matters. It seems that the author, like most of the rest of us, simply
accepts the fact that work inevitably conflicts with family life, and that
the organization has no part to play in improving imbalances between
work and family.
In recent years, I have noticed a considerable increase in concern
over the work-family issue among participants in our Leadership and
Mastery programs. Today, "finding balance between my work and my
family" is cited as a number-one priority by more attendees than any
other single issue.
Traditional organizations undeniably foster conflict between work
and family. Sometimes, this is done consciously—through the simple
threat that, "If you want to get ahead here, you must be willing to
make sacrifices." More often, it is done inadvertently, by simply
creating a set of demands and pressures on the individual that inevitably
conflict with family and personal time. These demands include
travel, dinner meetings, the increasingly common breakfast meetings,
weekend retreats, and just plain old long hours at the shop. The
pressures arise primarily from the narrow focus on organizational
goals and objectives to the exclusion of personal goals and objectives.
In other words, if all that matters is the organization's goals, there is
simply "no space" for weighing the cost of those goals for an
individual or the individual's family.
The disciplines of the learning organization will, I believe, end the
taboo that has surrounded the topic of balancing work and family,
and has kept it off the corporate agenda. The learning organization
cannot support personal mastery without supporting personal mastery
in all aspects of life. It cannot foster shared vision without
calling forth personal visions, and personal visions are always multifaceted—
they always include deeply felt desires for our personal,
professional, organizational, and family lives. Lastly, the artificial
boundary between work and family is anathema to systems thinking.
There is a natural connection between a person's work life and all
other aspects of life. We live only one life, but for a long time our
organizations have operated as if this simple fact could be ignored, as
if we had two separate lives.
THE STRUCTURE OF WORK/FAMILY IMBALANCE
There is a systems archetype underlying the work-family imbalance.
This archetype is called "Success to the Successful" because it consists
of two reinforcing growth processes, each of which tend to fuel
increasing levels of success—albeit to competing activities. This archetype
underlies a wide variety of situations where individuals,
groups, or organizations compete for a limited resource. The success
of one means that it tends to get more of the resource, which then
reduces the success of the others. The resource could be limited
dollars to invest in competing divisions of a business. It could be
limited praise of a teacher in a crowded classroom. Or it could be
the limited time of a busy manager: