It is obvious that the calmer your personal life is, the less likely it will be to send shock waves into your office life. However, I have never met anybody who enjoyed a perfectly serene personal life, and I am quite sure I never will. The lives we live outside the office are bumpy. We're up one day, down the next. We are always wrestling with problems of one kind or another: problems arising from family relationships, sex, money, social concerns--the list goes on and on.
These problems do not vanish when you step into your office. I urge you to separate your office life and personal life as much as you can, but you know and I know that complete separation is impossibility. When you go to work on Monday morning you are the same person you were over the weekend--the same person with the same problems and concerns. The trick is to organize your life in such a way that its two major halves--job and personal--can coexist harmoniously instead of interfering with each other.
Many people seem to find that a difficult trick to pull off. It can indeed be difficult in some situations. But it can be done no matter how hard it seems.
Let me tell you the story of a woman whose personal problems nearly cost her her job, but who finally got her life's two halves working harmoniously. She was one of the millions of women who in recent years have tried to balance the conflicting demands of raising a family and holding down a full-time job. It can be worked out neatly, but it took her a long time to figure out how.
Jean, as I will call her, was in her middle thirties. She was married and had a daughter aged about ten at the time I met her. Jean had spent most of her working career at one bank. She had been hired there as a younger woman, had dropped out of the job world briefly when her daughter was a baby, and now was back, holding a middle-management post and hoping for something better.
The people at the bank had been delighted to see her back after that baby-care period, for they were impressed by her abilities and had big plans for her. To their dismay, however, her performance started to deteriorate. At first her boss noticed little things: she often came to work late, looking tired; her customary crisp grooming became a bit slipshod. Then the problems grew more serious. She became distracted and forgetful, sometimes neglecting to issue instructions to subordinates and then looking surprised when jobs didn't get done. She also became irritable.
Jean's performance was being adversely affected by her personal life. One problem was her husband. He held a job at another bank. His salary was lower than Jean's--a fact that disturbed him a good deal. He wanted her to quit work. The reason he gave was that he thought their daughter needed more parental attention. He pointed out that their day-care and baby-sitting costs were high and constantly rising.
Jean refused to quit her job; she had invested too much of her life in it to quit. But in an attempt to satisfy her husband and assuage her own feelings of guilt, she went out of her way to spend time with her daughter. She would sometimes spend long evenings at school functions even though she was tired after a hard day at the bank, and then she would go home and take care of laundry and other domestic chores. Her husband gave her little help in all this because he wanted to make the point that she should quit her job.
Another problem was his constant telephoning. He was highly insecure. He didn't like the thought of Jean's spending all day with other men. He phoned her often at the bank to check on her. At first she was charmed by this constant attention, but when she began to guess the reason for the calls, they became an annoyance. They interrupted her work and disturbed her thinking. She tried having her secretary block the calls, but this only increased her husband's jealous feelings and led to bitter arguments.
Her performance continued to slip. One day her boss called her into his office for a closed-door talk. "Listen, Jean," he said, "there are all kinds of places you can go in this bank. I'd like to set some wheels in motion. But there's nothing I can do until you get your life pulled together. I don't know what it is that's troubling you. I'll listen if you want me to, but it's something you've got to handle. Whatever it is, you've got to straighten it out."
Jean tried for a long time, without success. She tried talking with her husband. She tried various new day-care and schooling arrangements with her daughter. Nothing helped. Finally, she and her husband separated.
Her problems were alleviated in a short time. The harassing phone calls ceased. With nobody to criticize her and make her feel unnecessarily guilty, she made new arrangements for her daughter--arrangements that allowed a reasonable balance between Jean's parental instincts and her need for rest.
But now she found she had fixed up one half of her life at the expense of the other. Her job was going more smoothly, but her family life had been diminished. Life as a single parent was calm but lacking in fullness. She wanted male companionship.
She met another man and fell in love with him. For a long time she was afraid to marry him, for her previous sad experience had taught her that marriage and a job don't mix well in a situation like hers. Finally, however, after many discussions, she became persuaded that the mixture can be made to work if you go about it carefully. She remarried.
Her life began to work again. She is now in line for the title of senior vice-president.
