You have run the numbers in your head more times than you want to admit. If you left at three thirty instead of five, you could get your kid yourself. You could stop paying for the late pickup. You could stop arriving at the door with that particular face on.
And every time, you talk yourself out of asking. Not because your work is slipping. Because you already know how the conversation goes. You will explain your life to someone who did not ask about it, they will say something sympathetic about how hard it is, and nothing will change except that now they know you are stretched.
So you keep going. And the quiet story underneath all of it is the one nobody says out loud: if I ask for less, they will think I want it less.
This week on the From a Woman to a Leader podcast, I sat down with Wendy Cocke, a chemical engineer, the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions, and the author of Making Flex Work: Defining Success on Your Own Terms and Reimagine Your Work.
Wendy went from school straight into a Fortune 100 company, straight into R&D, and spent about a decade doing exactly what she was supposed to do before she stopped to ask whether she wanted any of it. Then it took her eleven months to get her first flexible work arrangement. Once she had it, she got promoted more, and faster, than she had in the previous ten years.
But that is not really what we talked about. We talked about why so many of us never ask at all, and why those who do ask usually do so in a language their company does not speak.
“Below are the insights from our conversation, with my own experience and concrete steps you can take this week.”
1. You Are Probably Grading Yourself an F on a B-Plus Life
Wendy came back from maternity leave with her first child and crashed within weeks. She describes it as failing at everything at once, and the list she gave me is one I have heard some version of from almost every working mother I have coached.
“I felt like a failure as a mother every morning when I dropped that child off at daycare. I felt like a failure as an employee every day when I was having to leave early or choosing to leave early because I didn’t want to have to pump one more bottle of milk. I felt like an awful friend because I had no time for anything other than those two. I felt like an awful wife.”
Then, years later, writing her book, she did something almost nobody does. She went back and asked the people who were actually in her life during that period how she had really been doing.
“They said generally they would have given me a solid B plus. But as someone who takes my work very seriously and my goals very seriously, I would have thought I was getting an F in all of those categories.”
Here is what I see again and again from the coaching seat. High achieving women run a scorecard nobody else can see, and they grade it far harder than any real person would. The gap between the F you are giving yourself and the B plus the people around you are watching is not a small gap. It is the whole reason you are exhausted. You are not just doing the work. You are also carrying a permanent verdict of failure about the work.
I lived in that gap for years myself. Work and kids, work and kids, no free time, no time for me. And I was judging everyone while I did it. I judged the mothers who went home full time. I judged the mothers whose careers had slipped down the list. Then I turned around and judged myself, which was the only part of it that felt fair at the time.
How to apply this: This week, ask three people who were around during your hardest stretch how they would have graded you. Your partner, one close friend, one colleague. Ask them to be specific. You are not fishing for reassurance, you are collecting data on a scorecard you have been running alone.
2. There Are Four Definitions of Success in Your Head and You Only Have to Pass One
The subtitle of Wendy’s book is Defining Success on Your Own Terms, and when I asked her why that phrase mattered so much, she got very concrete about how many competing scorecards a woman is usually running at once.
“Success for you and success to all of your girlfriends may be different. Success to you and your mother and your mother-in-law might look different. Success to you and your spouse might look different. Success to you and your peers at work might look different. And that’s okay. We all get to decide what it is. It’s when we’re trying to be everybody else’s definitions of success that we lose our ability to actually feel successful.”
Read that last sentence again. Not that you fail. That you lose the ability to feel successful at all, no matter what you achieve.
This is where women get stuck, and it is subtle, because running four scorecards feels responsible. It feels like caring about the people in your life. But four scorecards means four chances to fail every single day, and it means no result can ever settle anything. You get promoted and your mother wonders when you will slow down. You take the flexible schedule and your peer at work makes a comment. There is no arrangement that satisfies all four, which means the work of choosing one is not selfish. It is the only way out.
How to apply this: Write down, in one sentence, what success looks like for you in the next twelve months. Then write down whose definition each of your current commitments is serving. The ones that are not serving yours are the first candidates for change.
3. Your Manager Does Not Care About 3:30, and That Is Good News
I asked Wendy the real question, the one my clients actually bring me. What if my employer is not flexible, and the job market is what it is right now, and I still need this?
She did not soften it.
“I think specifically women, we turn a business problem into an emotional problem, and then we don’t understand why our business leaders don’t understand it.”
And then:
“The business does not care that you want to pick your child up at 3:30. They don’t care. But what they do care is that whatever they want delivered is delivered.”
I flinched a little when she said it. Then I ran it against every version of this conversation I have had, in my own career and in years of sessions, and she is right.
We walk in with the reason. Daycare closes at four. My mother is ill. I am exhausted and I am not doing anything well. All of it true, all of it human, and all of it completely unusable by the person on the other side of the desk, because none of it is denominated in the only two currencies a business speaks, which are money and results.
Wendy also named the thing that makes this harder than it should be, which is that a lot of organizations are still measuring the wrong signal entirely.
“So many mistakenly think that if you are present and active, that you are productive. But we all know there are people that work around us that are present and active and absolutely unproductive. Sometimes that person that gets in first and leaves late accomplishes nothing.”
Sound familiar? If what your company measures is presence, then being fast and focused is genuinely hard for it to reward. That is a measurement problem, not a you problem, and you will never win it by working more hours inside it.
How to apply this: Before your next conversation about your schedule, write your ask twice. Once the way you would explain it to a friend, once with every reference to your personal life removed and only the delivery, the coverage and the outcome left in. Take the second version into the room.
4. Before You Trade Salary, Find Out What You Are Actually Working
Wendy is an engineer, so her first step is not a conversation. It is data collection. And her instruction is more specific than “track your hours.”
“So I ask them not only to count the hours, but find when’s the earliest you start in a week and when’s the latest that you stop. Because six hours compressed feels very different than six hours across sixteen hours.”
That line rearranged something for me. For some people six compressed hours is torture. For others, stretching six hours of work across sixteen hours of day is a marathon they never agreed to run. Same workload, completely different life, and you cannot tell which one you are living from a total alone.
She wants seven days. Not a Monday start, not a work week, seven actual days including the weekend, because almost nobody is truly off between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. Write down when you work, what you are doing, and how you feel.
“What I find is that most people who feel overwhelmed are working more than their allotted hours. And so before we trade full-time for part-time, we’re slowly gonna work our way down to what we’ve actually agreed to be paid for.”
This is the part I want every woman reading this to sit with. The first move is usually not going part time and giving up salary and benefits. The first move is getting back down to the full time job you are already being paid for. A lot of the exhaustion my clients bring me is not the job. It is the unpaid extra job stacked on top of it that nobody ever asked for and nobody will ever notice you stopped doing.
How to apply this: Start the seven day log today, not next Monday. Two columns beyond the hours: earliest start, latest stop. At the end of the week, compare the total to what you are contracted for. That number is your actual starting position.
5. Make the Change So Small That Nobody Has to Approve It
Once you know your current state, Wendy’s next step is what she calls leveraging small changes. The definition is the useful part: a change small enough that you do not need permission to run it.
Her example is deliberately unglamorous. You never work out, because by the end of the day you are finished. So one day next week you use the lunch break you already have, and you work out. Nobody’s approval required. You liked it, so you run it twice more. Now you are hungry, so you take an hour instead of thirty minutes and add the thirty to the end of your day. Still small. Still nobody’s business.
Then you go to your manager. Not to ask. To confirm.
“Hey, I just wanna make sure if I do this, is that a problem? And they’re gonna say, I don’t know. And you’re saying, well, I’ve actually did it three times last week. Didn’t seem to be a problem. Just confirming that you’re okay with it.”
Her grandmother had a phrase for slow change that Wendy still uses.
“It’s like boiling a frog. If you do it slowly enough, they won’t jump out of the pot.”
What I love about this is that it inverts the exact thing that stops most of us. You are not asking for permission. You are collecting evidence. And by the time the conversation happens, the risky unknown your manager would have had to approve has already been running quietly for three weeks without anything breaking.
How to apply this: Pick one experiment this week that is small enough to need no approval. One. Run it, note what happened to your work, and only then mention it, in the form of a confirmation rather than a request.
6. Stop Making a Request. Write a Proposal.
Sometimes the change you need is not small. School starts, and three thirty is three thirty. That is where Wendy’s third step comes in, which is assessing the expectations. Figure out what the business actually needs from you underneath the surface answer.
It might look like presence, but presence is nearly always a proxy for something else. Coverage. Responsiveness. A handoff that keeps happening. Find the something else, then write a proposal.
“This is what I want. This is what I know you need. And I have a proposal that will allow us both to get it.”
Then you take the hours in question and interrogate them one at a time. Can this be done remotely? Can it be done earlier in the day? Can it be done by someone else at all?
The story Wendy told me about a man on her team is the clearest example of this I have heard. He was near retirement, and his wife had found her dream house in another city, on the market right then. He was not ready to stop working. So Wendy called the site leader in that city and asked whether he could have a desk. And then she sent him off to build the case: go find out how many trips this team made to that city in the last twelve months, and what people actually did when they got there.
He came back with a proposal showing the team could cut those trips in half if he lived there. He moved at his own expense. The company saved money.
“We turned his problem into a business solution. So as your listeners continue to think creatively about how can what I want actually be a benefit for my organization, and pitch it that way.”
Here is what I want you to notice about that story. Nobody made an exception for him. He was not granted a favor that could be resented later or quietly withdrawn when a new manager arrived. He built something the company wanted for its own reasons, and his life was the thing that came along with it. That arrangement is durable in a way that a favor never is.
Wendy has free templates for this on her site, including an outline for building the proposal itself.
How to apply this: List the hours you want to move. Next to each one, write which of the three questions it passes: remote, earlier, or someone else. The hours that pass are your proposal. The hours that do not are the negotiation.
7. You Already Run a Small Business, and the Product Is You
Wendy closed our conversation with an idea from her second book, Reimagine Your Work, and it reframed the whole thing for me.
“No matter where you work, you already run a small business. You own a business that sells exactly one product, and that product is you. Today you sell that product to your employer, and tomorrow you might sell it to a different employer.”
“But as long as you keep in mind that you need to be doing product development on yourself, and you need to have a quality policy in place, and you need to continue to benchmark and to market yourself, then you’re going to be able to define that success the way you want, because you are going to be the most sought-after product.”
Product development. A quality policy, meaning what you will and will not ship. Benchmarking against the market rather than against the colleague at the next desk. Marketing, which is the one most of us skip.
Most of the women I work with do all four of these things beautifully for their employer’s products and none of them for their own. And this is what makes the flexibility conversation different once you take it seriously. A business that is clear on its product, its standards and its market does not go in asking to be accommodated. It goes in negotiating terms.
How to apply this: Pick the one of the four you have neglected longest. For most of my clients it is marketing, which in practice means being known for something specific. Do one visible thing about it this week.
About Wendy Cocke
Wendy Cocke is a chemical engineer who spent her early career inside a Fortune 100 company, moved into project leadership, and fought for eleven months to secure a flexible work arrangement in a company whose flexibility policy was written for administrative roles rather than technical ones. She is the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions and the author of two books, Making Flex Work: Defining Success on Your Own Terms and Reimagine Your Work.
What makes her useful rather than just inspiring is that she has done this from both sides of the table. She negotiated her own arrangement, and she has since been the leader saying yes to other people’s, including the team member whose relocation she turned into a business case.
Find Wendy:
- Website and free templates, including the business proposal outline: makingflexwork.com
- LinkedIn: Wendy Anderson Cocke
- Books: Making Flex Work: Defining Success on Your Own Terms, and Reimagine Your Work
What I Took From This Conversation
The thing I keep returning to is not the method, useful as it is. It is the reframe underneath it.
For years I treated flexibility as something I would have to be given, which meant it was something I would have to deserve, which meant the conversation was always going to be about me and my life and how much I was struggling. And a conversation shaped like that can only ever end in sympathy or refusal. Neither one changes your calendar.
Wendy’s whole approach removes you from the center of the ask. Not because your life does not matter, but because your life is not the currency in that room. When you walk in with a proposal, you are not a person with a problem asking to be accommodated. You are someone solving a business problem that happens to have your life on the other side of it.
That is a completely different position to negotiate from. And it is available to far more women than currently use it.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
If you are reading this at eleven at night having just done the mental arithmetic on daycare pickup again, I want you to know that the reason it has not worked yet is probably not that you are asking for too much. It is that you have been asking in the wrong language, alone, with no data and no proposal, at a moment when you were already depleted.
That is a fixable problem, and it is much easier to fix with someone in your corner who has sat on both sides of the table.
Book a promotion strategy call, and we will figure out your next move together.
Where to Start This Week
Start the seven day log today. Hours, plus earliest start and latest stop, plus how you felt. Do not wait for Monday and do not skip the weekend.
Run one experiment nobody has to approve. One change small enough that it is genuinely yours to make. Note what happened to your work, then confirm rather than ask.
Write your ask twice. Once the way you would tell a friend, once with your personal life removed and only delivery and outcomes left. The second version is the one that goes in the room.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you ask for a flexible work arrangement at work?
Ask with a business proposal rather than a personal explanation. Work out what your organization actually needs from you underneath the surface answer, then present what you want alongside how the business still gets what it needs. Wendy Cocke’s framing is: this is what I want, this is what I know you need, and I have a proposal that will allow us both to get it. Leading with your reasons, such as daycare pickup or family obligations, gives your manager sympathy to offer instead of a decision to make.
How long does it take to get a flexible work arrangement approved?
It can take much longer than people expect. Wendy Cocke spent eleven months securing her first flexible arrangement, in a company that already had a flexible work policy, because that policy had been written for administrative roles rather than for technical professionals and project leaders. If you are early in the process and hearing no, that is not necessarily a final answer. It often means the existing policy was not designed for your kind of role.
Should I go part-time or just change when I work?
Most people do not need to go part time, and should not start there. Before trading salary and benefits, find out how much you are genuinely working, because people who feel overwhelmed are usually working more than their contracted hours already. The first step is often getting back down to full time rather than dropping below it. Shifting when you work, rather than how much, solves the problem for many people.
What do I do if my company is not flexible?
Create data and make it a business problem to be solved. Start by tracking your current working pattern for seven days, then run changes small enough that they need no approval, and build evidence that the new pattern does not affect delivery. Wendy Cocke calls this leveraging small changes, and compares it to boiling a frog: change slowly enough and the system does not react.
How do I track how much I am actually working?
Log seven consecutive days, including the weekend, recording when you work, what you are doing, and how you feel. Record two numbers, not one: the total hours, and the span from your earliest start to your latest stop. Six hours compressed into a morning feels completely different from six hours spread across sixteen, so the span matters as much as the total.
Why do managers resist flexible work?
There are two main reasons, and neither is usually about you. First, most leaders were never trained to lead flexibly, and managing asynchronous work is genuinely harder because it requires getting a request right the first time instead of refining it in real time. Second, many organizations still measure presence rather than output, so a manager who cannot see you struggles to evidence that you are productive.
Should I tell people at work that I have a flexible arrangement?
Yes, and Wendy Cocke’s own experience is the argument for it. When she finally secured her arrangement she hid it, telling only the people who strictly needed to know, because she feared being passed over or judged. She now calls that naive and says she should have been telling everyone. Hiding it protects nobody and removes a working example other people in your organization could have pointed to.
Who is Wendy Cocke?
Wendy Cocke is a chemical engineer, the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions, and the author of Making Flex Work: Defining Success on Your Own Terms and Reimagine Your Work. She began her career in research and development at a Fortune 100 company, spent eleven months negotiating her first flexible work arrangement, and now helps professionals and leaders design flexible work that serves both the person and the business. Her free templates are at makingflexwork.com.
Listen to the Episode
🎧 Listen to my conversation with Wendy Cocke: Eleven Months to Go Part-Time: Wendy Cocke on Making Flex Work
📺 Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/H1xT_emnGr4
📝 Read the deeper, more personal version on Substack
Full Transcript
Full transcript of my conversation with Wendy Cocke on the From a Woman to a Leader podcast. Lightly edited for readability, filler words and false starts removed, wording otherwise unchanged.
Why women are carrying so much, and what leadership adds on top
Limor Bergman Gross (00:01): Hi everyone and welcome to From a Woman to a Leader. I’m your host, Limor Bergman Gross. And today, excited to have here Wendy Cocke. And Wendy is the founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions and the author of Making Flex Work, and Reimagine Your Work. And we’re gonna talk about that, right? What it means and how to make it work, especially for us women who are trying to juggle it all. So hi Wendy, welcome. How are you today?
Wendy Cocke (00:42): Good morning and afternoon. It’s exciting to be here with you today.
Limor Bergman Gross (00:48): I’m super excited because I think this topic is so relevant, especially for women. As a mom, yeah, exactly.
Wendy Cocke (00:55): We’re asked to do a lot, right? We’re asked to do a lot as women. And some of it is self-imposed and some of it is society imposed, and regardless of how we get it, we have a lot of things on our plate. And when we then add on the responsibilities that we get when we’re a leader, it just adds to the chaos potential in our lives, right?
A decade of following the path without ever choosing it
Limor Bergman Gross (01:18): Yeah, and I know we have kind of similar backgrounds, like you started your career in engineering, right? And you grew to leadership. And at what point did you start thinking about work and flexibility and how to make it work?
Wendy Cocke (01:36): My background is chemical engineering, and I came right out of school and into a Fortune 100 company here in the US and went right into R&D like I was supposed to, and just started doing all the things. And I was probably a decade into my career before I even stopped to really think about what it was that I wanted to do. Until that point, I had just been following the steps, the prescribed process. I had been saying yes to the opportunities and using my network to find the next fun, interesting thing to work on.
Wendy Cocke (02:06): And I was pregnant with my first child, who’s now 16, but I was pregnant with him at the time, and that was really the first time I’d actually stopped to think about what did I want to do. Was there some part of me that wanted to be a leader or had I just become a leader? Was there a part of me that wanted to be at home or did I want to be at work? Until that point, I hadn’t been making any choices. I had just been following the path. And I think a lot of women do that. And not just women, but a lot of people do that. People pour into us, which was a huge blessing. People gave me opportunities. I had these things in front of me. But I didn’t really stop to think why I was doing those things. And for me, it was being pregnant with that first child where the whole world was gonna change for me. And it gave me a sense of, well, what do I actually want to do? And at that point, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep working.
The stay-at-home mom who ran a manufacturing business out of the basement
Limor Bergman Gross (03:18): Really? Why is that?
Wendy Cocke (03:20): I was raised in a house where I thought I had a stay-at-home mom. I say thought on purpose because I was raised in the 1980s, and in that period of time, women either worked or they stayed home. There wasn’t really a flexible work environment. But my mom, she ran her own business out of our house.
Wendy Cocke (03:42): I had no idea until I was much older that not all stay-at-home moms actually ran manufacturing businesses out of the basement and had employees come through the door every day. I thought that’s what it meant to stay at home. And so for me, I always thought I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. My husband knew that. We talked about that. Even though I was an engineer, it was not my long-term plan. My long-term plan was to parent.
Wendy Cocke (04:09): At the point where I got pregnant, I thought, I don’t want to give this up. I don’t want to give up the dream of being able to be present the way that my mom was present for me. But I also really loved what I was doing. And I didn’t want to give that up either. And it felt very selfish on both sides. So I did what a lot of your audience probably does. And I just figured I’d make it work.
Coming back from maternity leave and crashing
Wendy Cocke (04:38): Everybody else has figured it out. I would just figure it out like everyone else. And I had not been back to work for a few weeks after maternity leave when I just crashed. I felt like I was failing at everything.
Wendy Cocke (04:52): I felt like a failure as a mother every morning when I dropped that child off at daycare. I felt like a failure as an employee every day when I was having to leave early or choosing to leave early because I didn’t want to have to pump one more bottle of milk. So I wanted to leave in order to get to the daycare just those few extra minutes early. I felt like an awful friend because I had no time for anything other than those two. I felt like an awful wife.
