Campus to Clients

Evaluating Career and Life from a
“7 Habits” Perspective

Editor:
Annette Nellen, CPA, Esq.
Professor
Department of Accounting & Finance
San Jos State University
San Jos, CA

Co-Author:
Anne M. Magro, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Michael F. Price College of Business
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK

Professor Nellen is a former member of the AICPA Tax Division’s Strategic Planning Task Force and Tax Executive Committee. This column is based on Professor Magro’s panel presentation, titled “7 Habits of Highly Effective Tax Academics: Balancing Work and Family,” given at the American Taxation Association 2005 Mid-year meeting. For more information about this column, contact Professor Nellen at anellen@sjsu.edu or Prof. Magro at amagro@ou.edu.

A common lament of most professionals today is that they have too much work and their work-life balance is out of whack. However, they do not always make the time to determine whether they are using their time well, whether they are effective at what they do, and how they might improve their work-life balance. This column explores an approach to answering these questions. The title makes reference to the wisdom of Stephen Covey’s popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, 1989), which provides advice on how to be effective in work and life. Covey’s 7 habits are:

1. Be proactive;

2. Begin with the end in mind;

3. Put first things first;

4. Think win/win;

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood;

6. Synergize principles of creative communication; and

7. Sharpen the saw.

While this column focuses on the work and life of tax professors, it contains insights helpful to tax professionals as well. It also debunks some of the common myths of the academic life, such as professors working limited hours and having only teaching responsibilities.

Where to Start

What does it mean to be effective? What are the benchmarks of success in professional life? In personal life? Assuming there are even answers to such questions, professionals would still have to reflect on their own performances to determine whether they actually were effective. And even if they are effective professionally or personally, is there balance? Finally, if they determine that they are effective and have balance, how did they accomplish that? That is, what are their “7 habits”?

The starting point for such an analysis begins with a self-assessment. Without that, neither effectiveness nor balance can be determined. Complicating the assessment is the number of roles individuals typically play. This long list might include parent, partner, sibling, child, friend, professor, colleague and community member. The roles professionals play encompass what they value and guide their assessment of success in being effective professionally and personally while maintaining balance. Professionals will need to ask themselves three basic questions: (1) What does it mean to be effective—professionally and personally? (2) Are they effective? (3) How can they achieve the desired level of effectiveness and balance?

As a tax professional, the answers to these questions may differ from those of a tax professor. The definition of effectiveness in a tax practice certainly diverges in some ways from academia. It also may be different within each group, depending on where they work and the demands of their personal lives. Nonetheless, the underlying exercise of determining what success means to each person, whether he or she is successful and what he or she does (or could do) to obtain success is useful.

What Does It Mean to Be Effective?

The markers of success in academia revolve around three functions: teaching, research and service. Within each there are multiple factors that merit consideration.

An obvious measure of effectiveness as a teacher would seem to be student evaluations of teaching, but at the end of a tough tax course students do not always have the perspective necessary to separate the difficulty of the class from their assessment of the professor’s abilities. Other measures of effectiveness are harder to gauge but seem more relevant to a teacher’s goals. Professors must ask themselves whether they are helping students make good choices about the area of accounting in which the students wish to specialize, or whether the students even want to be accountants at all. Students are at an important stage of their lives when they are making a choice about what they will be doing for the first stage of their career (or perhaps their entire career). Are professors making a difference in their students’ lives that will stay with the students long after the netting rules for Sec. 1231 are a distant memory? What is their impact on students? Are they teaching students to think, not only about tax but also about the world around them? Are they preparing and challenging students to continue lifelong learning?

Personal effectiveness as a professor is harder to measure, as there are fewer clearly defined markers. Professors should question themselves about whether they take out stress and frustration related to their personal life on students and colleagues, or whether they like what they do for a living or would they rather be doing something else.

In the realm of research, tax professors again have multiple considerations. An obvious place to start is with factors that come up each year in an annual review. In the self-assessment, professors should ask themselves how many publications they have, and what is the quality of the journals in which they publish. Does their research have impact? Has tenure been awarded? If not yet tenured, how are they progressing toward tenure? These questions address productivity and the quality of work as assessed by peers, but they miss something more ephemeral—professors should also ask themselves whether they have their colleagues’ respect. Are they good colleagues, contributing to others’ research, being a good co-author, etc.? Are they contributing to the training of doctoral students, if any?

In addition to teaching and re-search, professors are evaluated each year on the quantity and quality of service—service to the department, college, university and profession. Here, possible questions professors should ask themselves include whether they serve on and lead committees at each level. Do they advise student groups? How involved are they with campus life? Do they serve in nationally prominent and visible roles in the American Accounting Association (AAA) or the AICPA? Each of these questions must be answered to determine how effective a professor is professionally.

