Are you feeling overwhelmed by the constant juggle between work and personal life? Do you find yourself struggling to maintain a sense of balance while trying to excel in your career and meet the demands of your personal commitments? Indeed, the pressure to perform both professionally and personally can often leave us feeling drained, stressed, and burnt out. We may find ourselves sacrificing our personal well-being and happiness in pursuit of career success, or vice versa. But what if there was a way to break free from this cycle and find a balance that allows you to thrive both in your career and personal life? Why not consider flexible work arrangements?

Wendy Cocke, author of the best-selling books “Making Flex Work” and “Reimagine Your Work,” is the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions where she works with high-achieving, technical professionals and organizations who think about work differently. Wendy spent over 20 years leading teams in Fortune 500 companies before opening her own company and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech. About ten years into her career, Wendy pursued a flexible work arrangement to balance all aspects of her life. This catalyzed and propelled her career as she worked her way from engineer to PMO director. With her experience and engineering mindset, she can help other people do the same.

In this episode, Wendy delves into the transformative power of embracing flexibility in both work and life. Through her significant experience and practical tips, she shares her personal journey of navigating flexible work arrangements and managing her time and energy wisely. Wendy offers valuable advice on achieving greater balance and fulfillment, providing actionable insights to help revolutionize your approach to work and life.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Unlock the path to simplifying and streamlining your systems and processes with this tried-and-proven method
  • Learn ways to use your time purposefully and manage it effectively
  • Find out how to create a flexible work setup that harmonizes your personal needs with the company’s goals, all while ensuring optimal business results

“Just find the one thing that you can say yes to and give it a shot.”

– Wendy Cocke

Valuable Free Resource: 

Topics Covered:

02:41 – Describing what her job now after leaving corporate

04:37 – Starting a flexible work arrangement and being successful at it

09:15 – Lessons learned from starting flexible work time

10:30 – Doing a great job of balancing her own and the company’s needs with the flexible work set up

13:01 – What inspired her to write a book

14:30 – Sharing her book’s core message [EVAL-uation method]

17:18 – Helpful tips and resources to manage your time and work

20:37 – Relevant insight on when spending time in the office

23:01 – Sharing her important thoughts on ‘proximity bias’

24:38 – Q: What do I do if I’m the leader? A: If you really want to embrace flexibility with your team and you don’t know how, start small, just figure out something you can say yes to and try it.

Key Takeaways:

“In-person time should be valued at a different level than your remote work; thinking about doing the right work at the right time.” – Wendy Cocke

“If you are only going to be in the office a very small portion of your time, you should be treating the office as a business trip.” – Wendy Cocke

“Remote employees who manage that relationship well are not a victim of proximity bias. Because as a manager you feel like you have that same close relationship, but it is very much the case that you could become out of sight, out of mind if you are not being intentional to stay top of mind.” – Wendy Cocke

“Your leader and your leader’s leader all the way up to the CEO, for them, nothing from a business perspective has changed. They still need to deliver those business results. And so if you can partner with them to help them feel comfortable to reduce their feeling of risk, then you’re going to be more successful.” – Wendy Cocke

Ways to Connect with Wendy Cocke:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Wendy Cocke 00:00

And I think it’s important to know that it is a flexible work arrangement. When I talk to clients about these non-traditional work arrangements, I remind them that as soon as we take the word flexible out, it’s just another work arrangement. And the key is flexibility. And some weeks the company is going to win. And some weeks you are going to win. You’re not in competition with each other as long as everyone gets what they need on the macro scale. So, we have to pull back our lens of what it looks like to be successful. Maybe today is a six-hour day and maybe tomorrow is a nine-hour day.

Sarah E. Brown 00:41

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.

My guest today is Wendy Cocke. She is the author of two bestselling books: Make Flex Work, which we’re going to be talking about today and Reimagine Your Work. She is the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions, where she works with high achieving technical professionals and organizations to think about work differently. Wendy spent over 20 years leading teams in Fortune 500 companies before opening her own company and joining the faculty at Georgia Tech. About 10 years into her career, Wendy pursued a flexible work arrangement to balance all aspects of her life. At the time she was told that her career would stall, and she would never move up in the organization. Little did anyone know that the change would be the catalyst that will propel her career as she worked her way from engineer to PMO Director. Wendy has redefined success for herself according to her values. She believes that with her experience and her engineering mindset, she can help other people to do the same. Wendy, thanks for being with me today.

