Deciding to Be Maternal Without Being a Mother
One of the themes you’ll find running through these pages is that motherhood is not just a physical state but a state of mind. You can choose to give birth to children or choose to give to others. In either case, this decision shakes you out of a completely self-involved mind-set and enables you to mature as a leader. While becoming a mom was a nobrainer choice for me, deciding not to become a mom is a no-brainer choice for others. It may be that you have not found a partner with whom you want to have children or you believe that you’re simply not the type of person who would make a good mother. Whatever the reason, if you are convinced that this would be a bad choice for you, don’t let me, or society, convince you otherwise. Not everyone should be a parent, and if you have strong instincts against this, listen to your instincts.
If you choose not to become a mother or life’s circumstances prevent you from having children, find other means to attain the leadership lessons of motherhood. Oprah Winfrey, for instance, is incredibly nurturing and empathetic as well as a very powerful CEO, yet she has no biological children. In a recent interview, Oprah says that she is focusing a portion of her $1 billion net worth on helping “the world’s children.” She is devoting her private time to help build 12 schools for girls in Africa. “I went to Africa to create the best Christmas possible for kids who’d never had one, kids who didn’t even understand the concept of a present, and the joy in that room was so thick you physically feel it. And in that moment, it hit me. Now I see why I am not married. Now I see why I never had children. I am supposed to work with these children.” (Limbacher, 1)
Another childless executive, Sue Palmer, the managing director of London-based accounting firm Grant Thornton, is quoted in Susan Hewlett’s book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, as follows:
Round the time I realized I would most probably not get married and not have kids, I met this industrial psychologist... He told me that to remain strong and vital, I needed to find something in life that could be as important to me as children. If I could do this—find some interest that had deep, personal meaning—it would force me to balance my life. Otherwise, there was a danger my soul would shrivel—I still remember his exact words—and I could become some kind of one-dimensional workaholic. This conversation had such a profound impact. I mean, I just knew he was right. (Hewlett, 70–71)
While some women are absolutely certain that they do or do not want to have children, many are on the cusp. One day they worry that if they don’t have kids, they will regret it, and the next they are so enmeshed in work issues that having children seems completely unrealistic.
Be aware, also, that a couple of the maternal leaders I’ve interviewed were dead set against having children at one stage in their careers but changed their minds later on. Priscilla Lu, who was an executive at AT&T and went on to become the chairman and CEO of InterWAVE, a high-tech company in Silicon Valley, said that she was adamant about not wanting kids and shared this sentiment with her colleagues. When she got married, though, she changed her mind and decided to have children. She recalled:
My first pregnancy was pretty traumatic. When I found out, I was shocked. I was worried how I was going to handle being a mom. It was very overwhelming. I knew my life was going to be very, very different. I wasn’t 100 percent sure of my decision. I went into a sort of denial—like, “Nah, this isn’t happening.” But when Douglas was born, my fears went away. Everything did change, but it was wonderful. I guess it’s Mother Nature. I don’t know where my nurturing side came from, but I immediately felt passionate love for my son and went on to have two more children.
Myth #5: If I do take a break, I cannot get back on the fast track. The “High-Achieving Women 2001 Report” stated, “Fully twothirds of women who left their careers would like to go back to work.” (National Parenting Association, 2) While many high achievers want to return, some fear that they’ve lost too much ground to get back on track. It is a myth, however, that getting off the fast track means that you cannot get back on it. When you decide to become a mother, you do not condemn yourself to mid-level or below positions when you return to work.
Again, the media’s fascination with this topic has helped foster the illusion that, once you leave work for family, it will be difficult to pick up where you left off. Article after article warns of the difficulty of making up for lost time or convincing bosses that you are sufficiently “serious” about work to be considered for an important role.
In reality, you must battle to stay on the fast track no matter what your situation might be. More significantly, organizations don’t view “time off” with the same suspicion as they did years ago. CEOs often take breaks in their corporate climbs without penalty. Jamie Dimon was fired as president of Citigroup and took 16 months off before being appointed CEO of Bank One. Ed Zander became CEO of Motorola a yearand-a-half after leaving his COO role at Sun Microsystems. Ann Fudge was appointed CEO two years after voluntarily leaving Kraft. And Brenda Barnes, who left a top position at PepsiCo in 1997 to spend more time with her children, returned as the COO of Sara Lee after a seven-year break.
I heard many wonderful stories about corporations who went out of their way to support their talented senior women executives during and upon return from breaks. In addition to taking maternity leave, many of these executives have taken a break for family and balance purposes at one time or another. In my case, AT&T paid me a full salary to perform public service. It is not the only company to do something like this. One of the strongest women leaders I’ve known was at Sun Microsystems when she took a sabbatical to spend more time with her teenage daughter who was struggling with depression. “Scott McNealy was so supportive,” she said. “He wouldn’t even put me on a leave of absence. He paid my full salary while I took the time I needed with my daughter. Scott has three kids. He understood how important it was for me to be there for her.”
