thinking about building slack

or preparing for Fate

I had the privilege of interviewing John Fernandez, then CEO of Massachusetts Eye and Ear, now President and CEO of Lifespan, back in 2016 about his career and leadership. One of the things he said to me has stuck with me since then. I was asking him what advice he would give to people who are ambitious. One of the things he said was this to make sure there was some slack in your work obligations:

Make sure you’re not so busy, or perceived to be so busy, that you can’t take the next cool project. If you’re perceived to be too busy, or you want people to perceive you as too busy, then the next merger, the next new project that’s really exciting, they think of somebody else because you’re too busy. I made an effort to make sure, even though I might have been really busy, make sure you have time when the next cool project comes along.

OK, so he didn’t actually use the word slack, but I think it’s a good word to describe his recommendation. If your days are so full that everything is like juggling tea cups while riding a unicycle, people will likely be impressed by your effort but they will not ask you to do anything else. And so when the opportunity arises for you to try something above your level, no senior person is going to sponsor you for the opportunity, because it will appear you are already operating at your full capacity at the level you are currently working at. In the Army we used to say that promotions were not given in recognition of what you have already done, but in recognition of what you have the potential to do. If you are already just barely getting your current job done, you are not demonstrating that you have the capacity to do something even bigger. Usually the opportunities that come along to prove yourself ready for the next level require you to keep on doing your primary job and do something even more complex and difficult. It might be possible to compress your primary job if you really want to and do the additional task all in a normal work week, but I know very few senior executives who got to their executive levels by working 40 hours per week. So sometimes slack means sacrificing something else, like personal time. 

I am old school about this. If you aren’t prepared to work more than 40 hours per week, you probably don’t want an executive role. That is totally fine, not everyone does, and not everyone is cut out for it. We all have the same 168 hours in a week. It doesn’t mean that you are not deserving of the pay or respect. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have the raw talent to do the work. It might mean that right now is not your time. Not everyone has the ability to create slack in their work life by drawing on their personal life as a reservoir. Work comes with a set of obligations and our personal lives come with a set of obligations. Obligations make life richer and more meaningful, but we have to recognize that each additional obligation we take on uses up some of our capacity and reduces our ability to take on another obligation. If we have extensive obligations in our personal life, we may not have the slack there to shift some hours from personal time into work time, and vice versa. If you want an executive role, you have to set up your personal life to provide slack to your work life. If you already made choices to have extensive personal obligations, or through fate had personal obligations thrust upon you, then you may not have the ability to take hours from your personal life without failing your obligations to family or friends or community. 

Life evolves and changes. As I mentioned previously, my last child graduated from college a few weeks ago. This now creates more slack in our personal lives. My wife has worked from home, part-time, for more than 20 years because she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, but she recently accepted an in-office role that she will start next month. She worked part time to be sure she had the slack in her life to take care of our children. She chose to pull hours from work into her personal life in order to make sure that she had the slack to take care of our children. Now that we don’t need her to do that any more, she is giving up that slack and going back to the office (which she is really excited about!).

If you are running at full capacity in both your work and personal lives, you have no slack. This means that if an opportunity comes up in either, you will have to watch it go by. It also means that if something unexpected happens, you will be put into crisis mode, having to triage which of your obligations you will fail to honor. People who are poor tend to face this sort of lack of slack in their lives. They are often working as much as they can while struggling to fulfill their personal obligations with limited resources, and when something goes wrong, the wheels come off of the car. Running at maximum in all aspects of your life without any slack makes your fragile and susceptible to massive failure as a result of what might otherwise be a minor inconvenience. People who are wealthy may also be running at full capacity at work and in their personal lives, but financial wealth provides slack because you can often buy the slack with money - at least on the personal side. You can buy child care. You can hire a landscaper to mow your grass. You can get take out. These aren’t necessarily good long-term solutions, but they can be bridges. 

My wife and I got married a few weeks after we graduated college. We were lucky that our circumstances allowed us to graduate debt-free. So as soon as we were settled in my first duty assignment and my wife found a job, we started saving about 20% of our income. We were very intentional about creating a financial cushion to provide us slack. Once kids came along and my wife stopped working for a while, we saved less, but we always saved, even if it wasn’t 20%. Twenty percent of not very much is not very much, but we always had enough to cover unexpected expenses, like car repairs, without concern. 

One of the challenges of military life is that you spend most of your career far from family, especially if you are from the Northeast. We only had two years where we were an easy drive from family; the other 21 were at least a 10-hour drive or a flight. Having family support is a form of slack. My wife and I often fantasize about how much easier life might have been if we had had grandparents nearby when our children were small. And how comforting they would have been when our children were teenagers. One of the things that makes the military life so rich is the fact that most of your colleagues are in the same boat: most people have no family to lean on because their duty station is far from home. As a result, there is a strong culture of leaning on each other. Though it is in part out of necessity, it grows into bonds of caring. This culture creates slack that is much needed, especially with the demands of the military. As saving is to creating financial slack, building social bonds is an important way of creating social slack. Your social network is a source of slack in your personal life. Investing in it by building a strong local social network is important. Joining voluntary organizations such as churches and clubs creates bonds of caring that can be called upon in times of need. The workplace can also be a source of social support and creating bonds that extend beyond the office. 

Building slack in our lives should be intentional. Sometimes life throws you a curveball and there’s nothing that can be done about it. But curveballs are easier to survive when you have built slack in your work and personal lives. The richness of life comes from obligations, and working to fulfill those obligations, but it’s vital to manage those obligations to allow for some slack because the curveballs will come. One of my favorite passages from Machiavelli’s The Prince addresses this:

I compare [Fate] to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defenses and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valor has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defenses have not been raised to constrain her. 

I would say it appears that fortune pursues the unprepared, but only because the unprepared have left themselves vulnerable. There are some things that you can’t prepare for, but there is an awful lot that you can. If you want to be successful in your professional and personal life, building in slack should be part of your ongoing strategy.