UPDATE (January 2016): There’s lots of great things in this timeless piece, but one of the most interesting is reading it through the lens of the article it would have been if the subject had been a female CEO who quit to spend more time with her children.
That would have been an entirely different article. How different it would have been, in what way, and why those differences still exist tells us a lot about how far we have to go.
We often wonder why male CEOs aren’t ever asked the dreaded question ‘how they manage to have it all’ — at least not at the frenetic levels aimed at women in high ranking leadership roles.
So it was refreshing to see that the former chief of the world’s biggest bond business (overseeing assets worth $1.9 trillion) is speaking out about the reason for leaving his job — that being because he realised he was missing out on family time.
When Mohamed El-Erian resigned from his job at Pimco in May 2013, there was plenty of speculation as to why he decided to leave, including tension within the company and a fractious relationship with his boss. But, unlike the case as so often with women, none of those sought to speculate just what kind of toll his job was taking on his personal life.
In a post on Worth.com El-Erian, who earned $100 million in 2011, concedes that it was after his 10-year old daughter handed him a list of 22 milestones he had missed in her life that he realised that his “work-life balance had gotten way out of whack”.
“About a year ago, I asked my daughter several times to do something — brush her teeth, I think it was — with no success. I reminded her that it was not so long ago that she would have immediately responded, and I wouldn’t have had to ask her multiple times; she would have known from my tone of voice that I was serious.
“She asked me to wait a minute, went to her room and came back with a piece of paper. It was a list that she had compiled of her important events and activities that I had missed due to work commitments. Talk about a wake-up call.
“The list contained 22 items, from her first day at school and first soccer match of the season to a parent-teacher meeting and a Halloween parade. And the school year wasn’t yet over. I felt awful and got defensive: I had a good excuse for each missed event! Travel, important meetings, an urgent phone call, sudden to-do.
“But it dawned on me that I was missing an infinitely more important point. As much as I could rationalize it — as I had rationalized it — my work-life balance had gotten way out of whack, and the imbalance was hurting my very special relationship with my daughter. I was not making nearly enough time for her.”
Prior to resigning from the company, El-Erian worked an exhausting schedule, sleeping from 9pm -1am, then spending time writing his newspaper columns before going to the office at 4.30am and then hitting the trading floor at 9am.
Now he has taken on a “portfolio” of part-time roles which he says gives him greater flexibility and allows him to take turns in taking his daughter to school.
And he notes that while not everyone has the luxury of being able to work part-time, he hopes that as more companies pay more attention to the importance of work-life balance, “more and more people will be in a better position to decide and act more holistically on what’s important to them”.