It was an unlikely forum for a soul-baring revelation, but Cathy Benko figured it was as good a place as any to come clean on a subject close to her heart.
In front of 600 senior leaders and women partners at Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, the vice chairman confessed the reason she had missed an Office of the CEO meeting in New York.
A sick child? A migraine? A family crisis?
Nope. She hadn’t wanted to miss the first day of Nordstrom’s annual sale.
Benko, her firm’s managing director of talent, is a champion of what she calls being “compulsively transparent” — fostering a culture where people no longer hide behind excuses and half-truths.
Shudder if you will at the thought of so much honesty, but a new spirit of candor is infusing corporate America.
Proponents encourage people to be upfront about how they fit work into life — and life into work — while managing their jobs with a focus on what everybody agrees counts most: results.
Performance, not how many hours or where we work, is what matters. But old habits die hard.
“Golf is the classic example,” says Joseph Starshak of Starshak Winzenburg, a Chicago-based private investment bank. “Golf nuts always have customer reasons to get on the links in summertime.
“The question is, has playing golf because you love it and you’ve got only a three- or four-month window of good weather in Chicago” become an acceptable reason to ditch work?
Starshak is skeptical. The last time he checked, most weekday golf outings still come under the guise of doing business.
Family almost always is a more acceptable reason for missing work than, say, golfing or shopping. Change comes slowly, but it is possible.
After Benko’s revelation last year, others at Deloitte picked up her challenge. “I can give you all kinds of reasons why I’m not going to be at the meeting,” a senior partner remarked. “The fact is, I got tickets to the Super Bowl.”
Benko also reports that her firm’s global chief executive said during a recent meeting, “In the spirit of being compulsively transparent, I’m leaving an hour early. I’m catching a flight. I have a new grandchild and I’m going to see him.”
Leigh O’Donnell, a mother of two, recently returned from maternity leave to her job as sales technology and communications manager at Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. in Chicago.
She feels lucky to work for a company she considers family-friendly yet she balks at the notion of “compulsive transparency.”
For one thing, she leaves her desk at least twice a day to visit a nursing mothers’ room to express milk for her 4-month-old daughter. A recent business trip entailed more than the usual amount of advance planning, which she handled discreetly.
“We’ve seen a positive progression with people feeling more comfortable talking about balancing the things they’re away from the office for, but because I’m nursing, I never know who’s going to be squeamish about that,” she says, “so I’m very careful about what I say in front of whom.”
She was pleased when she returned from leave to learn that her team encouraged meetings to be scheduled between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. to make it easier for people working flexible hours. That eliminated at least one potential work-family conflict because she starts early to be home by 4 p.m. for her children.
“Does that mean I check my BlackBerry after dinner? Absolutely it does. That’s the give and take of it. I’m happy to give back some extra time because my company gives me the flexibility to manage my schedule. I realize what I’m doing is not an exception, it’s part of a system.”
All but the most work-obsessed professionals perform a similar mental calculus, weighing what they give up for work against what they get in return. There’s a perpetual rebalancing of the scales between goodwill and resentment.
Deloitte’s Dan Mayville tries to walk away from his home office in a suburb of Atlanta by 5 or 5:30 p.m. for dinner with his wife and children, but there are evenings when work interrupts family time.
His awareness that he lops hours off his workday by eliminating a drive to a downtown office factors into his mood when the manager of surveys and assessment programs excuses himself from dinner to take a conference call.
“I didn’t even flinch when they asked to do it at 6:30 because I get all that bonus time,” he says. “My ‘commute’ is pretty short. You don’t feel like you’re making this huge concession.”
Benko’s message when she talked about the Nordstrom sale was that everybody would be better off if they talked openly about their trade-offs. Younger workers who conclude they don’t want to work as hard as those who came before them aren’t seeing the full picture, she says.
“Don’t tell anybody, but we have quite a bit of flexibility,” she wrote in a popular entry on Deloitte’s Women’s Initiative blog. “Heck, we all know we’re taking the liberties that are important to us — be it volunteering or playing golf or coaching soccer or yoga classes.
“We’d be a more authentic culture if we all just said so.”
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berose@tribune.com
