Life Tool: A “Business Lunch” with Your Partner
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“…avoid talking about the meeting with the accountant when they’d rather be playing with the kids.”
In business school, I took a class called Work & Family. There, we met a couple who holds a weekly “business lunch” during which they discuss everything that it takes to run their household. Tactically, it was a time for them to figure out childcare coverage and who would take the kids to and from their various activities, but they also talked about financial and administrative matters.
Their key insight that resonated with me: by holding the meeting during the workday, it removed these matters from their evenings, when they’d rather have quality family time. It enabled them to avoid talking about the meeting with the accountant when they’d rather be playing with the kids.
Alan Mullaly includes a similar practice in his family’s routine:
“So we’d sit down every Sunday morning and everybody would get their schedule out. The kids would have their schedules and we’d have ours and everybody would compare schedules. And if they needed a ride or they had a soccer game or they had ballet or they had a school activity, we’d figure it out.”
Performance Reviews?
My undergraduate thesis advisor Quinn Mills wrote a book called Having It All … And Making It Work: Six Steps for Putting Both Your Career and Your Family First. In the book, he paints the picture of a busy business executive who thinks he has a good relationship with his family, but never takes the time to understand whether they have an issues with how he “performs” in the family context. And in many families, the interpersonal dynamics are such that no one ever speaks up with their feedback to each other.
So while the executive gets regular feedback about how he’s doing at work, he’s blind to his performance at home. Hence, Dr. Mills recommends instituting performance reviews with your family to remove this blind spot.
My wife, Erin, and I use a combination of these strategies in our Monthly Business Lunch. We typically meet over breakfast, and discuss these four items:
- What we appreciate about each other (affirmation);
- What we wish the other would do (feedback);
- What to-dos we have; and,
- Planning for the future (e.g., travel, date nights).
Those four topics combined are a great opportunity to make progress on our annual objectives and to improve our relationship. They also provide focus on the administrative tasks that are so easy to miss — e.g., setting up meetings with the financial advisor, checking in on our investments, researching activities for our kid. Seeing the next meeting on the calendar nudges us to revisit our commitments and and take action on follow-ups from last time.
I want to hear your thoughts!
This is a “living post,” in that I’d like your help to add to make it more valuable. What have you tried that is similar? Have any stories about the impact of using a tool like this? Please share!
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