How to Excel at Your Job and Be Home for Dinner

A former Goldman Sachs executive shares her tips for balancing professional work with your personal life during a recession

By Sharon Meers

When I was a new manager at Goldman Sachs, an executive coach told me: "If you can't get your job done in 10 hours a day, there's something wrong with you—or there's something wrong with your job." I laughed. In my 16 years in finance, I found it hard not admire the 24/7 ethic and even harder to imagine that top results could be produced without it.

But this coach was an advisor to highly respected CEOs. And he forced me to open my eyes and see what really effective executives do to cut time—and stress—for both themselves and the teams they lead.

Intrigued, I dug into the research. I learned how performance and judgement erode when we work too many hours and that motivating people to spend ever-more hours at work is bad for the bottom line. I also talked to hundreds of men and women working in a wide range of executive roles—C-suite jobs, partners at big investment, law, and accounting firms, and middle managers in various industries—to learn how they manage the stress in their lives.

Today's downturn means everyone who still has a job has more work to do. Things have been so uncertain that we all have to work harder because we don't know what will pay off. While "balance" may be a term that makes executives nervous in bad times, it's merely good management to ensure that each hour gets invested in the right things and that we cut all the waste we can. Here are five tips I've found that let executives produce world-class results and still get home for family dinner—most nights.

1. Measure what matters.
With your boss and your subordinates, become very precise about how performance should be evaluated. What are the top five measurable items that drive better results? Many firms spit out lots of reporting, using metrics that don't tell you much because they reflect the priorities of past management, or never were effective at capturing what drives sustained profits.

Researchers at Harvard Business School have found that dramatic gains are made when managers make it clear what specific, measurable work will be rewarded. One case study shows how an underperforming Wall Street research department (ranked No. 15 in the industry) became #1 in three years. A new manager came in and told his team that only numbers—not schmoozing or boasting—would get them paid. For the companies that each analyst covered, how many times per month did the analyst call the CEO, key customers, and suppliers? How often did the analyst see money managers and sales people? How accurate were earnings estimates? But when this metrics-driven manager left, his disciplined approach fell out of use and the research team's ranking plummeted again, to No. 13.

Most firms lack the IT budgets and managerial will to step aside and prioritize what they want employees to do with their time. For instance, sales: What kind of clients are the best long term? Quality: How do you measure it concretely? Profits: What time frame do you look at to make sure you've captured the real costs behind your revenues? (Think mortgage lenders booking ever-more-questionable loans.)

On my own teams, I've found that the effort to develop good metrics is worth it—even if you have to cobble numbers together on a spreadsheet. Your employees can be more efficient because they know what you want them to do. They have more confidence that the system is fair—and this reduction in subjectivity relieves a lot of stress. When the boss wants to know who is or isn't pulling their weight, where the problems and opportunities are, it's all in the numbers.

2. Cut interruptions and fire drills.
Time management experts say it takes us 25% longer to get something done if we get interrupted in the middle. The biggest drains are mismanaged meetings and crises that suck up huge portions of executive time.

A former colleague used to say: "Most of our meetings are spent admiring problems. 'Yeah, that's a big problem.' Or 'that problem's a tough one.' But we're reluctant to actually attack the problem and get rid of it."

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