Even if professors are successful professionally, how do they measure how successful they are at home? To answer this question, professors need to determine which family members and friends are priorities. When considering these relationships and personal effectiveness at sustaining them, professors should consider questions such as whether their relationship with their partner is vibrant. Are they a good partner? Do they know their children? Are they part of their lives? Do their children know them and do their children like them? Are they involved in their children’s education? Do they keep in touch with extended family and spend time with them? Do they maintain relationships with their friends? Do they take out stress and frustration related to work on family and friends?

In addition to relationships with others, personal effectiveness also includes caring for one’s self. Here, self-assessment questions for professors should include how well they take care of their own needs. Do they get enough sleep? Do they eat healthy meals? Do they exercise? Do they take time to relax and reflect? Finally, the $64 million question: Are they happy?

Each professor or professional would need to answer each of these questions as the basis of a self-assessment. They can then determine whether they are effective, and, if not, how they might achieve effectiveness and work-life balance.

Assessing and Achieving Effectiveness

If the life of a professor were more like that depicted in movies and on TV shows, achieving effectiveness professionally and personally might be a lot easier. In truth, professors do not have fancy offices with nice furniture and art. They do not have private secretaries and their own classrooms. Professors do not get summers off, and they spend much more than six hours a week teaching, often spending 60–80 hours per week on teaching, research and service combined.

If professors want to be effective in both the professional and personal dimensions of their lives and to have a good work-life balance, they will need a plan and some rules to live by to reach this goal. The exhibit above is a sample plan for how professors can apply the 7 habits.

Tax professionals do not often step back to examine their lives, assessing what they value and how successful they are in multiple aspects of their lives. While difficult, most will likely find it to be an exercise worth undertaking. Some individuals will find that they are doing what matters to them and doing it well, and they will likely find the self-assessment process very gratifying. Others will discover they are not being effective in all areas of their lives, and the self-assessment exercise will help them identify where they need to focus more effort. When individuals can identify what matters to them, where they are effective and which strategies help them achieve success, the process is likely to help set them on the path to even greater success.

Exhibit: 7 highly effective habits for professors

1. Schedule time for self and family, then work the rest of the time. Professors should be sure to plan time in each 24-hour day for themselves and their family. They should look for ways to be flexible with work hours by working after children go to bed, a few hours on weekends and having work with them everywhere they go in case they have unexpected time available.

2. Keep things in perspective, be flexible and be sure both the short-term and long-term effects are considered in making decisions. Children only live with their parents for about 20 years and, for many of those years, parents are not the people they want to spend time with. Parents likely have a brief window during which they are their children’s companion of choice, and they likely will not want to miss any more of it than absolutely necessary. Work is important, but ultimately most people find that it is their relationships with family and friends that will determine their satisfaction with their lives. Professors need to consider whether they need to trade off some professional success to be an integral part of their children’s day-to-day lives.

3. Schedules, schedules, schedules. Lists, lists, lists. Like professors, many professionals today seem to be overcommitted. An obvious tool for holding everything together is to schedule everything that needs to be done each day and keep detailed lists of what needs to be done at work and home.

4. Develop a support network. Contrary to the image of the solitary professor locked in an ivory tower, being an academic is a very social profession. Professors should try to maintain a network of colleagues who will read papers and give feedback, whom they can bounce ideas off of, who will nag them to get things done, who will listen to them vent or brag, and who will be honest with them about their choices and performance.

5. Work in a department that allows for and supports a healthy work-life balance. Professors cannot be successful balancing work and family if they work in an organization that does not give them that flexibility. In choosing where to work, the decision must be based on shared values and respect for the professor’s life choices. If an employer expects professors to always put work over family, it is difficult to maintain balance.

6. Work with good co-authors and assistants. As noted, being an academic is not an individual endeavor. Carefully selecting the people with whom to do research is an important element of being successful. When possible, professors should delegate work to research assistants and teaching assistants to focus on the elements of work that must be done personally. It is important for professors to find co-authors with skills that complement their own.

7. Hire others to do what does not need to be done personally. When trying to decide whether to hire a house cleaner or yard service or have shirts washed and ironed by the dry cleaners, professors should ask themselves whether it is worth spending $20 to spend an hour with their children today. If professors have and use the money to hire someone to do what does not need to be done personally, they are more likely to achieve work-life balance.

Learn to say “NO!” Even Stephen Covey has an 8th habit (The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (Simon & Schuster, 2005)). Professors cannot do everything and do it all well. Sometimes they have to say “no”. When professors know their priorities, they are better able to determine when to say no and when to say yes, but sometimes they still have to say no to things that they think are worth doing.