00:00:00
And the really good news is that
we now have a body of evidence that shows that when you take
care of the whole person in a
00:00:06
way that serves the interests of
the person, their families, their communities, and your
business, you can all win. Now
00:00:14
it's not easy to do that, and of
course, there's conflict between work and the rest of life, and
you've got to deal with those,
00:00:20
having to do with time and other
other constraints. But when you ask what can be done to make
things better for you and your
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family and your community and
our business, people come up with ideas for innovation that
you wouldn't have thought.
00:00:36
- Welcome to <i>The Ripple Effect</i>, the podcast that takes
you on a journey through the
00:00:41
minds of Wharton faculty. I'm
your host, Dan Loney, and in each episode, we'll be diving
deep into the inspiration behind
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the groundbreaking research that
Wharton professors have conducted and exploring how
their findings resonate with the
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world today. - The balance between
the time we spend on the job and the time we spend living our
lives has been a very important
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area of study for quite some
time now. But just how different is that balance now from a
couple of decades ago? Pleasure
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to be joined here in studio by
Stew Freeman, who is Emeritus Practice Professor of Management
here at the Wharton School. He
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also founded the Work Life
Integration Program, a project— excuse me— here at Wharton. And
he's Founding Director of the
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Wharton Leadership Program. Stew,
great to see again, as always. Thank you, Dan. So good to be
here.
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Let me start out by— because this has obviously been
such an important area of focus
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for you for many years now.
Let's go back in time and— what was it that first had you
thinking about the importance
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and the connection between work
and life? Well, I was a graduate student
at the University of Michigan in
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the early '80s. And there, I sort
of minored in the field of role theory and adult socialization,
and how people figure out how to
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piece together the different
roles that they play in life. But my main emphasis in my
research and teaching and
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practice was on talent
management systems and the succession and development of
leadership talent in companies.
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But when my first son was born
in the late '80s, I had a very profound reaction to his
arrival, to meeting him and
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thinking, "Oh, what do I do now
to ensure that the world that he grows up in is one that— will
be one that encourages his
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flourishing, his safety. It was
a question that I hadn't really given enough thought to before I
actually met him, but it was— it
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was a question that I couldn't
get out of my head after— after that moment. And I asked
everybody— my parents, my
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friends, relatives. And then
when I got back into the classroom about a week or so
after that, I asked my students.
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I kind of cleared the deck of
what we had planned to study that day, which had to do with
motivation and reward systems.
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We were going to do a case on
that. And I said, "You know what? We're going to put that aside
because there's something else
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that I want to talk with you
about, and that is, how are you as future business leaders, going
to cultivate a world in which
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people can be the people they
want to be, outside of work, as parents, as whatever— friends,
members of their communities.
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And the reaction was intense.
There were people in the room who were thinking, why is he
doing this when we prepared a
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case for today. And that
was in the days when students would prepare for class. Sorry.
- Not using ChatGPT, right?
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Well, they were— they were
there, ready to go. And I was putting that aside. They
were also saying, like, "This is—
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how's this relevant for us right
now? We're a business school. Why are we talking about
children and families and—
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Professor, nobody really cares
about your family. So like, let's get to— let's get down to
it." But there were others in the
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room who kind of leaned
forward and said, "Yeah, let's talk about this."
- Right.
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And in response to my question, what are you going to do as
future business leaders to shape
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a new world, one of them said to
me, "Well, you're the professor. You tell us." - Right.
- And that that caused me to shift my
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attention. That's probably more
than you wanted to hear about the early days of this. But the
late '80s, I shifted my
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interest and started to focus
more on— and using what I had learned in graduate school and
the tools that I had developed
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there at the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Michigan, how
could I study this question and
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produce useful knowledge for
people to help them figure out what it was going to take to
integrate the different parts of
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their lives?
- How, then, have those two elements, work and
life, kind of developed? And
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thinking about it from the
corporate perspective and the employee perspective, how have
they developed in the last 30
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years, to whatever point we are
at right now? And maybe, to a degree, where you think we are
going with this?
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That's a great question, Dan.
There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that the
world has changed in many
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positive ways in terms of the
role of women in the workforce and the increasing authority and
power that women have, which has
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changed the dynamics of the
domestic lives of people, and forced a new kind of questioning
and experimentation with
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different ways of approaching
how men, women, everyone figures out how to integrate the
different parts of their lives
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for mutual gain. That became our
challenge and our task. So today, you have many more young
men interested in having
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fulfilled lives beyond work, and
you have many more women in positions of authority who are
also helping to drive innovation
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and change. What we figured out—
so I started the Leadership Program at about the same time
that I started the Work Life
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Integration Project. And there,
we were developing new models for how people learn what it
means for them to lead and how
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to grow as leaders. 35 years
ago, this wasn't standard fare. Now it is. And now it's
standard for organizations
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around the world to be asking
the question, how do we help our people grow as people, not just
as elements of our, you
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know, components of our
productive machines? They're more than that. And the
really good news is that we now
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have a body of evidence that
shows that when you take care of the whole person in a way that
serves the interests of the
00:07:09
person, their families, their
communities and your business, you can all win. Now,
it's not easy to do that. And of
00:07:17
course, there's conflict between
work and the rest of life, and you've got to deal with those,
having to do with time and other
00:07:23
other constraints. But when you
ask what can be done to make things better for you and your
family and your community and
00:07:33
our business, people come up
with ideas for innovation that you wouldn't have thought.
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Should I be surprised that maybe
the corporate world has taken the level of interest that it
seemingly has in this topic,
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specifically? Because it feels
like going back decades— and you talked about this before— this
was not on the radar of the C-
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suite or the corporate world in
general. Now, obviously, it very much is.
- Yeah.