Below are some insights that can be derived from Jean's experience, plus some others that didn't apply directly to her situation but may apply to yours. All of them spring from two fundamental axioms: your personal life and job life should be brought into harmonious balance, and where they don't harmonize, they should be kept apart.
Intrusions
If a spouse, friend, or any other person from your personal life begins to intrude too far into your job world, find a way to show that you need more distance.
It is not usually very productive to tell a spouse, for example, that you would rather not be interrupted by frequent phone calls at work. As Jean found when she tried that with her first husband, it only leads to hurt feelings, and is unlikely to solve the problem in any case.
Such a request, more often than not, will land you in a volley of unanswerable questions: "You mean you'd rather talk to your friends at work than talk to me? Your job is more important to you than your family?"
Since those questions have no good answers, your best bet is to see to it that they are not asked.
Instead of telling this person that he or she is intruding too much, find ways to demonstrate it without actually saying it. The next time a phone call interrupts you, for instance, respond pleasantly--and then invent a crisis. "Uh-oh, something just came up! I've got to go. I'll tell you all about it tonight."
That night, or at some other good time, explain what the crisis was about. Then say something like: "I hope you'll forgive me if I'm brusque sometimes when you call. I really do enjoy talking to you. But this new marketing project has us all so busy."
Moods
Jean not only had her husband intruding too much into her job world, she also allowed her own moods to intrude. She became irritable. Her personal life caused this irritability, but she carried it into her working life.
This is a very common situation. We all get upset occasionally, and people generally understand this and allow for it. Your office colleagues and superiors will probably forgive you a display of bad temper or a downcast appearance once in a while--but they won't forgive you, and shouldn't be expected to, if the condition becomes chronic.
If you are always glum, condescending, or Hi-tempered--or, perhaps worse, if you keep people on edge by being unpredictably up one day, down the next. You will quickly exhaust the patience of those who work with you. Although your moodiness may result from personal problems, your colleagues will naturally associate it with the office. They will wonder if they did something to offend you. Or they will wonder whether you are unhappy with your work.
If you suspect that you are letting personal problems intrude on your job this way, ask a friend to tell you confidentially whether your behavior is troubling others. If you have no close friend at the office, do your best to assess yourself. Remind yourself continually that the people you work with know nothing of your personal problems and should not be subjected to them. By being considerate of those people, you help yourself.
Communication Outside
One of Jean's mistakes was that she failed to tell her first husband enough about her life at the office. She allowed it to be a mystery to him. This gave him the feeling of being barred from an important part of her life, made him more curious and suspicious than he would have been otherwise, increased his feelings of jealousy, and of course magnified all the problems related to her job.
Don't allow your working life to seem hidden and mysterious to those who populate your personal life. Some will want only a few details; they will quickly become bored if you try to tell them more Others will ask many questions and won't be satisfied until you give them a pretty complete story. Whatever they want, give it to them.
Jean's difficulty with this was a common one. When she came home after a long day at the office, she wanted to forget her job for a while. She didn't want to talk about it. When her husband asked questions she would merely mutter in reply: "Oh, I had a problem with a customer... too complicated to explain right now. What's on TV tonight?"
The more secretive you are about something, the more people will wonder about it. The more your family members or friends wonder, the more likely it is that you will get tangled as Jean did in problems of jealousy.
Suppose you are expected at a long-planned family dinner, but then you suddenly get called out of town to attend to a branch-office emergency. This painful kind of situation is familiar to anybody who has held a job for any length of time. There is no known way to make this conflict fun, but you can markedly ease the distress by telling people all they want to know about the way you earn your living. If you have been doing that all along, family members at the dinner may be annoyed, but most will acknowledge that what has happened isn't your fault. If you have seemed secretive, however, you could be in trouble. People will ask, perhaps out loud: "Do you suppose this is really a business trip? Couldn't somebody else have gone instead? Why did it have to be this week?"
Communication Inside
Similarly, don't let your personal life look darkly mysterious to people at the office.
This doesn't mean you need reveal a great wealth of details. Most of your job colleagues don't want that. Most would be bored by long anecdotes about your family or an analysis of your youngster's school performance. Most would be embarrassed and put off by revelations about your sex life.
