Executives are encouraged to up-skill themselves by taking short term courses that an employer pays for. Employers also pay for longer term Executive MBAs. Companies also spend a fortune on trainings, courses and offsite events to enable their employees to become better leaders, managers and team players. Many companies also encourage employees to take sabbaticals from burnout. But returning women from maternity leave are often merely accommodated in “a” job as the law in that country requires, without much regard to her past contribution and/or for her career.
Life After Maternity Leave and Beyond:
It is a well acknowledged truth that motherhood is the most life changing event in a woman’s life. There also exists a pernicious myth that women who take a break for maternity leave come back less motivated, and with atrophied skills and a distracted mind.
It is well known that learning from feedback/failures to course correct, thinking on your feet to troubleshoot, negotiating with a difficult (a non-verbally communicating) partner, problem-solving, endurance, patience, confidence, are all skills that a new mother has to master on a steep learning curve. Also well understood is that she has learned to take the ultimate responsibility, that of another human being, wholly!
But lesser-known experiences of motherhood that because of their intensity or novelty, directly augment her managerial attributes in the workplace are myriad. It enables you to:
- Be present in the moment which leads to greater focus and becoming more purposeful over both the short and the long terms.
- Be firm but kind which helps in decision making.
- Read people much quicker and deeper by zooming in on subtle non-verbal cues.
- Develop empathy which helps in understanding the customers point of view.
- Motivate colleagues by providing greater freedom and flexibility but making critical aspects non-negotiable, leading to a quality product.
- Handle crises by calmly and quickly evaluating what is the worst that can happen, what is salvageable, and mobilising the resources to execute swiftly.
- Research a subject thoroughly as if your life depended on it.
- Budget and stick to it because you have learnt that you can neither compromise on quality nor cost.
- Multitask and prioritize.
- Truly seeing without judging, leading to a great deal of clarity about both people and the market. Also helps in saying no quickly to unproductive work and unviable projects.
- Confidence in one’s ability to handle anything and inspiring team members to find meaning in their work. A mother who gives up time with the baby makes herself more productive so that work does not spill over. This is difficult to do without finding meaning in work. Moreover, she also has found more meaning in her life. Therefore, can inspire her team in finding meaning in their work. This combination has to make her a more inspirational leader.
- Growing a larger and more responsive network. One that is almost better than your professional network, as a web of hierarchy and high degree of competition do not exist. So, these are richer networks in “give and get” without the question of, “should I help?”, coming up!
Owning results! With a baby the buck does stop with the mother. Nothing is more managerial.
These are all among the more enhanced experiences after a maternity stint. And that we could come up with such a quick and long list isn’t at all surprising!
When an experience involves pain and tedium, much more struggle than triumph, how can it not enable the professional growth of a person? Even with the most natural task like breastfeeding, a mother truly learns how to get good at getting better, and experiences what achievement feels like, with repeated setbacks. She also understands the process that leads to breakthroughs — the nonlinear curve of incremental improvement that is continual rather than continuous. Sometimes, it is not even continual. Often one faces an absolute wall of resistance for a long time, that once broken through, leads to remarkable progress. These are the deep experiences that forge the intuition of a management expert.
Given all these, it comes as a surprise that not only do many workplaces expect these women to prove themselves all over again by only making place for a job rather than recognising all their past contribution and enhanced potential to deliver at a higher level now, but that women returning to work from maternity leave themselves have self-doubts about their new set of enhanced skills not being valuable in the world of “work”!
To all the women and their employers:
It is counterintuitive that when women are recognised for going off to complete executive MBAs and other sabbaticals, a woman returning from maternity leave is pitied and spurned. Folks, please recognise that this woman has now gathered an expedited, immersive and intense Executive Management degree!
And returning women, rather than going through self-doubts and guilt pangs, you should be thinking of leveraging this hard earned “qualification” to becoming more productive at your workplace and to demand to be treated and compensated accordingly.
PS: Why the motherboard picture?
This article is a very plainspoken assessment of the useful (as applied to a business) lessons learnt as a result of motherhood and the right way to onboard a mother. Motherhood is a core altering experience. The motherboard is the core of a computer. If an MBA converts you from an employee into a manager, motherhood converts you from an idiosyncratic individual to a dependable leader to form the core of the company.