Wendy Cocke 02:23

I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sarah E. Brown 02:25

Oh, it is a pleasure. So tell me, just clarify a bit about what you’re doing now, your day job, how you’re balancing a career and teaching, being on the faculty and all of that. Just clarify what you’re doing today.

Wendy Cocke 02:41

So I call this stage of my career, my first retirement because after 20 years in the corporate world, I’ve retired from full-time corporate work, full-time for me, which was still a part-time job. But that corporate job is my primary focus. Today, I have three different income streams that I really enjoy. So, the first is a passion I discovered after I left corporate, which is writing, speaking, and training. Absolutely love that. As you said, I’ve got two books and I go and talk to organizations about how to think about work differently, how to think about their structure of their organization design, how to think about their hours, how to think about the way they put their teams together, those sorts of things. The second is technical consulting. So as a part of engineering leadership solutions, I have a small army myself and some 1,099 employees that are some of the best and brightest people I’ve worked with throughout my career.

And we go and support program and project management and continuous improvement mostly in small mid-size companies, but we’ve also done some Fortune 100 work there as well. Anything from fractional leadership to helping with small project and anything in between. And then twice a week I go down to Georgia Tech where I support a cohort of 150 juniors. As they learn how work works, I help them in a design class that I’m responsible for with a few other faculty members where the students are put into groups and go through the entire medical device process. That job allows me to continue that talent building, which is the part I missed when I left corporate. How do I continue to build talent? Well, now I can do it on a much more massive scale because I get 150 new juniors every semester.

Sarah E. Brown 04:22

Oh my goodness. Wow. Alright, well, before we talk about the book, I want to talk a little bit, I want you to recap your flex journey in corporate America. How did it start? Where did it go? Tell us a little bit about that story.

Wendy Cocke 04:37

So, this was about 15 years ago, little less than 15 years ago. And I was an up and comer in a Fortune 100 company. I was in R and D, I was running technical projects. I was doing all the things that it’s meant to do to be successful in a career. And then I got pregnant, and I realized that maybe I didn’t want to do all of that anymore. And within three months of coming back from maternity leave, I felt like I was failing at everything. I was not being a great wife. I was not being the employee that I was before I went out on maternity leave. I wasn’t even a good friend and coworker. I was short with my husband. I was frustrated with my child, and I was really frustrated with all of my coworkers. But honestly, I was just tired and I needed some relief.

So I went to my boss. Luckily, I had an amazing manager at that time who was just a few years ahead of me. We had sort of grown up in the organization together and he knew when I came and talked to him and I said, I need some help that I had already exhausted all those other options. Well, he said, sure. And then we both sort of stared at each other blankly because neither of us actually knew how to get a flexible work arrangement. There was a policy as with most giant companies, but we couldn’t, didn’t really know anybody that used that policy. So for us, there was one other technical woman on this five building campus that had a flexible work arrangement. So I went and I found her. We figured out the process and as we started to navigate that process, there was another R and D project that had just bombed.

It had failed every test it had passed or had tried to pass. They’d already boxed up the equipment and it was on a truck headed across the border to the manufacturing facility. And they needed me to step in and be the project leader. I didn’t know what I was going to do because I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be able to go part-time and take that new expanded role. As a matter of fact, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to take that part-time arrangement if I took this other job. But then as with a lot of things in corporate, it wasn’t really a choice on if I was going to take that role. So there were a lot of tears. I got really close to quitting. My husband told me I could quit. And I had a dear friend who said, no, no, no, you can’t quit.

If you quit they win. And she was right because if I quit, they had to find someone else to do it and maybe her right, like maybe somebody else that I cared deeply about was going to be in the same position. So it took me 11 months to get that part-time job. I refused to let go of that idea. At the end, about three months prior to the end of that 11 months, I convinced the VP of R and D to let me try it. I asked for a trial, a 90-day trial. And when he did not say no, I assumed he meant yes because I believe no is just short for not yet. So he just hadn’t said yes yet. And I started immediately, 90 days later, I polled the whole team. I asked them, along the way, to give me feedback and I compiled all of that.

And I sent it to the head of R and D with a meeting that said, finalize the flexible work arrangement for me to go part-time. And he declined my meeting. And in a not so proud moment, I slammed my chair under my desk and I had a bit of a temper tantrum as I walked out into the hallway and down the long hall as I saw him coming towards me. And he was waving his arms like air traffic control, Sarah. He was like, no, don’t say anything. And as we got close enough where we could hear each other, he said, before you say anything, just know that I saw your email. And I was like, yeah, and you declined it. Thank you. And he said, I declined it because I didn’t know you had started. And if I didn’t know you had started it must not have been a problem. Just give me your form. We don’t need a meeting. So this patient, this 11-month journey, finally got what I needed. And I’ve never worked a full-time schedule since I got promoted faster after going part-time than I did before. Because I was focused, because I was intentional and because I was able to be who I needed to be there.

