Heading up a company is a tough job, and one that can easily become all-consuming.
When asked about his approach to work-life balance, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told an audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Arizona today that managing his time at the office and time at home can be tough.
“This entire notion of work-life balance is just a tough one,” he said in an interview with Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe, a Microsoft board member.
“The way at least I think of it as is that you really think of it as a problem or a challenge where you have to figure out the harmony as opposed to thinking of it as some kind of a balance.”
Nadella, who has been working hard to revitalize Microsoft in what he sees as a “mobile-first, cloud-first” world, said that his approach wasn’t as focused on the amount of time that he spent at home with his family, but rather on the quality of his relationship with his kids.
He said that he got the idea from Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Advertising Sales, who said that so long as her kids know that her relationship with them is the most important one in her life, then everything else works out. So, when he’s thinking about how to manage his work and his home life, that’s what he pays attention to.
“The moments that I’m there with my children – and in my case we have a couple of special needs kids and I have a natural opportunity to go help them with a couple of things – that is the moment that I want to be present,” he said. “And that is what gives me that harmony to carry on with what is perhaps otherwise a very tough work-life balance.”
Nadella has added challenges, given that he’s charged with turning around Microsoft. In a lengthy expose in Vanity Fair that appeared yesterday, the Microsoft CEO job was described as one of the toughest in business. In fact, as Nadella sees it, technology can be used to help people get time back, so they can focus on more important things.
“What is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention. And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that’s the core of this company—that’s the soul,” Nadella told Vanity Fair. “That’s what Bill started this company with. That’s the Office franchise. That’s the Windows franchise. We have to re-invent them. . . . That’s where this notion of re-inventing productivity comes from.”
