The Pitfalls Of Perfection

Fallacy #1: Work-Life Balance

Since many women are mothers and wives, as well as professionals, they may be delighted to hear their employers say they support a healthy work-life balance. But Natalie Bartholomew, community president for First Community Bank, says there is no such thing.

“I feel like work-life balance is some kind of concept that a corporate group created just to say that they were doing something to help the culture at their organization,” Bartholomew said during her session at the 2023 New England Women in Banking conference, put on by Mortgage Women Magazine’s parent company. “It’s one more thing for us to check the box.”

It’s disingenuous for someone to say they support a healthy work-life balance when, for instance, they text, email, or call their employees after working hours. Bartholomew asked the audience, “As a woman leader in your bank, are you sending out emails or text messages to employees after hours?” causing some in the audience to smirk and point to the guilty party at their table.

She explained that even if the message starts with “Don’t answer this” or “I know it’s after working hours, but I’m sending this because … ” it will still pull that person’s attention back to work. That person may be in the middle of dinner with their family, asking their kids how school was, when all of a sudden, their phone pings, and their boss’s name pops up. Even though the boss urges them not to respond, that person is now thinking that it must be important since the message could not wait until morning, and they should respond.

The boss in that scenario might not even know they’re crossing a boundary, but that’s why it is important for women to ask what their employer means by “work-life balance” when the topic comes up and ask them to explain what they consider to be an appropriate balance.

Traditionally, work-life balance means matching the amount of time spent at work with the amount of time spent with family and friends. But achieving that 50/50 split isn’t very practical for a lot of people, Bartholomew said, especially for women.

That isn’t to say men don’t have busy lives outside of work, but the majority (60%) of women perform most of the familial and household duties, according to a Pew Research study. That includes the cleaning, cooking, and tending to the children’s needs. Even married women with no kids are expected to handle social and family responsibilities like taking care of elderly family members, planning and preparing for social gatherings, and representing their partners at functions they cannot attend.

The 50/50 Split

The fallacy is believing that anyone can achieve a 50/50 split between their working life and outside life. By continuously trying and failing to keep the balance, women will only frustrate themselves and receive disapproving looks from both their kids and their bosses. One for not showing up to an important ball game and the other for not staying late to complete a work project.

Rather, Bartholomew said that women are constantly in a state of imbalance. Sometimes work will demand more of their attention, and sometimes, family obligations demand more attention. It’s more of an ebb and flow that women need to navigate as long as they make sure their attention isn’t solely dedicated to one or the other.

“We’re either leaning more into our career like I am right now, I missed my son’s football game last night. Or sometimes we’re leaning more into our family,” Bartholomew said. “Sometimes we’re leaning more into ourselves, and that’s OK.”

And for those who have bosses that continue to send messages after working hours, Bartholomew stated firmly on her podcast, Girl Banker, to not respond.

“Stop answering emails after 5 p.m. even though you love to show your boss that you will respond at 7:30 p.m. at night. They don’t care. When it comes down to it, they will lay you off in a heartbeat,” she said.

Fallacy #2: Multitasking

In the mortgage world, many employees, especially loan originators, are valued for their productivity and efficiency. There are deadlines to meet, and oftentimes the borrower needs the loan closed by a certain date. In this high-interest rate environment, companies need a steady stream of production to stay in business. So, more important than marketing, communication abilities, teamwork, and how many leads are raked in, employers want to see loans getting funded.

A commonly held belief is that multitasking will increase efficiency and productivity, yet research consistently shows that performance level declines when multitasking versus doing one task at a time.

The research is pretty much unanimous, which is rare in the social sciences, but people who chronically multitask show deficits in multiple areas. A Stanford University study shows that people who multitask frequently cannot filter out irrelevant information, can’t manage a working memory, and are chronically distracted. The author of the study, Clifford Nass, said that too much multitasking can be detrimental to someone’s ability to concentrate because they’ve retrained their brain to multitask poorly and cannot revert back.

“Brains are remarkably plastic,” Nass said. “We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but they’re not elastic. They don’t just snap back into shape.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the rigmarole of the industry considering how fast everything changes, said Roxanne Emmerich, founder at Institute for Extraordinary Banking, empathizing with those who bend themselves out of shape just to stay ahead.

“This is an industry that’s on the move, and only those who are staying ahead of it are going to survive this next phase,” Emmerich said.

Moreover, multitasking is linked to heightened stress levels and decreased well-being as individuals grapple with the psychological toll of trying to manage competing demands.

Instead, Bartholomew says that it is better to switch from task to task rather than try to do them simultaneously.

Fallacy #3: Be A ‘Yes’ Woman

It may be disheartening to hear, but there is no reward for exhausting yourself to the maximum limit. There’s no golden trophy for being the last one to leave the office or the first to come in. Nor is there one for taking on more projects than what’s actually feasible. Odds are that no one will even notice you’re stretching your bandwidth to the breaking point, but they will notice if a task is done poorly or late.