A solid B plus, and the F she was giving herself
Wendy Cocke (05:22): Because I was exhausted and I was grumpy with the only other adult in my house, and myself. I wasn’t even on my list, right? There was nothing left for me. When I wrote Making Flex Work, I actually went back and talked to a lot of people that had been in my life, they’re still in my life, but that had been in my life at that phase, and they said generally they would have given me a solid B plus.
Wendy Cocke (05:46): But as someone who takes my work very seriously and my goals very seriously, I would have thought I was getting an F in all of those categories. I just couldn’t do it. And I knew there had to be a better way.
Limor Bergman Gross (06:00): And I want just to pause here for a second and share that what you experienced is so familiar, me personally, and for so many women, and the message I want to give to everyone that is watching us right now or will listen to it after, it’s natural. It’s natural to feel guilty, especially for us women, because we want to do everything as you mentioned, to do everything very well, we have very high standards, and then we feel like we’re failing at everything. And usually reality is not either kind of perfectionism or complete failure, it’s somewhere in the middle.
Limor Bergman Gross (06:26): And for me, it was about prioritizing. How do you make everything work together? What do you prioritize? When? And I, for many years, didn’t have a lot of free time. Did not have time for myself. It was all about work, kids. Work, kids. And along the way it changed. So that can happen too.
Defining success on your own terms
Wendy Cocke (07:18): It can. I think if we are intentional with our time, and we are intentional with what we believe is important for us, then we can be successful. The subtitle of Making Flex Work is defining success on your own terms. And I think that is such an important piece, especially for high achieving women to hear, is that it is important for you to understand what success means to you.
Wendy Cocke (07:46): Because success for you and success to all of your girlfriends may be different. Success to you and your mother and your mother-in-law might look different. Success to you and your spouse might look different. Success to you and your peers at work might look different. And that’s okay. We all get to decide what it is. It’s when we’re trying to be everybody else’s definitions of success that we lose our ability to actually feel successful.
Limor Bergman Gross (08:15): 100 percent, Wendy, I’m completely with you on that. I think this is really hard for us, to detach ourselves from the surroundings, and we keep comparing all the time how others are doing that, and when we do things differently we feel maybe we’re not good enough or maybe we’re failing. And it happened to me too. I was seeing either moms that decided to go full-time on motherhood, or those who were completely focused on their careers. I was judging both of them, by the way. I was judging the stay-at-home mom.
Wendy Cocke (08:55): But you wanted to be as good as both and you were neither.
Limor Bergman Gross (09:06): And there are moms that are really focusing on their family and their career was kind of still going but less priority, and I was judging them too, and then I was judging myself. So tell us what led you to write this book, and perhaps start helping our audience to figure out how they can define success on their own terms.
Eleven months to get a flexible work arrangement
Wendy Cocke (09:24): So I’ll pick up that story where I felt like a failure, right? I was like, I guess I’m just gonna quit. That’s the only solution. I can’t keep doing this. And the one lever I could control was not working. So I talked to my husband about it. He actually told me, great, quit. Do it. I tell a story in my book that he was like, call me from the car, I’ll pick up your stuff later. Like, just tell them you quit and walk out.
Wendy Cocke (09:53): But I didn’t want to quit because I enjoyed my work. I felt fulfillment with my work. And so I went on an adventure, unbeknownst to me at the time, that would take about 11 months. And that was securing my first flexible work arrangement. I say that, and I tell that time, that 11 months, to everybody out there that feels like they’re struggling and they can’t do it. Keep trying. Someone will hear you. Keep trying. If it’s what you need, fight for it.
Wendy Cocke (10:19): It took me 11 months because although I worked for a company with a flexible work arrangement policy, it didn’t apply really to the type of role that I was in. It was meant for administrative jobs, not for project leaders. It was meant for those support roles, not for the technical professionals.
Why she hid it, and wishes she had not
Wendy Cocke (10:50): When I finally got it though, I got promoted more and faster than I had in my previous 10 years because I was so intentional with my work. But I’ll tell you what, I hid it. I didn’t want to talk about it. People that needed to know knew, and nobody else knew. I did not tell anybody I had gone part-time that I didn’t need to tell.
Limor Bergman Gross (11:09): What did you hide exactly?
Wendy Cocke (11:16): I was so scared that people would pass me over for things, or they would judge me because I couldn’t handle it, or it would reflect on me as a potential leader in the organization. I was so naive. I should have been telling everyone.
Limor Bergman Gross (11:32): So you decided, just to make sure I understand, you decided after you had your first child that you wanted to go part-time, and that took you 11 months. First of all, kudos to you. I never thought I would be able to do a part-time. So it’s just believing it’s possible. It’s available. It’s somewhere out there. There is someone who is willing to compromise. What would you say to someone that is listening that is maybe in an engineering role or something technical, that wants to do a part-time?
Find out how much you are really working before you trade anything
Wendy Cocke (12:13): First of all, I have these conversations with lots of women specifically. And I tell them, first of all, we’re gonna start to figure out how much you’re really working before you start trading salary and benefits, because that’s the real difference in full-time and part-time, is you’re gonna trade money and benefits. But most times you don’t need to trade that. I went part-time in a time when we still had to plug a computer into the wall to get internet.
