Fake It Till You Make It

How some men get ahead by pretending to work overtime

Ask most workaholics when they last took a ski trip and they would burst out laughing.

But they might be tempted to take a break after reading the results of a study by Erin Reid, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, who found that hitting the slopes occasionally won’t stop you from getting a promotion—if you hide it well enough.

Reid conducted 115 interviews—and analyzed performance evaluations and turnover data—in the American offices of a global strategy consulting firm. She discovered a secret: while some consultants really were putting in 80- or 90-hour weeks, others, particularly men, were faking it.

How did they slip under the radar? For starters, by building a local client base, relying on telecommunications to cut back on travel, and ensuring that their whereabouts were kept under wraps.

One consultant, whom Reid refers to as Lloyd, admits, “I skied five days last week. I took calls in the morning and in the evening but I was able to be there for my son when he needed me to be.”

Lloyd may have spent the week gliding downhill, but at work he was seen as a rising star; he was later promoted to partner.

By contrast, those making formal requests for flexible time, writes Reid in Harvard Business Review, “were marginalized and penalized, in the same ways that women who reveal work-family conflict have long been.” Unlike women, however, the men did have one advantage: colleagues seemed to assume that men clocking out at 5 p.m. were leaving for a meeting, but that women were going to pick up their kids.

Reid writes that her findings signal the need to restructure how we work and that long hours don’t necessarily mean a better end product. “The experiences of those men who passed,” she says, “show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.”