People who have a reputation for saying yes to things without thinking about their own capacity to complete the requested task are often labeled “people pleasers.” Research also shows that more women (56%) call themselves people pleasers than men (42%). A YouGov survey shows that 70% of women go to great lengths to avoid conflict, and 55% of women say they often feel as if they can’t say no when someone asks for something.

The evidence makes it clear as to why setting boundaries is often discussed at New England Women in Banking and Mortgage Star events. Bartholomew threw another question to the audience, asking, “How many of you have said this phrase? ‘I’m gonna be on PTO next week, but I will have my phone and my computer with me.’”

Many in the crowd looked at their colleagues, and one said that’s what she told her coworkers before leaving to attend the conference.

Bartholomew said she had an employee who went to Italy. As he was getting on the plane, he sent a message saying, “I don’t have an international cell phone plan. Here’s an app if you need me for anything, and you can use this app to message me.” But Bartholomew messaged him back saying she would not be messaging him on vacation, which she said was hard because he plays a big role in the bank.

“But you have to live by that standard,” Bartholomew said. “And it’s a really hard habit to break, but it’s up to us to do that.”

Essentially, being a people pleaser or “yes woman” is a fear response to avoid conflict or losing their job. However, when someone says yes to taking on a task they actually cannot complete since they have other tasks at hand, they’ll be letting down that person who made the request, backfiring on the people pleaser.

Instead, Bartholomew recommends saying, “Can I get back to you on that?”

Fallacy #4: Anger And Resentment As Weapons

The fourth fallacy is that women must mow over all other men to reach their desired level of success, which only creates resentment and enemies out of potential allies.

Emmerich admits it can be frustrating when female leaders, such as herself, sometimes struggle to earn respect from their male employees or peers because they don’t look like the type of individual they are used to taking orders from. Once, before stepping on stage at a conference, in front of a large audience of executive and c-suite men in banking, Emmerich was told by a man that “Men aren’t ready to take orders from women.”

“Don’t get upset about it; take action,” Emmerich said. “Move on, or it will define you. If you get into that energy of being angry and trying to prove them wrong, that’s a problem.”

Emmerich’s advice to younger women or any women who are new to this industry is “Don’t hate men.” She explained that the pendulum has swung, and she is finding more intolerance among female professionals against men, which is not conducive in an environment where women will have to work alongside mostly men.

“Yes, we were held down and discriminated against, but many of us rose up in spite of all that, but that doesn’t mean we go the other direction,” Emmerich said.

Although it can be more difficult for many women to break into the c-suite and upper echelon of the industry, Emmerich says that it’s not impossible, as evident by her own success.

Know The Metrics

She often encourages women, no matter what position they hold at their bank or company, to understand the big picture as their executives do. Before the sessions began, Emmerich walked around the room and asked some ladies what their net interest margin was at their bank.

“Several of you said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘You’re never gonna say that again. Okay?’ Men in this industry understand that language … You have to understand the language of banking, and you can’t just understand your department,” Emmerich told the audience during her session. The same holds true for the mortgage industry. Know the key metrics.

In a follow-up interview, Emmerich said she will more often quiz women on this question because they are frustrated about not breaking into that c-suite role. Most likely because they were able to achieve their previous promotions by excelling at the job they were doing in their department. The difference in achieving an executive role is that they need to understand the big picture, and that means knowing the numbers for each department.

“As executives, you’re 100% responsible for everything that moves those metrics, not just your division,” Emmerich said. “You need to understand some of those key leading indicators and the lagging indicators that then move profitability and growth, because if you don’t understand how those things tie together and you don’t know where your numbers are at you can’t have a seat at the big table.”

The Real Problem

Reading this, some women may identify with a few of the characteristics mentioned such as being a people pleaser or a multitasker, but the underlying theme in all these fallacies and internal issues is that they all are associated with anxiety.

Taking a note from Megan Marsh’s “Big Girls Do Cry’’ article in last year’s Mortgage Women Magazine — and who has also attended a number of Mortgage Star and NEWIB events — women are still learning to adapt to the corporate business environment.

“The problem that we all have to overcome is that men built the professional word and devised the rules that were geared towards them at the time,” Marsh stated. “Women are still trying to figure out how to behave in this world where we are told to be calm under pressure, diligent in the way we carry ourselves, and always mindful of keeping our emotions in check.”

Back to why women leave the conference feeling rejuvenated, it’s because they are connecting more with their own community; people who have experienced the same feelings, made the same mistakes, and have the same anxieties as their own.

Although not every woman professional in this industry has the privilege of having a female companion at the office, there are groups of women out there who are looking to form more connections and a stronger, more supportive female community in the mortgage and banking industries.

“What I have found is that the community of women in banking wanted a community,” Bartholomew said, and that’s why she created The Girl Banker podcast.

“There is a Facebook group that you’re all welcome to join if you’re a woman in banking. I think right now it’s like 8,500 members and it represents 32 states across the country and it’s full of women in banking. And there’s a lot of great conversations that go on in there.”