Wendy Cocke (12:41): We don’t have to do that today. I can work on my phone from anywhere. So the fact that we have this flexibility and mobility, you may not have to go part-time. Now you may choose to, but you might not have to, where I maybe didn’t have as many options because of the technology at the time.
Wendy Cocke (13:03): But for me, the key is understanding how much you’re working today, and that leads us right into the evaluation method in Making Flex Work. So the first step to figuring out what we’re doing is figure out our current state. I’m gonna take our engineering principles, right, and figure out what we are doing today. If you’re not an engineer, don’t panic. This is not scary, you can just call it journaling. It’s actually the exact same thing. We just like to make it sound scary in engineering, right? So we’re gonna write down when we are working.
Wendy Cocke (13:31): We’re not turning this into our boss, but we need to know for ourselves how much time am I actually working? When am I working? How many times am I switching back and forth? If you’re working from home, you might be working a long span of hours. So I ask them not only to count the hours, but find when’s the earliest you start in a week and when’s the latest that you stop. Because six hours compressed feels very different than six hours across 16 hours.
Wendy Cocke (14:01): And for some people, six hours compressed is torture. And for some people, doing it across 16 seems like a marathon they don’t want to run. It’s because we’re all wired a little bit differently. But you need to know how you are currently working. What I see from a lot of people is when they journal for that first week, that’s all I’m asking. One week, you can start today. You do not have to start on a Monday, and you do have to count the weekends. Because we are in a world where most people are not not working between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. So for seven days, I want you to write down when you’re working and what you’re doing and how you feel.
Wendy Cocke (14:29): And what I find is that most people who feel overwhelmed are working more than their allotted hours. And so before we trade full-time for part-time, we’re slowly gonna work our way down to what we’ve actually agreed to be paid for.
The right work from the right place at the right time
Wendy Cocke (14:58): If at that point it still doesn’t work for you, now we start talking about trade-offs for part-time. We also can talk about shifting when we work. So I’m a big fan of the right work from the right place at the right time. And in a global economy and in a connected world, we have a lot more available time to work if we think creatively about the right work from the right place at the right time.
Limor Bergman Gross (15:27): What would it look like, for example, to do it creatively?
Wendy Cocke (15:30): I have one of my dear friends who works on the east coast of the United States, so she works on Eastern Standard Time. Her company is located in Europe and most of her peers at her level, she’s a vice president, most of her peers at her level work in Europe. But most of her team that reports to her works in Asia.
Wendy Cocke (15:58): There’s really no reason for her to work from 8 to 5 Eastern Standard Time. What really works well for her is to get up in the morning and work from about 6 a.m. to say 11 a.m. Eastern Time. That’s when all of her peers are working in the European afternoon. She’s my favorite lunch date because she’s always available in the middle of the day to do whatever you want to do.
Wendy Cocke (16:22): And then she logs back in at night, say around 8 p.m. and may work until eleven or twelve at night. Now she’s still worked a full day, but that nighttime is morning for her team in Asia. So she’s available every day for them and available every day for her peers. She didn’t have to go part-time, but she’s now split her schedule to be where the work needs to happen.
Wendy Cocke (16:52): Depending on what your organization looks like, this might work really well for you if you have school-aged children or smaller children. You can work in the morning, you can work after they go to bed. So you can start to think about how do you play with your time so that the company actually gets better quality time from you and you get better quality time for what you want in your life.
Why companies stay rigid: training, trust, and baggage
Limor Bergman Gross (17:11): Yeah, that makes total sense for her. I know it’s not for everyone to work at nights, and for me it’s definitely not early mornings. What if a company is not really, I think one of the challenges is many companies are very rigid in allowing that kind of flexibility you’re describing.
Wendy Cocke (17:45): Yes. And they’re doing it out of necessity. I’ll give you two reasons that they do it. One, we’ve not done a good job historically in the corporate world of training our leaders on how to adapt and customize. We teach them a tool, a skill, a way, and then we tell them to go execute on that. Well, in order to allow your team to be flexible, you have to be able to know how to lead flexibly. And unfortunately, leadership is much harder if your team’s work is customized. Because you have to be able to remember who’s working when and where is it. You have to have systems in place to be able to track that, control that, and to account for it.
Wendy Cocke (18:43): The other reason it’s much harder is that when we are in the same physical proximity, or we’re all working synchronously even if we are scattered geographically, I can change my mind. I don’t have to know exactly what I want for you to do when I tell you to do it. I can come back and continue to think about it and refine it and check and adjust in real time with you. If we’re gonna work asynchronously and across a geography potentially, I have to be very clear.
Wendy Cocke (19:09): Because you’re going to do the work before I talk to you again. So if I don’t know what I’m asking you to do and I can’t clearly articulate it, then we’re not very efficient. But it’s a much higher bar for that leader. Because you have to be right. You have to get your request right accurately the first time. And many leaders, that’s hard for them to do. Think to your leader. Does your leader come back and check in a lot?
Present and active is not the same as productive
Wendy Cocke (19:40): We also then have trust issues on top of it. So depending on that leader’s experience, whether with you, with people like you, or people not like you, but in their past, all these leaders have baggage. And many of them have trust issues. So many mistakenly think that if you are present and active, that you are productive.
