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Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the GE stock went up by 4,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fortune named him the ‘Manager of the Century’ in 1999

Suzy Welch is a former editor of Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author of Jack Welch’s latest book Winning

You can e-mail Jack and Suzy Welch questions at winning@nytimes.com

(Please include your name, occupation, city and country)

Is it possible for a leader to be a top performer and still be able to achieve work-life balance?
– Christy Dobbs, Philadelphia

Not only is it possible, it happens all the time. Look, top performers are top perf-ormers for a reason. They are usually very talented – smart, creative, productive and loaded with energy. And those qualities don't tend to confine themselves to work. If they are in a person, they suffuse everything he or she does.

That's why we all know plenty of successful businesspeople who also have successful lives outside work, filled with family, volunteering and hobbies. They have figured out what they want and how to make it all happen, usually with the help of well honed home processes, like meticulous scheduling, online shopping and backup childcare.
We understand your question, though. We have heard it dozens of times. In a global economy where job challenges are constantly escalating, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by conflicting demands. And technology complicates matters – with your Blackberry in hand, you can constantly be on call to everyone.

But feeling swamped is really just a default mechanism; it is what occurs when you don't face what achieving work-life balance really comes down to: making choices and living with their consequences. In fact, we would even vote to retire the term work-life balance and replace it with work-life choices. The problem is that work-life balance suggests there is one right ratio for how much time a person should spend working and not working, and with that, we disagree.

Sure, there is a lot of politically correct advocacy for a kind of perfect equilibrium, and it may very well be that many people want a 50-50 split between work and life. But some people love work so much and find it so gratifying that they want to live a different equation, say, like 70-30. Others want to work just enough to support a life of avocation. For instance, we have a friend who writes and consults about two months a year to pay to travel the other ten. He thinks his life is perfectly balanced.

Balance, we are saying, is a personal choice based on what feels right to you, given what you want from life, both personally and professionally. With that choice comes consequences. When you choose to work 80 hours a week, you are also choosing to give up some level of intimacy with your children. When you chose to work 35 hours a week in order to see more of your family, you are also choosing to take yourself off the fast track to senior management. There is no right or wrong here. There are just individual choices and their trade-offs.

That said, we do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder deal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally, but about what is right for their kids. That period can be a fraught time, in which choices and consequences are more complex.

But to answer your more general question, yes, it is completely possible to be a top performer and achieve work-life balance. Most top performers have already made a choice – work is a priority – but their talent helps them forge a meaningful outside life too.

We are a company that is growing quite fast, and we have started to have trouble organising ourselves. What is the best way to go from a small company to a big one?
– Ante Milos, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

What a great problem to have. Growth like yours can only mean you've figured out a strategic "Aha!" – a new product or service that customers really want and competitors don't offer – and that you have an energised team to match. Nice going. But brace yourself. The leap from start-up to an established business is one of the trickiest transitions in an organisation's life. If left to happenstance, it can really cause a company to come unglued. The problem is that many start-ups, while installing processes and systems to organise their burgeoning bigness, accidentally kill the spirit and energy that made them so successful when they were small.

That is why your overriding goal right now must be to help your company grow up – and still stay young at heart. Start by going back to the basics: mission and values. When you were starting out, everyone probably worked together and could feel in their bones where you were going and what behaviours were expected of them to get there. But as new hires have poured in and operations have dispersed, your mission and values have probably become somewhat fuzzy.

That is trouble waiting to happen. Stop it by tal-king about the mission and values ad nauseam, always remembering that people haven't lived them like you have. Your next step is to establish an operating system and rhythm since you have probably gotten along so far using ad hoc forms of budgeting and planning. It is time for the real thing now. But remember: avoid bureaucratic awfulness.

Keep planning to a few key ideas designed to generate lively discussion. And ensure budgeting doesn't devolve into a phony series of negotiations, culminating in a rigid number instead of exciting stretch goals. Whatever you do, never punish people for missing bold targets. Reward them instead for how they did compared to last year's results and how they did relative to the competition or the opportunity. Speaking of rewarding people, no company can go from small to big without a rigorous, candid appraisal process that is conducted at least twice a year. Momentum won't carry you forever, and you need to make sure you have the best team. To do that, you will need some systematic differentiation: identifying great, average and sub-par performers so they can be moved up or out accordingly.

Unfortunately, in your situation, as with every growing start-up, some underperformers are sure to come from the ranks of your original employees. Just because someone started out with you doesn't mean he or she is a star. May be they got lucky, hopping on the train as it was roaring downhill, but lacking skills to go back up.

You cannot carry them along for the ride – and facing that can be difficult. This is one of the hard parts of the small-to-big transition you are going through. You can't continue winging it as in the past and yet you need to hold onto the informal, indomitable feel that launched you.

Hard stuff. But exciting too. You are ahead of the game because you recognise the challenge. Now, you have got a glorious piece of blank paper in front of you. The future is yours to design.

Doesn't differentiation destroy employee loyalty?
– Andre Rapoport, São Paulo, Brazil

Look, loyalty is no magic bullet. In today's globally competitive world, you can't survive – let alone thrive – without satisfied customers. Do loyal employees make that happen? Sure...sometimes.

But for satisfied customers all the time, you need employees loaded with talent, energy and passion. You need people who stay with your company not because the benefits are good, but because your mission turns them on, the work is meaningful and fun and the opportunities for growth are thrilling. You need people who are happy to stay, but are ready to leave if the environment isn't buzzing. Those are your winners.

Differentiation has its flaws, but it works better than any other system we know. And one reason is that it makes it clear that employees can only stay as long as they are performing.

What can you do about a peer who persistently disrupts work getting done? This person is no problem for the bosses, but butts heads with practically every lateral member of the team.
– Ashley Prisant, Cambridge, Mass.

You've got a real problem – a brutal and all-too-familiar one. But, unfortunately, it is one you probably can't solve. Peers don't manage peers. They have some influence, but no power. So understand that if you try to deal with this disruptor on your own, you enter the fight unarmed. Yes, you can pull the disruptor aside for a conference-room chat, take him out for a long lunch or write him a thoughtful letter. But no matter what even-handed approach you use, the response will likely be in the same vein.

Disruptors cannot be persuaded about anything, nor be reasoned with. There is something else going on in their psyches, something that does not allow them to, for lack of a better phrase, play nicely with others. Unless you are a psychiatrist, your best bet is to just keep as much distance as possible.

And, just as important, keep your mouth shut and your head down. Wait for your boss or the human resources department to identify and fix the problem, which will eventually happen if you picked your company correctly.

With today's increasingly mobile workforce, what has a manager to do to retain employees?
– Claudia Stowers, Philadelphia

Gone are the days when companies had employees who signed up at 21 and marked time until retirement. That lifestyle has been eroding for decades now. Two or three job changes in one decade are not unusual. But, while that may be good for a person's career building, it is not particularly good for companies. Every time talented, productive employees walk out the door, they take with them training and experience. They are investments with unrealised returns.

Given that, today's companies must have powerful retention mechanisms in place to hang onto their top performers. We are not talking about money. That is Retention 101. It is basic.

No, retention starts with senior management giving the real matter bite. It has to be an organisational sin to lose a top-20 performer. It just cannot happen without repercussions. That makes it imperative for companies to have rigorous appraisal and rewards systems in place, so they know exactly who their best are and can manage and reward them accordingly. The ultimate retention tool, is success – profitability, growth and opportunity. Those three reasons are why great people didn't leave IBM in the '70s or Microsoft in the '80s. And they are why high performers aren't leaving Google right now.