Fred, A sixty-ish colleague, said, “My son is so overloaded at work. But he refuses to work overtime. He says it compromises his ideals. Is overtime something Millenials don’t do?”
I asked, “When do you think it’s okay to work overtime?”
Fred said, “Whenever the company needs me to work overtime.”
“How many days do you normally work overtime?” I asked.
He drummed his fingers on the table. Then he looked at me, eyebrows to hairline, and said, “I’ve been working overtime every day for the past three months. I even took a work call on my most recent vacation.” Then he told me he hadn’t worked a week without overtime in years.
I grinned. “So, you compromised once, and it continued. Your son isn’t compromising at all. Is this something Boomers do?”
Fred wasn’t sure, so we spoke about the problems of long-term overtime work:
- The more hours people work in a week, the more tired they get. The more tired they get, the more mistakes they make.
- Too many other people think they need to work overtime, too. Now, I have a team of exhausted people, making more mistakes.
- And because I don’t know how much overtime they’re working, I have no idea if their estimates are correct or not. Or, what this effort really costs the company.
Fred decided his son was correct, and that he, Fred, would stop compromising on overtime.
That wasn’t the end of our compromise conversation.
Compromise Continuum
Compromise is often a continuum, and is context-dependent.
For example, I won’t compromise on issues of integrity. That’s not even worth consideration. And with my vertigo, I don’t compromise on physical safety and other kinds of risks.
I do change my mind when I learn something new. (So did Fred, when we discussed the overtime issue.) But I don’t think of changing my mind as compromise.
Here’s where I do compromise:
- Because Mark and I have different physical abilities, we compromise on vacations. I will never go with him on his skiing vacations. Instead, I will happily wave goodbye—and with any luck, go someplace warm for me. And when we vacation together, we choose which activities we will do together and separately.
- Sometimes, I compromise with clients. Many clients have outsize expectations for the time and money they are willing to invest with me. I won’t do more work for less money, but as long as the client resets their outcome expectations, I am willing to change the services I will offer them.
- I compromise on restaurants all the time, because not everyone eats a low-carb diet. If I can find just one item on the menu, that’s probably good enough. Assuming the company makes up for my lack of choices!
But, too often, one small compromise leads to a total—and sometimes, unwelcome—change in our lives. Fred didn’t realize his consistent overtime meant the company underpaid him and ate into his freedom to choose other ways to live.
Fred’s overtime was a death of a thousand small cuts. I’m glad he changed his mind.
That’s the question this week: When and for how long do you choose to compromise?