# The Downside of Work-Life Balance Narratives By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-03-03 Consider the following situation. Let's say two people compete for the same promotion at an organization. One is mediocre at the job but willing to work nights and weekends to compensate for their mediocrity. The other is naturally talented at the job, but is unwilling to spend their nights and weekends working. As a result, both individuals deliver equivalent outcomes. So, who will the organization promote? I suspect the mediocre individual is promoted eight times out of ten. The reasoning has nothing to do with the outcome but the perception created by how they accomplished it. The mediocre individual presents as fully committed to the organization as a hard worker willing to do what it takes. The talented individual presents a less committed individual. This is how most organizations and people think. It is worth noting that both individuals may have the same work, family, and value preferences. One can afford to spend their nights and weekends doing other things based on some luck of the dice roll regarding their background, training, or innate skills. Suppose the talented individual wanted to tilt the promotion back in their favor. What might they do? The most obvious choice is to work some nights and weekends to outperform the mediocre individual. If this occurred, the mediocre individual would likely respond by working even more hours. Thus, both sides are now in a constantly escalating war. Who wins this war? The organization. They have ever-improving work products as competition drives down the price and increases the quality of work. Thus, this is how mediocrity wins in modern organizations. Organizations do not want the best talent defined by creativity or efficiency; they want competitive individuals who will work as hard as possible to climb the ladder. This is not to say that organizations will not accept a highly talented individual if it happens along the way. Talent is just a nice-to-have feature after one clears the minimally capable threshold. Talented individuals or those who genuinely prioritize non-work activity have felt this problem for a long time. As a result, they have advocated for redefining the game by injecting the idea of work-life balance into public consciousness. Under this paradigm, the mediocre "workaholics" are painted as unhealthy and unbalanced. Thus, they start to lose the promotion game, and perhaps a different type of effective productivity emerges. Regardless of whether one believes the output will be better or worse for the organization, changing the game has consequences. For example, what means does the mediocre person have to rise through the ranks and provide for their family under these conditions? If those with better dice roles of education, support, and innate talent win out by vilifying hard work, what chance does someone have if they have none of these things but are willing to work hard? Perhaps we should change the game further and ignore the accounting of hours worked. A good product is a good product. The means to create it should be the individual's decision based on their unique situation. The biggest problem with this approach is that organizations have no idea what good is. #### Related Items [[Work]] [[Talent]] [[Paradigms]] [[Games]] [[Organization]] [[Life]] [[Value]]