Sarah E. Brown 08:50

So I think there are a couple of lessons in that story and patience is one, and you highlighted that. But I think the idea of starting with a trial, what I call a pilot, is another one that makes sense. And the fact that you don’t have to get it perfect right at the very beginning. And that’s what was behind your polling of your team. So I think there are three really good lessons in that.

Wendy Cocke 09:15

Yeah. One of the things I did with the team when I walked back that first day when I decided I was starting, because he had not said no that time, it was not the first time I’d asked him, he’d said no a lot of times. And . one time he did not say no. So I took that as a yes. And you know, I walked out of the team and I said, look, I need this. I know I need this. And I also know that this team needs to be successful. So this is a team effort. If there is any moment that you need something from me and you’re not getting it, I need you to tell me. And I will adjust. If there is any time when you feel like I’m not doing what I need to do or keeping up my end of the bargain, I need you to tell me and I will adjust. You know, at the end of the day, business is responsible for getting business done. And although I had a way I wanted to get it done, if business needed to get done differently, I needed to be able to adjust to that.

Sarah E. Brown 10:04

So I talk a lot to my clients and on this podcast about the importance of getting your individual needs met. But the point that you’re making that I think is important is the company has needs as well. And part of this trial and error process is finding that balance between the company needs and your needs. And I think you did a beautiful job.

Wendy Cocke 10:30

Well, and I think it’s important to know that it is a flexible work arrangement. When I talk to clients about these non-traditional work arrangements, I remind them that as soon as we take the word flexible out, it’s just another work arrangement. And the key is flexibility. And some weeks the company is going to win. And some weeks you are going to win. You’re not in competition with each other as long as everyone gets what they need on the macro scale. So we have to pull back our lens of what it looks like to be successful. Maybe today is a six-hour day and maybe tomorrow is a nine-hour day. Maybe the board of directors is in and you need to be there because that’s what your job entails. Well, that’s okay because when your child is in something important and you want to be at that event, you expect the company to give for you.

So you have to give when it’s time. I continued to travel on a part-time schedule. And I think a lot of people think you cannot travel on a part-time schedule. Well of course that week is not very part-time. Getting up and I’m in Atlanta getting up and driving to the Atlanta airport, sitting there for the number of hours flying to a place, having a dinner with a client, getting up the next morning doing all those things. Of course that’s not a part-time week. But next Friday when you want to go support field day at the elementary school, that’s probably not meeting all of your hour commitment there either. It’s a give and take. Every week has got to be different.

Sarah E. Brown 11:58

Very good point. So why did you want to write a book?

Advertisement 12:01

Hi, this is Sarah Brown again, the host of the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can take control of your career and do it your way, visit sarahebrown.com. There you will be able to download a free chapter from my book, Let Your Personality Be Your Career Guide. It contains information and exercises on how you can identify your unique interests, strengths, and needs, and translate that into career goals that are just right for you. Now back to this informative episode.

Wendy Cocke 13:01

You know, I didn’t want to write a book. As a matter of fact, I had been gifted a book on how to write a book and I had put it away. I know, right? So I have a mentor who said, Wendy, you do something different. Several important mentors in my life said, I’ve never seen somebody be able to navigate a flexible work arrangement the way I had done it. I believe my engineering brain and my study of people, which is sort of my non-fiction people study, that’s my hobby. When I put those together, it’s like two really interesting pieces of a puzzle. So a friend gave me a book and said, I need you to write it. And I said, you are crazy. I am a chemical engineer. We don’t write books. And he said, well, just here, have it. And I said it on the shelf, and I don’t know about you and your listeners, but I have this stack of books that I’m going to read.

And then I sort of get to them when the time is right. Within 30 days the only thing left in my stack was the book on how to write a book. I had read everything else. And then for 30 more days I read nothing because I could find nothing else that interested me. And this book was just staring at me on my nightstand. So I finally picked it up and I said, well, the author will not know that I’m not writing a book. I’ll just read it. And within 60 days I had 40,000 words written just from picking up that book.

Sarah E. Brown 14:22

Wow!

Wendy Cocke 14:23

Yeah. Sometimes the universe just tells you you’re supposed to do something.

Sarah E. Brown 14:26

Okay. So what’s the message, the key message in your book?