Wendy Cocke (20:10): But we all know there are people that work around us that are present and active and absolutely unproductive. Sometimes that person that gets in first and leaves late accomplishes nothing. Sometimes that person who spins their wheels all day accomplishes nothing. But if what we’re measuring is presence and activity, and you want an accommodation because you are gonna be laser-focused and get things done, that can be very hard for a leader and for an organization to understand.
Limor Bergman Gross (20:44): Yeah, I think the trust issue is a big one. I remember I had a manager who insisted on me being in the office. And it was very difficult for that manager to let go of the need of monitoring, right? Seeing that everyone’s butts in seats.
Wendy Cocke (21:07): Butts in seats for sure. I call it leading with your eyeballs. It’s much easier to just look at people and see that they’re working on something.
Limor Bergman Gross (21:14): Yeah, and it requires trust as you mentioned, and I know that the trust is also a lot of times at an organizational level, kind of organizationally not believing that people at home will be as productive as in the office, and maybe they’ll take advantage of it to do other things, right, like laundry or dishes or whatever.
The time wasters we have normalized because they happen in an office
Wendy Cocke (21:39): Heaven forbid somebody take the ninety seconds to start laundry away from the work day. Okay, so maybe I took two minutes and folded laundry. But guess what? My bathroom is not on the other side of a building. The coffee is very close to me. I’m not gonna run into somebody and start talking about nonsense and lose track of twenty minutes in the hallway. There’s nobody here to talk to. So there are time wasters in the office. We’ve just normalized them as a part of our culture.
Limor Bergman Gross (22:16): I’m with you on that, and there’s so much time we spend on coffee chats and all that, that when you work from home you just focus on your work. But the thing is, let’s say we have a listener who said, okay, I’ll go and define what success looks like to me. But my employer is not really flexible for that, and the job market as you know is not the greatest. So what would she do?
Why the business does not care that you want to pick your child up at 3:30
Wendy Cocke (22:51): My engineering background says we’re gonna create data. We are gonna create data and we are gonna make this a business problem to be solved. I think specifically women, we turn a business problem into an emotional problem, and then we don’t understand why our business leaders don’t understand it. I’ll tell you what, the business does not care that you want to pick your child up at 3:30. They don’t care. But what they do care is that whatever they want delivered is delivered.
Leveraging small changes, and boiling the frog
Wendy Cocke (23:27): So we’re gonna first evaluate our current state, right? We’re gonna know what we’re currently doing. We are going to then, the L in the evaluation is leverage small changes. So we’re gonna experiment with our time. We’re gonna play a little bit in small enough changes that I don’t have to ask permission. That’s important. Small enough change that it is so not noticeable to anybody else that I don’t have to ask permission.
Wendy Cocke (23:51): This might look like, well, I’m exhausted at night, so I’m not getting my workout in because I cannot find time. I run out every single night of time. So one day next week, I am gonna use my lunch to work out. I already have a lunch, I already have a dedicated break, I’m gonna work out during that period of time.
Wendy Cocke (24:12): I didn’t have to ask anybody for that at work. I can just do that. If I like it, I’m gonna do it a couple more times and confirm it, right? I’m gonna run a little confirmatory experiment. And then I’m gonna say, well, you know what, I’m really hungry because I haven’t eaten lunch. So now I’m gonna run a small experiment that says, what if instead of a 30-minute lunch, maybe I’m not a clock-in, clock-out person, right? So maybe instead of a 30-minute lunch with the workout, I’m gonna take an hour lunch and I’m gonna add the 30 minutes to the end of my day. That’s again small enough. Maybe I don’t need to tell anybody. Just one time. Okay, so now I can work out and I can eat. I worked a little later, I liked that. Excellent. Now we have data.
Wendy Cocke (24:57): That we can go back to our supervisor and say, hey, I just wanna make sure if I do this, is that a problem? And they’re gonna say, I don’t know. And you’re saying, well, I actually did it three times last week. Didn’t seem to be a problem. Just confirming that you’re okay with it.
Wendy Cocke (25:16): We’re making small enough changes that we can do this. My grandmother had the best, most colorful phrases when I was a child. And she used to ask the question when she wanted you to do something slowly, she would say, it’s like boiling a frog.
Wendy Cocke (25:32): Right. And I don’t know why you would ever want to boil a frog, but this idea is if you do it slowly enough, they won’t jump out of the pot because of the water temperature and their cold blooded nature. Like you can boil them without them jumping out. We are gonna make our changes for time, if we’re in an organization that’s very resistant to this, we’re gonna make them small enough that we’re going to boil that frog. It took you a while to get into whatever your current work arrangement is. So we’re just gonna take a slow approach to unwind it to get what we want.
Assessing the expectations, then writing a business proposal
Limor Bergman Gross (26:07): But what if I want to, let’s say I work every day until, I don’t know, 5, 6 p.m. And I want to get my kids at 3:30. So what’s a small change? I’m just thinking, how can you experiment with that if the change is not that small?
