TIAA chief says a late-night commute changed her view of work-life balance

TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett says a late-night emotional breaking point during her JPMorgan Chase years changed how she thinks about work and family. Speaking on Fortune’s “Titans and Disruptors of Industry” podcast, Duckett said she stopped trying to achieve work-life balance and began treating her time as a limited asset to allocate.

Duckett told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that the idea of work-life balance had left her feeling as if she were falling short in every part of her life. “Work-life balance is a lie,” Duckett said on the podcast, adding that the competing demands of career and home life do not neatly reconcile.

A breaking point after a long workday

Duckett said the shift began while she was working at JPMorgan Chase, where Fortune reported she spent nearly nine years and rose to become CEO of Chase Consumer Banking. At the time, she was commuting between New Jersey and New York City, with workdays that left little time to see her children.

One night, Duckett said, she was waiting at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal for the last bus home. She described seeing late travelers headed elsewhere and a janitor cleaning the terminal as she absorbed how much of family life she was missing.

Duckett said she called her husband while crying and told him she was not seeing her children before or after work. Her husband, whom Fortune described as a stay-at-home father, Marine and engineer, responded directly: “then quit.”

According to Duckett, he told her that if the arrangement was not working for her, it was not working for the family. Duckett said that blunt response pushed her to change her thinking rather than continue measuring herself against an ideal she could not meet.

She told Fortune she had felt as though she was failing her husband, children, parents and siblings. What needed to change, she said, was her mindset about what success across those roles could look like.

The portfolio approach

Duckett, who became CEO of TIAA in 2021, said she now thinks of her life as a “diversified portfolio,” a framework she tied to her finance background. In that view, she said, a person has only 100% of their time and energy, not more, and must decide where to put it.

Duckett told Fortune that the approach means assigning attention to the relationships and duties that define her, including her roles as a mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt, philanthropist and executive. It also means accepting that no one part of her life can receive all of her time.

She used parenting as an example, saying her children cannot receive 100% of her because sleep, school and work take up large parts of each day. Duckett said that accepting those limits has made her more present as a mother, rather than more guilty.

The 52-year-old executive said the same approach has helped her as a daughter and sister because it reduces the pressure to give everyone everything at once. Duckett compared changes in life demands to market volatility, saying allocations may shift as circumstances change.

Duckett told Fortune that abandoning the pursuit of balance has helped her lead without carrying the same burden of anxiety over competing obligations. Her view, she said, is that people can perform better in life by allocating their energy honestly instead of trying to make work and personal demands match evenly.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.