their relationships with others—colleagues, employees, networking contacts—to reshape their careers according to their values. And he emphasizes that workers’ immediate supervisors can be their best advocates. While corporate policy and HR practices can support flexibility and individual choice in terms of hours, telecommuting, and the like, it is the managers who are often faced with the day-to-day challenges of breaking out of old ways of thinking to make nonstandard arrangements work. “If you want to do something different, raise your hand and talk to somebody about it,” he says. “And be willing to be flexible in your flexibility: both the employee and the organization have to make accommodations to make it work.”

Hall’s research suggests that despite the challenges, the rewards of cultural change are worth the effort. “Organizations are finding now that there are economic payoffs” to providing more flexibility to their employees, he says. “The organizations in our sample that were doing the best job of providing support were not doing it just because they thought it was the right thing to do or because it would make employees happier; they were doing it because they believed this is the best way to get the work done, and the best way to satisfy the customers.”

Change is possible even in jobs and industries in which long-standing norms have the illusion of sacrosanctity: Philbrick’s derivative company is a case in point. Though the “myth of separate worlds” still holds powerful sway in the finance industry, Philbrick and her colleagues at Derivative Advisors have endeavored to create a workplace culture in which people have flexibility to create their own balance of work and nonwork priorities. “I do think there is an industry perception that you should be here to make money, be completely focused on the job, and if your personal life comes first, you can find a job that has less pressure,” she says. “And I think it can be hard to fight it. But I always thought it was a perception that wasn’t based in truth, so I don’t run my company that way. I am really happy and proud to say that we have a completely different culture here. Our attitude is, if you don’t have a deal going live, if you don’t have a client waiting for you, and it’s a beautiful day, go play golf, go to your child’s game. We trust our people to do what they need to do.”