MARRIED CEO’S by Penna Dexter

Sacrificing marriage for career is not a good plan. And, in the long run, it’s really better for your professional life, if your marriage is happy and long-lasting.

Steve Cooper runs Hitched Media, Inc., which aims to entertain, educate & inspire married couples. He wrote a piece for FORBES magazine recently about how being happily married can make a person a better CEO.

First, there’s loads of data showing that married people report better mental and physical health and that happily married people live longer.    Researchers at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana recently combined several of these studies into a report:  “The Impact of the Family on Health: the Decade in Review.” It concludes that non-married women have a 50% higher mortality rate than married women. And non-married men have a 250-percent higher mortality rate than married men.

So the married person will have more time to accomplish more goals. Steve Cooper wrote in FORBES,  “a CEO needs to think of the long-term picture, and that means living long enough to execute your full vision.”

Secondly, good communication skills are important both in marriage and business. Steve Cooper reports that the health and longevity benefits for marriage are (quote) “negated for couples who keep things bottled up.”    Marriage is a good classroom in which to learn to discuss and constructively work out the most intimate, often complex and consequential matters. Of course we’ll mess that up sometimes. But, the two-way communication learned in marriage can pay huge dividends at the office.

Sometimes, in both marriage and business, we fail to confront important issues to keep the peace.    Steve Cooper points to a landmark marriage study by relationship expert, Terri Orbuch, entitled “The Early Years of Marriage Project.” After studying hundreds of married couples since 1986, Dr. Orbuch found that couples who avoided conflict were actually less happy over time. And the CEO who ignores troubling items and expects them to go away is paving the way for the issues to surface later, sometimes magnified. Plus, ignoring festering problems fosters discontent in the ranks.

Finally, Dr. Orbuch’s study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, also revealed the importance of spousal affirmation. In marriages where spouses made one another feel special, especially where wives frequently affirmed husbands, there was less divorce. And in the workplace, we all know a pat on the back once in awhile goes a long way. Steve Cooper emphasized the wisdom of affirming workers in todays economic climate, where they are asked to do more with less.

Many divorces are blamed on one spouse’s career aspirations. But in God’s economy, success in marriage and in business complement one another. A well-run company that provides products and/or services that help people is part of God’s provision. And so is marriage. We shouldn’t be surprised that cultivating the qualities that make a happy home also make us better leaders at work.

1 thought on “MARRIED CEO’S by Penna Dexter

  1. Pingback: John Leonard, Suzy Flory, Time-Management Tricks That Don’t Work | 4word women

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