Between being one of the top women at State Street and her responsibilities as the mother of two and guardian of a boy from Africa, Alison admits to sometimes feeling like she takes on too much. "I never thought I'd be working after having kids," she says. "But I just got really engaged. It wouldn't have been consistent with my personality not to work. I enjoyed being held accountable for things and managing people."
Alison's passion for her work drove her to find solutions. "What I started to learn is that it's cyclical. Sometimes your home life goes a little crazy and you need to focus a lot of time there. And other times it's the work life that goes crazy. Now I've been through enough cycles of it to know that it doesn't last forever."
Alison's Strategies for Advancement:
Don't quit to make it okay.
"Don't make decisions based on the peaks and valleys. And until you exhaust all of your options, don't do something drastic. I think that sometimes people make decisions based on certain phases they are going through. What they can't foresee is that soon their job and their family are going to be in a different place. You've got to find ways to tweak some things and find your ebb and flow so that you don't have to quit to make it okay."
Outsource personal responsibilities.
"Find the tasks that you are comfortable not doing yourself and give them to someone else. Stressing over whether my house is clean for the week while I'm at work is distracting, so I started getting help much earlier in my career than I could really afford, but I didn't worry about it because I knew it was a career investment and it was going to pay off in the long run."
Prepare for the next step.
"When I've wanted to move to the next level, often there have been parts of the job that I've never done. I think about: 'How am I going to make sure that I've got the right people around me so that I know what I'm doing when I have to do this for the first time?' This phenomenon exists in companies that the more senior people are, the less we develop them. And the stakes are much higher. So you have to make sure that you have your own network and a support system set up in advance for that next position."
Keep the end goal in mind.
"I keep trying to guide the kinds of decisions I make daily by where I'm headed longer term. I think to myself, 'This might be really challenging right now, but it's all working towards what I think is going to happen in the next five years.' When people don't have a plan of what they're going to do next, it can get very stressful."
If you'd like to ask Alison a question, send it to Stephanie@womenworking.com, and we'll see if we can get you an answer.
"When my daughter was 11 she told me, 'I don't want your life.' I told her, 'You have so many years before you make that decision, and you'll probably change your mind dozens of times about what you want to do. And I'll tell you what, I never really wanted grandma's life either.'"
GREATEST PROFESSIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT:
"The change we've created to enable success within the organization has been pretty significant. I hear senior people talking about the programs that we've put in place in the last two years as if they've been there forever. I know they believe in it. I know that it's being used in the right way, so that gives me a level of satisfaction."
July 25, 2008
Don't quit to make it okay. 
