Agree you tend to always be on call…..this is for a few reasons.
- the higher you get in management, the more likely your role is knowledge or decision-making based - enabling you to do it from anywhere, and contribute relatively quickly (eg by weighing in on one section of a meeting then dialling off)
- you tend to have some kind of ownership stake. That can be literally that you are a shareholder, or your performance bonus rests on your results, or you are directly responsible for clients and/or winning business- which means you work on the client clock.
- your work is international- meaning different timezones
- There is only one of you. Shift work, by definition is when you have multiple people trained to do the same task. Once you re a CHRO or CEO or the top barrister in your team in a certain area of expertise, you can’t clock off and know someone else is doing your job.
there are rare exceptions to these patterns, like an airline pilot, whose job is so high stakes and high skilled that they are well paid, but still ‘clock on and clock off’ shift style. It is impossible for them to do their job virtually (for now), and there are strict regulations about their rest and time off.
But the large number of high paid jobs fit with the above principles.
However, the aspect of this that is rarely mentioned is the flexibility that comes with this. Even though you are expected to be available always, you are not held to account for your hour to hour presence in the same way. People come in late, schedule meetings around personal commitments (which are often not declared), work from home because they are feeling under the weather or want to pop out to the doctor or a school event for their kid etc….. They have specific pressure points - such as a key presentation, when they really have to be there. But most other things are established by negotiation. The better respected you are and the more unique your skills, the more people will schedule around you.
Most people at that level also have a complex network of responsibilities that cut across departments or multiple clients/companies. This means there is lack of transparency. If you say ‘I can’t do Thursday morning- how about Friday’ nobody knows whether you are having a picnic with your partner, with a different client, or flying to Brussels on Thursday morning…. They just tend to accept it. All this lack of clarity is even greater since the explosion of virtual working.
This is a huge bonus and privilege of this kind of managerial work that is often unacknowledged. It can be a simple benefit that allows you to schedule and balance your life effectively while being committed and effective in your job. It can also be a mechanism for obfuscation- making poor performance and coasting harder to quickly detect. In top management, this would be flagged through results quite quickly. For middle management in big corporations, it’s a lot less clear and there are a good number of people who have worked out how to play the system- do enough to scrape through, turn up to the countless meetings and sound active, while not actually contributing a great deal. Their productivity is pretty poor, compared to people in shift work on far less salary, doing way more valuable things, in far more gruelling circumstances.
I think quite a few on this thread have overemphasized the ‘crucial hard work’ angle of working at this level, probably triggered by the initial post about golf. It is true a lot of hard and high impact work is done, but that’s true at every pay level.