Working moms are part of a club. They share their struggles and achievements. Most of all, they share a very similar experience and provide support to each other via a plentiful supply of forums, meet-ups, and blogs.
In the last few years, a new wave of working mothers has emerged: The Executive Moms. These mothers are working with young — sometimes very young — children in an executive role. Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Meyer have recently raised the profile of these executive moms and are examples of this new breed.
The fact is, women are having children later in life and more of them are doing so after having developed their career and accepted executive roles. They are setting goals that were not traditionally set in past decades by women. This new phenomenon may seem sweeping to some of us, but in fact, it accounts for a very small portion of the upper-level workforce. When you get into the statistics on executive motherhood, well, those almost don’t exist.
But there is no club for those executive moms. No blogs to find precious advice. No forum to seek support. The executive mom is usually lonely both in her higher management role (see: The Only Woman in the Room: Navigating a Career in Cybersecurity) and in her role as a mother.
Naturally, executives are nearly always Type A, striving for perfection at work and home. This makes for tough compromises, as the question is never whether we should stop working or even slow down, but how to find a balance and carve out time for a new priority in our lives: our young kids.
From my 4-year experience, here is what it means to be an executive mom:
- Bring on the guilt. The guilt towards work, towards our team who is asked to do more with less guidance, and towards our babies and toddlers as it always feels like we are never doing enough.
- Where is my confidence? Being pregnant and having a newborn brings limitations to our ability to do what we used to do: travel easily and frequently, work long stretches at a time, take a call with little or no notice. We suddenly feel vulnerable and can experience an erosion of confidence for some limited or prolonged time.
- Maternity leave, take it or forget it? After my first kid, one of my peer executives asked how my vacation went. For my second child, I worked during my maternity leave. Guilt again.
But with the struggles of executive motherhood comes a new level of wisdom:
- Productivity gets a boost. Like any other working mom, every moment in the executive mom’s day needs to be productive. This does not just mean working every minute of the day, but focusing on what has a real impact on the company and employees and what really matters to the top and bottom lines.
- Creativity also gets a boost. When our mind is not 100% on work and takes a breather to be with our children, we get new perspectives. New ideas have popped into my head in the middle of a Lego construction in a surprising way. After 4 years, those ideas still happen. And that stopped the guilt.
- Becoming a better leader. Not smarter, not more strategic nor operational but just more human in a way that employees can relate. When my son was a newborn and I was attempting to find my new balance, I relied more on my team and shared with them what I was going through. They related. They worked harder and helped me through this transition. We bonded deeper during that time and our impact on the company became stronger. In more personal conversations, team members emphasized how fulfilling it was to be able to help me not just on the next board presentation but in my daily struggles.
I will leave you with a final story. During my college years, I spent some time in Japan at Kobe University. There, I attended a lecture from a Japanese woman CEO. She was impressive and very respected. She would have been a role model in the West. To my Japanese classmates, less so. By choosing to have an executive career, she renounced a life as a wife and mother, and that was not something many Japanese teenagers were willing to do. In Europe and the USA, there were also few women executives at that time, but the choice was not as hard for them as it was for the Japanese executive. Nevertheless, choices had to be made.
Today, though the statistics are still non existent, there are enough executive mothers now that we can say finally that we truly can have it all. Executive mothers are surely a new breed, and a formidable one.
