VideoFinance staffers also view flextime very seriously. Jim Rea, CFO of American-Marsh Pumps, in Collierville, Tennessee, lets his employees work any eight hours between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., which is especially helpful because much of his staff gets an hourly wage. "They appreciate it because it puts a lot of stress on them if they have sick kids at home and they have to take a day off and they can't get their normal take-home pay one week," he says.
CFO, Heal Thyself
Several years ago, Rea was the 48-year-old CFO of an automotive-supply company in Detroit. The company was encountering such tough times that suppliers began demanding cash on delivery for shipments. And Rea was dancing as fast as he could, trying to keep it all together. Adding to his stress was the fact that he and his wife missed their families back in Tennessee, as well as the slow pace of the country.
After a year of watching the company hemorrhage money, "I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown," says Rea. And one day, an intense pain gripped his chest, sending him from the office to the emergency room by ambulance. Luckily, the pain was only an anxiety attack, but Rea calls it one hell of a wake-up call. Three months later, he quit his job and moved his family back to Tennessee, where he landed the job at American-Marsh Pumps, a small irrigation pump manufacturing company, and now works a manageable 45 hours a week.
While CFOs seem to have a variety of techniques to reduce employee stress, they tend to fall down when dealing with their own. Consider, for example, that most senior finance executives in the survey fail to use the easiest stress reducer available to them: taking all their vacation time. In fact, 62 percent of survey respondents admit they don't use all their time each year, and when they take vacation, 61 percent check work voice mail, 55 percent check work E-mail, and 35 percent bring a laptop.
For the time that has to be spent in the office, experts generally preach a few familiar coping techniques — exercise, eat right, get plenty of sleep. But, of course, these practices are the first to go when stress hits. "When you're tired and under stress," says Olivia Mellan, a stress-management expert, "no matter how much self-help work you have done, you will always revert to your primitive mode of behavior, which is always dysfunctional."
The trick, she says, is building a bridge between the dysfunctional you and the rational and thriving adult inside. The bridge can take a number of forms. For some, it's writing down what's stressing them out. For others, it's a creative pursuit, like painting or music. Nolan, for example, is a part-time church musician, a hobby that he says "relaxes me in a lot of ways." He also participates in a monthly men's counseling group, where "work-life balance is becoming a much more popular topic of conversation," he adds.
Taking breaks during work time is vital, too. Jodi Aronson Prohofsky, senior vice president of clinical operations at CIGNA Behavioral Health, suggests that executives avoid eating lunch at their desks. "If you're eating while you're working, you're ingesting more stress," she says. She also suggests putting a picture of your favorite place — a beach, your back deck, whatever — on your computer and taking a few minutes each day to just stare at it. "It may be counterintuitive to stop and stand still, but if you do and then you regroup, you'll get far more done in the course of a day," she says.
Roberts at Emory, on the other hand, thinks the solution may be a little more basic. "I think a half-hour walk every day is the best medicine," he says. "[Executives] relax, they're stretching muscles, and sometimes those 30 minutes without a BlackBerry is the only creative time they have." Higginbotham, for example, despite his mammoth workweek, is totally committed to working out as often as possible. So is Stepan, who runs between 2 and 10 miles a day.
Still, all of the CFOs interviewed agreed that the most important thing they learned during their tenure in high-stress workplaces was that it is vital to push back when things get to be too much. "It's very important to have boundaries on the way into a new job," says Korn. "You're a better employee if you spend time in the outside world." That means setting limits both with the CEO and with the job itself. Says Rea, "I wouldn't ride it out if that kind of [stress] happened here. I'd back out of the job instead. I wouldn't go through what I went through before."
A Hardy Few
As a Green Beret, David Higginbotham spent a year in Haiti as part of a mission sent in 1994 to the tiny nation to help expedite the democratic process. His mandate, and that of the men on his team, was to assist in setting up elections, install a trained police force, and help teach Haitians about human rights. No one, not the team nor the Haitians, was really sure how to properly proceed, or how it would all turn out. Higginbotham's commander would fly in by helicopter from time to time to inspect the troops and see how things were going, and then he would fly right back out again.
"That sort of prepared me for what we're doing now," comments Higginbotham, who in September completed writing all of TiVo's internal-controls documentation to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.
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