The mother prepares her suitcase for her next business trip, the daughter cries hysterically and shouts: “Don’t go! Please stay with me ”. How many times the journalist Joann Lublin, columnist of the Wall Street Journal, has come to terms with this type of situation, with that “sense of guilt that working women know well”. To shed some light on the subject, Lublin has published a book, entitled “Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life”, for which he interviewed 86 mothers “in power”. Each of them told how motherhood made her a better entrepreneur (in spite of the sense of guilt).
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But what are the skills we acquire after the birth of a child? In Italy there is a platform called “Lifeed”, specialized in transforming life changes and care activities into gyms for the training of soft skills, which has collected data. The numbers are “fresh” and concern women mothers and workers in the era of the pandemic: out of a sample of 1000 people, 85% feel they have developed their empathic skills more, 88% acknowledge that they have improved their decision-making. making, 89% feel they have greater ability to see and manage change. In addition, 74% of mothers feel they have improved their leadership skills, a figure even higher than the average of participants in Lifeed training courses, men and women in different types of care roles, in which it is equal to 71% . Chiara Bacilieri, head of Lifeed’s people analytics division, explains to HuffPost: “Motherhood can be a master’s degree as well as crisis can be. Either way, we become more vulnerable, but also more aware of our strengths and abilities. Mothers, in this period of great change, found themselves more responsible (85%), more aware (86%) and also vulnerable (75%). And it is precisely self-awareness that plays a key role, that reveals our superpower, which transforms vulnerability into a strength when we become able to recognize and express it “.
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Data that confirm the thesis of the Wall Street Journal journalist: “Many ‘power moms’ belonging to every generation have confided to me that they have become better leaders by raising families – writes Lublin in the book -. With less time available, they acquired new skills, learned to prioritize, multitask and delegate effectively. They also learned to handle everything with empathy. And this is a quality strongly valued by companies because they are increasingly operating in complex contexts “.
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Lublin tells of Sarah Hofstetter, president of Comscore (an internet research company able to provide services and data for marketing in various commercial sectors of the web, listed on the stock exchange, ed): “‘The first thing you instinctively learn with being a parent is the empathy’. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is totally different when it comes to your baby. ‘I feel his stomach ache, it’s totally visceral,’ he admits. Hofstetter reacts in the same way in the workplace – the book reads -. It takes on the personal problems of employees in a profound way. And that’s how he helped a struggling team member in 2012. It was a mother whose daughter was ill and required hospital care. To try to help her out, he purposely arranged a visit to a distant client to make the trip and talk to her. After realizing that the woman felt guilty for not having enough free time to spend with the child, he warmly invited her to take her freedom. Hofstetter left the company in April 2019, but a year later she became president of Profitero, an e-commerce startup.
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According to the author of Power Moms, there are many examples of female leaders whose empathic management style has made them a role model in the eyes of employees, especially parent workers. The reporter recalls that in 2005 the CEO of Avon Andrea Jung met a manager mother who was a member of the team: during a meeting, the woman received a call from the school because her son had fallen, was injured and was on his way to hospital. Jung, well aware of the sense of guilt that mothers divided between work and parenting can feel, took the situation in hand: “Leave the meeting, you have an emergency – he said in front of the rest of the team, mainly made up of men. -. This is a priority and Avon will survive ”. Today Jung leads the nonprofit organization “Grameen America” which helps American women in poverty become successful entrepreneurs.
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The women interviewed by Lublin are all part of different generations (from boomers, women born between 1965 and 1980, to millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996). But what is the difference you found between them? In an interview with NextAvenue, the author explains that the Power Moms active in the ’80s gave a gift to those who came after, that is, they showed them that being successful and being moms is possible. But not only that: many times they have encouraged women of future generations to do the same. More and more millennial mothers play important roles in companies, as evidenced by the rankings of Fortune. But in this “advancement”, Lublin also reads a step backwards: “When there were modems, a boomer mother could perhaps stay a little longer in the office. Today it is possible to work from home. But as millions of parents discovered during the pandemic, these advances in technology also triggered the ‘always on’ mechanism. In this sense, the boomer mothers feel very sorry for the fact that the mothers of subsequent generations must always be available and active ”.
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In the book there is also space for mothers’ sense of guilt, an evergreen for every generation. In addition to 86 women, Lublin also interviewed 25 daughters of boomer entrepreneur mothers to try to understand how their mothers’ experience had affected them and their path. And he found that often the unpleasant sensations experienced by mothers did not coincide with the same suffering experienced by their children. And that’s a relief. “There is this boomer mother who still remembers when her daughter’s eleventh birthday was not missing because she was on a business trip – continues Lublin – only to be there the whole weekend for the celebrations. When I interviewed her, her daughter said to me: ‘I don’t remember that mum was out for work that day because she was at the party and, indeed, she made me the cake’ ”.
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