Wendy Cocke (26:30): Okay, I need a big change. The school year just starts and this is a big deal for me. What are we gonna do? Okay, so the third step in the evaluation method is the A, which is assessing the expectations. So what I want you to really do in your organization and in your job is figure out what are the most important things to the business. Now it might be butts and seats, but probably butts and seats is a result of some other business need. So you are going to assess those expectations so that we understand what is the most important. And then we’re going to create a business proposal for our leader that says, look, this is what I want. This is what I know you need. And I have a proposal that will allow us both to get it.
Wendy Cocke (27:24): Let’s imagine that it’s this 3:30. We have this situation at 3:30 where I know I still need to work another two, three hours, but I also know that I have this. So we’re going to look at what happens in those other hours of the day and figure out, can they be done remotely? Can they be done earlier in the day? Can they be done by someone else? How can I do it? And we’re going to create a business proposal to start a negotiation. Negotiations, money and results are the language of business. We’re just going to use that language.
Wendy Cocke (28:02): And I’ve got a couple of free templates on my website at makingflexwork.com if any of your audience wants to go grab it, including an outline of how to put together a business proposal if you want it. So we’ll make sure we drop that in the notes for everybody. But you want to be able to show how they are going to win while you get what you want. Because if they can’t win with you, they’ll go find somebody else, right? And that’s not what we want. We don’t want to become a burden. We want to continue to be a benefit to that organization, but we want to be a benefit to that organization on our terms.
A quiet way to change a rigid leader’s mind
Wendy Cocke (28:48): I also like to challenge leaders. If your leader is struggling with this idea of any sort of flexibility other than traditional nine to five butts in seats, find out if your leader has any peers in the organization that aren’t in the same geography and time zone. And then quietly study how they work with those people.
Wendy Cocke (29:18): And then at the right moment, gently remind them that they’re already doing it and that they’re successful and that you just want a chance to prove that you can also be successful doing it. Because many of these leaders, when you look at the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world, most of their team does not work synchronously co-located with them.
Limor Bergman Gross (29:46): I think that many companies nowadays don’t have the entire team working synchronously. I think most, if not all of my clients are working with people that at least some of them do not live in the same country. It’s definitely a global environment and hopefully companies will become more flexible.
Turning one man’s move across the country into a business case
Wendy Cocke (30:18): I think there’s a huge advantage to them being flexible. I had a team member who wanted, my whole team, this was years ago, was co-located together. And I had a team member who was nearing retirement age. And my team spent a lot of time flying back and forth to different manufacturing facilities that we supported. And three manufacturing facilities were within a drive of a different office location for our organization.
Wendy Cocke (30:47): And this gentleman came to me and he said, I need your help. My wife has found her dream house in this other city that she wants to live in when we retire, and it is on the market. I’m not ready to retire. What can we do? Okay, well, a creative leader, I pride myself in that, picked up the phone, I called the site leader at that other location, and I said, hey, if Mike moved, could he use a desk in your facility? He’d still work for me, but can he have a desk?
Wendy Cocke (31:21): Again, this was when you had to plug computers into walls to get internet. So the desk was an important piece, for him to be able to get to the internet. And that site leader said, well, let me think about it. Let me go figure out what that might look like. And in the meantime, I said, Mike, we’re gonna do a retrospective study on our team. I want you to go talk to everybody on our team and figure out how many trips they have made to that city in the last 12 months.
Wendy Cocke (31:47): And when you’re doing it, I would like you to find out what they did when they were on that trip. And you come back with a proposal to me that shows that we can cut those number of trips in half if you live in that city. Because if you’re going to move, you’re now gonna be my first line of defense for some of the things that people were having to fly to do. So he got that. The site leader came back and said, yes, I’ve found a desk.
Wendy Cocke (32:12): And then Mike and I were able to go to the vice president and say, look, Mike at his own cost is gonna move. But here’s where the company’s actually going to save money by letting him do that. We turned his problem into a business solution. So as your listeners continue to think creatively about how can what I want actually be a benefit for my organization, and pitch it that way.
You already run a small business, and the product is you
Limor Bergman Gross (32:42): So Wendy, before we end today, anything else that is very important for you to share?
Wendy Cocke (32:49): Yeah, I will share one little tidbit from Reimagine Your Work. So Reimagine Your Work is built on the foundation of that small business that I grew up in, that idea where I didn’t know that not everybody’s stay-at-home mom ran a manufacturing business out of their house.
Wendy Cocke (33:05): And that is that you, no matter where you work, you already run a small business. You own a business that sells exactly one product, and that product is you. Today you sell that product to your employer, and tomorrow you might sell it to a different employer.
Wendy Cocke (33:21): But as long as you keep in mind that you need to be doing product development on yourself, and you need to have a quality policy in place, and you need to continue to benchmark and to market yourself, then you’re going to be able to define that success the way you want, because you are going to be the most sought-after product.
Limor Bergman Gross (33:48): And you mentioned the website, makingflexwork.com.
Wendy Cocke (33:53): Makingflexwork.com. It has all the tips and tools on it.
Limor Bergman Gross (33:57): Perfect. Thank you so much Wendy. It’s been a pleasure.
Wendy Cocke (34:01): This has been a great way to start my day.