Page 1 |
Previous | 1 of 3 | Next |
|
This page
All
Subset
|
An Interview with Barrie S. Greiff, M.D. At the Firm's management seminars attended by new partners and directors over the past three years. Dr. Barrie S. Greiff has led a discussion on ways to deal with the conflicting pulls of work and home. A practicing psychiatrist, Dr. Greiff teaches a unique course, which he originated, on "The Executive Family" at the Harvard Business School. The course is intended for couples, so both husband and wife attend the sessions. At least one of the spouses must be enrolled in the Harvard MBA program. H&S Reports conducted this interview with Dr. Greiff in order to bring to its readers some of the concerns that have been brought out in his course at Harvard and in the Firm seminars. Did your course on "The Executive Family" start in the MBA program at Harvard? Yes, because I wanted both husbands and wives in the course initially. The average age of the Harvard MBA student is twenty-seven, so this was a wonderful opportunity to bring together a group of people who.had previous business experience. I wanted as heterogeneous a group as possible, i.e., those with previous business experience, those newly married, ten-year-married couples, those with children and without, and so forth. We included a number of topics, such as the effects of travel and relocation, promotion and success, job loss, stress within and outside the organization, as well as methods of coping with these stressful situations. I felt that if we were to look at these phenomena it would give the couple an advantage prior to their entrance into the business world, or their return to it, so they might better cope with these normal human dilemmas. Did you discuss the two-career family, in which both husband and wife have a career to consider? Yes. We are seeing more and more families where the wife as well as the husband has a career. By that I mean not just a job, but a career. I predict this will be the biggest single factor affecting American family life in the next twenty-five years. The career wife will face traveling, relocation and so forth just as her husband does. And at times there will be considerable conflict as to whose career comes first. For instance, some couples who have dual careers think they can live apart in separate cities, commute on weekends and have a viable relationship. That may be attractive in a theoretical sense — the difficulty comes in practicing this style of living. Did a lot of students in your course try to express their concerns before they took the course, but not really focus on them? Does the course help them bring out into the open what had bothered them before? Yes, it did. I asked them at the start to give their reasons for taking the course, and we tried to address the issues they raised. For example: To become more familiar with the lifestyle of a business-oriented family To understand how the husband-wife concerns may conflict To understand the effect of changing employers or losing a job To learn how to apportion time between business and family To help me handle a husband with a high-pressure job
Object Description
Title |
Coping with conflict in the executive family |
Author |
Greiff, Barrie S. |
Subject |
Families -- Psychological aspects Interpersonal conflict |
Abstract | Illustrations not included in the Web version. |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 14, (1977 spring), p. 28-32 |
Date-Issued | 1977 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | HSReports_1977_Spring-p28-32e |