Wendy Cocke 14:30

So Making Flex Work is about thinking of yourself as the system, the process, or the machine. And doing what we all do to systems, processes, and machines, which is optimizing them. So I bring an engineering perspective, which is if I am the machine and I want to optimize it, how do I do that? I have a four-step method in the book called the EVAL-uation method. EVA and L, E is, every hour counts. It’s understanding our current state, it’s understanding what we are already doing. It is creating a baseline depending on the industry or the type of work that your listener is in. We can’t change anything until we know what it is. The second step V is valuing optimized work. This is if we were a machine, we’d be dialing in the knobs just to get it right. If we were a process, we would be getting that feedback and figuring out where the waste is in our process.

And for us, it’s looking around saying, what are the tasks that take me longer than everyone else? What are the tasks that I put off because they’re hard? What are the tasks and the things that are slowing me down? And then figuring out problem solving ways to optimize that. This third step is A, that’s assessing the expectations. Once we’ve optimized everything, now we need to understand is it bringing us value? And by us, I mean me value or the company value. Because in the business world, if we’re doing activities that do not bring us personal value or organizational value, we should be questioning why we are doing them. So you’ve optimized it. Now you start to say, is it bringing me or the company value? And sometimes it used to bring you value and it doesn’t anymore. Maybe there’s a committee you got on years ago that it’s time to let a more junior person serve on that committee and free up your time.

Maybe there’s an activity that brings you a lot of passion that you have a lot of passion for, but there’s a way you could delegate that to someone else so they could also develop that passion. That’s the A. And then the L, this is my continuous improvement background, my engineering background. It’s leveraging small changes. It’s R and D on yourself. It’s Kaizen yourself. It’s about trial and error. It’s about trying something and seeing is that better or worse? And if it’s better, do more of it. And if it’s worse, don’t do it. Again. It’s about being flexible and creative.

Sarah E. Brown 16:50

And if I could add in this EVAL method, you have lots of really easy to use tools to actually work through that process. And one of the tools that you talk about is tracking your time on 15-minute increments, which is something I have done for years. And I thought I was just OCD about it. But you are actually validating this is a really good way of getting a handle on what you were doing now.

Wendy Cocke 17:18

And I think it is. What I have found is that it is eye-opening in a lot of ways to write down your time. And so you’re right, thank you for the confidence in the tools. They are all available for free on my website makingflexwork.com. They are all there for any listener that wants to download them for free. I have found that people will ask for a reduced schedule and then I ask them to fill this out for a week. And it does not have to be a Monday to Friday week. I say start tomorrow, whatever tomorrow is, that is the start of the week. Just start it tomorrow. I have had people come back and say, oh, I wasn’t actually even working 30 hours. I thought I was overworked and I needed things off my plate. But when I really looked at it, I wasn’t actually even working 30 hours.

I was just working a lot over a span of time. So I ask people to think about when is the first time you engage with work in the morning? If you’re like me, you have it on your phone and you engage with work before your feet even hit the floor. I need that time when it’s still quiet in my house to understand what my day is going to look like. So I may engage at five fifty five in the morning sending out emails, but my brain is now on for work. It knows work has happened. My husband, on the other hand, doesn’t do that. He goes to his laptop. The work lives in his laptop. So for him, when the work starts at seven thirty or eight, the work starts at seven 30 or eight. It doesn’t stop. Right? He works straight where my day might go from five in the morning until seven at night, but I might only work six hours during that period of time. His day is much more controlled. It’s more from seven 30 to four 30. But he’s working that whole time. Neither of us is doing something right or wrong. It just feels different. And a lot of times if people are working early in the morning or late at night, they think they have worked more than they have actually worked.

Sarah E. Brown 19:15

And I have learned from that exercise of having done it for many years, that if I will block the time that I’m going to allocate to work on my calendar. And granted it works better now that I’m not so much in the corporate world because I’m not getting the interruptions that I used to get. But if I block that time and try to get things done within that time period, I’m able to balance better. So, but I didn’t know that.

Wendy Cocke 19:43

Yeah. And being really honest with yourself. When so many of us switched to a hybrid model or a work from home model with literally no training, no forethought and no intention in 2020, so all the things you would do if you were making a major career change, none of us did. We all just went home. And for people that still are in that mode and they haven’t thought about it, laundry does not take up a lot of time. And yet it does take you away from work. So if you are doing laundry during the day, excellent. Love it for you. If it works, do it. But understand that while you are folding laundry, you are not actually working.

