Women in Power panel seeks the Holy Grail work/life balance

Asked if they had attained a work/life balance, many, if not most, of the 160 attendees of the Jan. 24 Women in Power panel at Purchase’s Manhattanville College raised a hand. But when asked if they’d like more of a work/life balance, about the same number of hands went up from the same people, as one humorous observer noted at the Reid Castle breakfast event, presented by White Plains-based Citrin Cooperman, one of the nation’s leading professional services firms, and Westfair Communications Inc., parent company of the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals. The event marked its return after a Covid absence of three years. 

Work/life balance has long been the complex, controversial Holy Grail of the workforce, never more so than in the age of Covid, which has produced a new work culture with its own lexicon remote work, coworking and quiet quitting.  And never more so for women, still considered the point persons for childcare. Not surprisingly, the good-humored, complimentary and complementary panelists, who agreed on much, had varying opinions on work/life balance and how to attain it. 

It may be a bit of an urban legend, Sally A. Paull, executive vice president of human resources at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, said in response to a question from moderator Chelsea Rosen, an audit partner at Citrin Cooperman. There are just days and weeks when you are really fried. There’s no panacea. Time is not a renewable resource. 

Susan Fox, president and CEO of White Plains Hospital, agreed:  It’s personal to you, I like to work, although my kids and husband, who is here today, are important to me. Whatever you do you have to make some sacrifices. 

And here it should be noted that the willingness to do so in the health-care and pharmaceutical sectors helped most of us weather the pandemic, during which, Paull noted, 65% of Regeneron employees were at the office to ensure global drug supplies and a drug therapy for the first Covid strain. 

But Cynthia R. Cindi Bigelow, president and CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield, said that work/life balance was achievable, in part because women are such great schedulers, although she acknowledged that when you are in production/manufacturing as 350 of her 450 employees are scheduling time off for a dad to coach his daughter’s softball team is not without its challenges. Still, Bigelow said, her company is small enough that she and her leadership team can deal with employee needs individually. And she added she always takes her children’s phone calls something Fox and Paull agreed was essential. Indeed, a potential hire was so impressed with Bigelow’s willingness to interrupt the job interview to take her two children’s calls that the interviewee accepted a position with Bigelow Tea. 

Taking time to address the needs of others be it family or employees is key, the panelists said, to success in the workplace. Bigelow who spent nearly 20 years in all areas of a company that her grandmother, Ruth Campbell Bigelow, founded in 1945 with Constant Comment black tea recalled her first days on the job as a self-satisfied cost accountant with a newly minted MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Rather than hand her the praise she was expecting, however, her father David Sr., who ran the company then reminded her that she needed to stamp her own mail, just like everyone else.  

People are watching you, Bigelow said she learned that day. We are role models. 

Fox who began her career as a pediatric intensive care nurse at New York Hospital in Manhattan in the 1980s, a time when there wasn’t a great deal of respect for nursing said she vowed that if she stayed in health care, that would change. 

Without your employees, you’re nothing, she said of CEOs. 

And Paull who graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and spent 20 years in the Air Force on active duty and in the reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel said she struggled for a time to find her values of service to country and others in the civilian workforce. 

You have to create enough space for yourself to do what you value as a person, Paull said. “Be a working professional, but be true to yourself.

The question then becomes, she said, “How do we create space for all colleagues to achieve balance?”

The panelists agreed that maternity and paternity leave, the rise of fathers in coparenting, flexible working conditions even in more traditional businesses like Bigelow where employees are in the office and production five days a week, with shorter hours Fridays all contribute to that balancing act. But much of the time, it’s on the individual and the individual leader, who has to learn how to draw a line and communicate, knowing when to say yes and when to say no or at least not now and always persevering. 

Once I’m convinced that I’m right which is most of the time, Paull said to laughter, then I keep circling back. No small feat with her two bosses Regeneron CEO Leonard Schleifer and CSO (Chief Scientific Officer) George Yancopoulos both of whom she described as a handful who’ll argue about anything Mets, what’s the other team? Yankees? You can see I’m a baseball fan. 

Indeed, the sunny, wintry morning was punctuated by the panelists self-deprecating humor. 

No, I wasn’t a nurse who saved lives, Bigelow said, gesturing to Fox. And I wasn’t in the Air Force protecting people, she added, gesturing to Paull. But I was a bartender, she added of a job that no doubt stood her in good stead in the tea business, which is also about mixing ingredients. 

Fox got the ball rolling at the beginning of the event introduced by Citrin Cooperman partner Catherine Sabol when she said, “First things first:  How did she do it?” addressing the walking boot on her broken ankle.  

She and her dog, Murphy, were racing to greet son Christian, visiting from Boston. 

Murphy won, she deadpanned.