For Americans, Family Comes First—or Does It?
By Suzy Welch
Is there anything worse than Thanksgiving travel? Yet next week some 80 million of us will brave trains, planes and automobiles to get home. Because family comes first.
Except it doesn’t. Not for most Americans. Over the past six months, my research lab has been collecting data with a tool called the Values Bridge, which ranks in order each respondent’s values on a scale from 1 to 16. Drawing on nearly 90,000 assessments, the largest data set of its kind, the results challenge the conventional wisdom about the primacy of family in our culture, with implications both personal and professional.
Only 11% of Americans rank family as their No. 1 value. Even among the wealthy and married, the demographic group that ranks family the highest, that figure climbs only to 15%. Less than half of all Americans (48%) place family in their top five values, 35% rank it midrange, and 17% put it in their bottom five values. Americans may love their families, but most don’t live for them.
Read the full The Wall Street Journal article.
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Suzy Welch is Professor of Management Practice at NYU Stern.