Sarah E. Brown 20:21

Correct. But it could be a scheduled break.

Wendy Cocke 20:24

That’s right.

Sarah E. Brown 20:25

And that’s the key is just to get clear about that.

Wendy Cocke 20:28

It’s just about being intentional and not letting the day disappear.

Sarah E. Brown 20:32

Are there any other tools that you want to accentuate that are in the book?

Wendy Cocke 20:37

So for making flex work, I think if your audience just grabbed onto the evaluation method, I would feel like my job was done. But we also have some tools about managing your presence, which I think in a hybrid world could be really important for your listeners. If you’re only going to be in the office a limited amount of time, you cannot take for granted that time in the office, in person time should be valued at a different level than your remote work. Thinking about doing the right work at the right time. If you are going to work and sitting there with your noise canceling headphones on, doing heads down focused work, the question in my mind is, why did you spend commuting time to do that? Instead, if you are going to be in a place with other humans that you can interact with, you should be intentionally interacting with those humans.

You should be building relationships and doing that collaborative work that is so much easier in person and it will hold you through those periods of time when you are not together. I tell my clients that just like if you were going on a business trip, if you had booked an airline ticket, you wouldn’t not have a plan. You would have an agenda for when you landed. You would know where you’re having dinner. You would know what time you were going in the next day. You would know what you were doing. If you are only going to be in the office a very small portion of your time, you should be treating the office as a business trip. Who else is going to be there? Who do I need to see, what’s important while I am there? And then it won’t matter that you’re only in the office a few days a week or a few days a month because you will be able to build those relationships that we’ve all done with clients and vendors. Now we just need to have those same intentional conversations with our coworkers.

Sarah E. Brown 22:31

I’m really glad you brought that up because I have individual clients who complain about the phenomenon of proximity bias. You know, that managers and leaders will pick people for special assignments based on just their being around. They see them more often and I tell them, yeah, but managing that is your responsibility and here’s how you can be conscious about doing that, particularly if you’re working remotely. So I’m really glad you brought that tool up.

Wendy Cocke 23:01

Yeah. Most of my management career, I’ve had one or more remote employees. And I will tell you that remote employees who manage that relationship well are not a victim of proximity bias. Because as a manager you feel like you have that same close relationship, but it is very much the case that you could become out of sight, out of mind if you are not being intentional to stay top of mind. And we have so many technology advantages now that we even had five years ago that allow you to really play with that ability to how you build connections. We can be on a video where we can actually see each other’s faces in a way that we could not before. And people are visual creatures. And so turning that camera on, even when you don’t want to, can really help to build a relationship. If you’re the only face they see and everybody else is a little black circle with their initials on it, you are building a stronger connection than everyone else.

Sarah E. Brown 24:04

So Wendy, you’ve had a very interesting career and you’ve proved that flex can work if you’re patient and take the responsibility for working on it. And you’ve written a book to help people get started on doing this on their own or for finding the balance that works for them. Is there a question that I didn’t ask you that I should have asked you that would help our listeners really realize that finding the right balance for them is within their prerogative and their control?

Wendy Cocke 24:38

The only question I think that still remains is what do I do if I’m the leader? And so many of my employees want this flexibility and I don’t know what to do. And so I’m going to answer that question to the individual, which is to understand that your leader did not get some magic training on how to do this. Your leader and your leader’s leader all the way up to the CEO, for them, nothing from a business perspective has changed. They still need to deliver those business results. And so if you can partner with them to help them feel comfortable to reduce their feeling of risk, then you’re going to be more successful. And if you are a leader and you really want to embrace flexibility with your team and you don’t know how, start small, just figure out something you can say yes to and try it and then find something else you can say yes to and try it.

I had a client who was concerned about a woman who needed to go to the bus stop and she said, well, what’s really inconvenient is that we have a weekly team meeting and she takes the notes. And so her being at the bus stop is really difficult because she cannot take notes at the bus stop. And I stopped my friend and I said, why does this one person need to be the note taker? Well that’s who’s always done it. And I said, okay, well what if one day somebody else did it and we just see what happens because the person could still put their earbud in and walk to the bus stop. So she could still be engaged in the conversation. And she came back and she’s like, she says, we tried last week. We rotated around and a different person every day took the notes and nothing bad happened. Excellent. So just find the one thing that you can say yes to and give it a shot.

Sarah E. Brown 26:30

Very good advice. Wendy, thank you so much for being with me today.

Wendy Cocke 26:36

I have had an absolute blast. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah E. Brown 26:39

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes, and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown

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