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Well, back in the day, not
only was it not on the radar, it was— it was an idea that was
suppressed. And indeed, when I
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shifted my focus of research and
practice and teaching to this issue, I had people— senior
people— saying, "Stew, what are you
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doing? This is a women's issue
that nobody cares about. Why are you shifting your attention in
this direction?" But I could
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foresee that things were going
to be different. I'm not saying I had a crystal ball, but it was
clear that— that changes in
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the roles that men and women
wanted to play in organizations, and the increasing flexibility
that was going to be possible,
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and the supports that we were
seeing in Europe, especially northern Europe, that were
being provided for people's
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lives beyond work, particularly
their families, was creating pressure for organizations in
the United States to respond.
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And so when I was, you know, a
man at the Wharton School talking about families and kids
in the late '80s and early '90s, I
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was decidedly strange. I mean, I
still am in a lot of ways, but— but there, I was a distinctive
messenger. Because at that time,
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it was almost only women talking
about this issue. And it wasn't— it wasn't really on on the
radar, as you say, in most
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business school curricula. So as
things changed, we have now, with the advent of the internet,
of course, and then with the
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pandemic and the radical shift
to working from home, there's all kinds of new models for how
to figure out the ways and means
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of how we get things done in the
different parts of our lives. And so to a degree, it's incumbent
on companies to have this as a
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component of their health
profile that they will have for employees, of making sure that
they are doing as much as they
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possibly can for the employee, not
only for the bottom line benefit of the day-to-day work, but
obviously, the component of
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keeping the employee there, who
may be very valuable. And you don't want to lose an employee
to another company who may be,
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you know, a key cog in
your daily mix. Yes, and that is the good
news in the story. When I
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went, at the end of the '90s,
after launching the leadership program here and
doing the research on, what does
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it take to integrate the
different parts of life for mutual gain throughout the '90s,
the CEO of Ford Motor Company
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hired me to be the Head of
Leadership Development for the company worldwide. And so I went
there for a few years. Took a
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leave from my post here at
Wharton and there, had the opportunity, with an incredible
support of remarkable executive
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sponsors and a great team, we
created a program that we call Total Leadership, which brought
together what we'd been learning
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about the growth of leadership
capacity and the integration of the different parts of life. And
what we demonstrated there was
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that when you help people to
articulate their values— what they care most about— to be
real, to act with authenticity
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by clarifying what matters most
to them, by helping them to be whole, by identifying who are
the most important people at
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work, at home and in the
community, and what do they really need from you, and what
do you need from them? And
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looking at your whole life as a
social system that you can navigate and influence. And
using that knowledge, that fresh
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knowledge in a peer-to-peer
coaching environment to come up with ideas for innovation that
are designed to produce what I
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called a "four-way win"— and that
is demonstrably improved performance at work, at home, in
the community and for yourself.
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People are able to do that. And
they overcome the guilt and the fear of trying something new
when they realize that what
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they're trying to do is not just
for themselves, their families, their communities, their
businesses, but for all four. So
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when you take that view— that
it's possible, if you look— put on a new set of lenses and look
for ways to make things better
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in the different parts and
experiment with that, then you can actually make those things
happen and get support. So using
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leadership principles to create
change, to become a leader that is capable of producing
sustainable change— because it
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works for all the different
parts of your life. And we call this Total Leadership. For the
last 25 years, I have been doing
00:12:29
that, both in coursework here at
Wharton and with companies all around the world. And the good
news here again is that our
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evidence shows that when you
take this approach, people work smarter. They're less distracted
when they are at work, and they
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actually produce better results
at work while spending less time at work. Which is a paradox that
my economist friends wonder about.
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Are we then going into a time
that requires a little bit more focus because of the fact
we're seeing companies start to
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call people back into the office
full time, and there are some people that are fighting back
against that, or not staying
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with the company, or, you know,
making a choice that— that balance that they've had for the
last few years, especially
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during the pandemic, is more
valuable to them than being in the office five days a week?
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Yeah, having control over your
life is something that more and more people are claiming. Now in
the current labor market, it's
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hard to predict what is coming
forward. But what we have found, and the evidence is pretty
clear, is that when you trust
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people and verify, you know, that
what they're doing is good for you and for them in their lives,
and you let them know that they
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can and should be experimenting
with different ways of getting things done that are good for
you and for them, and you
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measure that, and you support
that, that you're going to get a big return in terms of retention
and loyalty. But you're also
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going to get better
productivity. So the blanket policies of "Everybody's coming
back, and everybody's got to be
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there all the time," I think
that's going to backfire. Because the norms for today's
workforce are very different
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than the ones that I grew up
with and the ones that you grew up with too, a generation later,
Dan, after me. And— and so, you
00:14:27
know, there is going to be
pushback. But of course, in a tighter labor market, you know,
it's going to— there's going to
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be— it's hard to know. I don't
think anybody can really predict. But clearly, the trend
is in the direction of greater
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freedom, greater sense of
control, greater belief that people want to be productive in
the different parts of their
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lives. And when you give them
the tools and the support to do that, the returns are great for
your business.
00:14:52
Great topic. Where can people
find out more about the work that you've done in the past and
how this is progressing?
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Well, it's kind of you to ask,
Dan. The Total Leadership website is probably the best
place to get free information,
00:15:06
videos, book chapters. It's
totalleadership.org, and you can learn all about our history and
impact there.
00:15:12
Great to see you again. Thanks
very much. Stew Friedman, who is Emeritus Practice Professor of
Management here at the Wharton
00:15:19
School and founder of the Work
Life Integration project, as well as the Founding Director of
the Wharton Leadership Program.
00:15:27
Thank you for listening to <i>The Ripple Effect</i>.
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00:15:29
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00:15:36
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