All that is necessary at the office is to sketch the broadest outline of your off-the-job life--just enough to assure everybody that you are a rounded, flesh-and-blood person. People feel comfortable when they can assign you to certain familiar categories: "Ann? Oh yes, she's married, has two kids, or maybe it's three. Her husband is an architect, I think. She's a great skier--you'll never find her at home on a winter weekend." Just that sketchy outline, just those few sparse facts are enough to give people the comfortable sense of knowing what kind of person Ann is outside the office.
Conversely, people become uncomfortable when you make a mystery of yourself. "Ann? Frankly, I don't know what she does or where she goes at five o'clock. She could turn into a werewolf, for all I know." By withholding the few called-for details of your personal life, you make it virtually certain that people will speculate about you--and once they start speculating, their imaginations are bound to conjure up stories, some of which may be less than flattering. By making yourself mysterious, you make yourself seem odd.
Indeed, we in the business world today enjoy remarkably wide latitude in our styles of living. But there are boundary lines, and outside those lines you stop being just "a little different" and become "strange." It is perfectly all right to be a little different, an individual. People will admire you for it; you may even make a career plus out of it if you handle it well. But once you get labeled "strange" or "odd," you are vulnerable.
Strangeness is never given openly as a reason for firing some body or denying a promotion. "Sorry, Charlie, you're too weird for this job." You will never hear that, but the fact is that strangeness often is a factor in career disasters. People in business, as anywhere, like to work next to colleagues with whom they feel comfortable. A man or woman labeled "odd" has a heavy handicap.
Bad Publicity
Make sure your after-hours activities don't generate unwanted publicity for your company or yourself.
Most companies today try their best to keep their noses out of employees' private lives. What you do on your own time is your own business-but only up to a point. If your activities become public in some sense, then they may become the company's business.
For example, let's say you choose to lead a varied and adventurous social life. That is your own affair as long as it remains private. But if you get involved with somebody else's spouse and the episode becomes public, your job and/or future promotions may be in jeopardy. Business managers are not so naive as to believe all employees live like Puritans, but most executives would agree that it looks bad to customers and others when employees get caught in careless or irresponsible behavior. Every company wants to protect its image.
Or let's say you choose to get involved with a political movement of an activist group of some kind. You should avoid such political involvement when a schemer is looking for holes in your armor, and also when you espouse views that are unfriendly to your company's own business activities. But let's suppose you have neither of these hazards to deal with. You belong, let's say, to an activist environmental group. Your employer, an insurance company, conducts no business that has even a remote connection with that debate. You're safe, right? Wrong.
Membership in that group isn't likely to do your career much harm as long as you handle it quietly. You don't need to make a secret of it, for people don't expect you to be apolitical or to subscribe to any approved party line. In the business world today, wide divergence of political views is amiably tolerated as long as it is managed with common sense and discretion.
But if your advocacy becomes shrill and public, and if the company's name gets dragged into it, then what started as your own free-time concern becomes the company's concern.
Suppose, for example, that you attend a rally at your local town hall, and a newspaper photographer takes a picture of you waving a placard. The caption in the next day's paper identifies you as "Janice Carpenter, a product advertising supervisor at XYZ Insurance."
You are now potentially in trouble. You have allowed your company's name to be associated with a controversy that the company would vastly prefer to stay out of. It's true that the association is distant and indirect. After all, you haven't claimed that the company is for or against what you advocate; you have only said that you work for the company. No matter: that tenuous link is association enough.
If you are lucky, the worst that will happen is that your boss will call you into his or her office and tell you to cool it. If you are unlucky, a major customer of the company will turn out to hold views strongly opposed to your own. Happening to have lunch with the president, he may make his views known in ways that could damage your career.
Common sense is the best guide in situations like this. If you join a Fourth of July parade and march in favor of patriotism and apple pie, or if you spend some of your Saturdays taking orphanage kids to the zoo, nobody is going to get mad at you if your activity gets publicized in association with the company name. If there is controversy surrounding what you do after hours, keep the company name out of it. When people ask who you are, you're Janice Carpenter, private citizen, period.
