Balancing Acts

Rahm Emanuel

Managing Partner
Wasserstein Perella
Chicago, Illinois

Conventional wisdom says that you can't work in politics and have a family. But I worked in the White House, and, all things considered, I think it was a family-friendly environment. It's true that when you work for the president, you are on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But while working, I found time to do plenty: to get married, to go on a three-week honeymoon, to visit Spain and France, and to start a family. We now have two children. On the Saturdays when I had to go to the White House to review the president's weekly radio address, I would usually bring my son. And most Mondays -- no matter what was going on at work -- I would eat lunch at home with my family. I also drew the line on using technology: I rarely wore my pager, and I refused to have a fax machine at home.

There's obviously no easy answer to the question of balance. You have to work at it. You've got to be as determined in your personal life as you are in your professional life. I've been in politics for 16 years, and I've managed to stay in shape both mentally and physically -- which, in my world, says a lot about sustaining an even keel on this work-life sea. To me, you're not a very interesting person if you do only one thing. Don't let your work become all-consuming.

Rahm Emanuel, one of the original members of Bill Clinton's Little Rock "War Room," was President Clinton's senior adviser for policy and strategy. He was the president's chief strategist on the balanced-budget deal and on the overhaul of the welfare system. One example of how Emanuel has pursued a balanced life: He has taken Saturday ballet classes on and off since he was 16.

Patti Manuel

President and COO, Long-Distance Division
Sprint Corp.
Kansas City, Missouri

I'm a boss, an employee, a friend, a mother, a daughter, and a member of my church and community. I play a lot of roles. Balance is about understanding what those roles are and not letting any one of them become dominant. Most of the time, I'm good at this. Other times, I'm trying to manage my way back from chaos.

I sleep 5 hours a night. The other 19 hours, I'm going 200 miles per hour. But I don't overdo it. There are people at Sprint who work from sunup to well past sundown: They become their jobs. They might make it to middle management, but then they get stuck. They can't lift their heads above the trenches. They're horrible managers, because they expect the whole world to behave and work as they do. I went through a stage like this in my early thirties: Would I get the next promotion? Would I get a better account assigned to me? Today, as a leader, I try to guard against that syndrome. I know that in the final analysis, workaholics are not business successes.

I try to create an environment in which people know that it's okay not to be a workaholic -- in which they get ahead because of their contribution, not because of the number of hours they log. I let people know that balance is important -- for them and for us. I let people I work with know that I take off Wednesday afternoons to volunteer at my son's school. It takes a lot of discipline to achieve balance. People who work too much have a massive amount of discipline -- but they're not applying it in the right way.

Patti Manuel joined Sprint (www.sprint.com) as a national account manager in 1986. When she was promoted to president and COO a year ago, she became the first woman in Sprint history to run one of the company's divisions. The long-distance division employs more than 19,000 people and accounts for more than $9 billion of Sprint's $15 billion in revenues.

Liz Dolan

President
Dolan St. Clair Inc.
Portland, Oregon

It's hard to admit that your work life is out of control. I loved my job at Nike, but it was all-consuming. I had no life. My housekeeper was spending more time at my house than I was. I reached a point where I could not remember the last time I had slept in my own bed. I love summers in Oregon, but I was never there long enough to enjoy one. But the real indicator that my life was out of whack came when I got a call from my brother, Brendan. He'd been trying to reach me for several weeks. I was always too "busy" to call him back. When we finally connected, he told me that he'd had to do a Lexis-Nexis search on me to figure out where I was that week. I was being Lexis-Nexised by my own brother! That really made me stop and think.