Myth #4: Women who have to leave work because of family problems become bitter and resentful. In other words, you feel that the decision to have children will eventually come back to haunt you. You fear having kids because you feel they will need you, you’ll have to quit a job you love, and this second decision will make you miserable. Or you have already had children, and you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the moment when the family/work balance becomes impossible to maintain and you have to quit.
In reality, when high-achieving mothers stop working, they usually do so because they have decided they prefer to be at home rather than at work. No one puts a gun to their heads. Contrary to the myth, they don’t look at motherhood as a sentence to life in prison. I interviewed a number of very talented, ambitious executive moms with senior corporate executive aspirations, but they had gladly stopped working or changed career paths to spend more time at home. Some felt they could not be good at both, some didn’t like the incredibly hectic pace, and others had children in distress. Not one regretted her decision to become a mother. In fact, they all said their children were the best part of their lives. Though some had struggled with the decision to leave the corporate world, all of them eventually came to terms with their departures.
In fact, a trait of many maternal leaders is an ability to derive meaning from more than work. Though they may miss aspects of the business world, they don’t miss it in the same way that many men do. Too often, powerful male leaders derive the bulk of their identity from their work, and fatherhood is seen as a secondary role. Powerful executive mothers, on the other hand, have a more balanced viewpoint. This balance is why senior women leaders are not as likely to be consumed by the quest to be CEO as men are. Warren Farrell, the author of The Myth of Male Power, finds the following:
When a woman gets near the top, she starts asking herself the most intelligent questions. The fact that few women make it to the very top is a measure of women’s power, not powerlessness. Women haven’t learned to get their love by being president of a company. They’ve learned they can get respect and love in a variety of different ways—from being a good parent, from being a top executive, or by a combination of both. But here again, women are opting off the CEO track because they believe they found something better, namely, love. (Farrell, 1)
Myth #3: To become a CEO, you must carefully plan your career and life around your goal. While you need to get the right mix of academic and job experiences to be even considered for a CEO position, you cannot plan every aspect of your life to the point that you significantly increase the odds of becoming a CEO. When I hear women complain that they would have been considered for a CEO job if they had never had kids, I know they are under the influence of this myth. When they decided to have children, they did not automatically destroy their chances of being a chief executive. Though being a mom might not have fit into a formal CEO career plan, it also didn’t throw them off the fast track.
When my son was young, he wanted to be a professional athlete. While he was very talented, the probabilities were still a million to one. Now that he’s a scholarship athlete on a Division I football team, his probabilities are more like a hundred to one. His odds of making it, while better, are still pretty low. He knows he’s at the mercy of certain factors beyond his control, such as injuries and luck. As a result, he is not planning everything in his life around playing professional football, even though he still would like to achieve this goal. Similarly, women who decide not to have children because it doesn’t fit with their CEO plan are forgetting that factors beyond their control will impact whether they ultimately become a CEO. Only so many top jobs are available, and if you sacrifice a family for this long shot, you are making a bad bet.
Myth #2: Mothers are opting out at alarming rates. The optout myth places pressure on working moms to quit their jobs and join the trend to stay at home with their kids. It also discourages women from having children, because it creates the fear that becoming pregnant signals the beginning of the end of their careers. Though it is impossible to find reliable statistics about how many professional women opt out after having children, everything I’ve learned from my interviewing and research suggests that the number has been inflated.
The media has had a field day with this trend, and articles in USA Today, The New York Times Magazine, Business Week, and Time have all declared that more women than ever are leaving the workforce to stay at home with their children. I would caution everyone to take what they read in the media with a grain of salt, as the following example illustrates.
A New York Times Magazine and Business Week article declared that only 38 percent of the female graduates from Harvard Business School’s 1981, 1985, and 1991 graduating classes were working full-time. (Conlin, 1) In a follow-up article, Bonnie Erbe noted that she called the Harvard B-School media office and received the results of the Harvard survey cited in the New York Times article. Erbe wrote: “It was made clear this was not a statistical reliable sampling. I was told each of those classes of 900 graduates (in 1981, 1985, and 1991) she cited were roughly 30 percent female. That means, to get a statistically accurate sampling, the professor would have had to receive approximately 810 responses (or 30 percent of 2,700 responses). She received a grand total, I was told, of 150 responses. And who would have more time to respond to such a survey than women home full-time versus women crunching hours and putting in face time at high-velocity jobs?” (Erbe, 1–2)
Opting out is also a nebulous term. Some mothers quit executive positions for the same reason nonmothers do: They are dissatisfied with some aspect of their organizations, their jobs, or their lifestyle. The time-out that women take for maternity leave gives them an opportunity to assess their career and life. One of my bosses used to tell me, “As soon as your team completes a huge project or solves a crisis, put them on another one right away. You don’t want to give them too much time to think about how hard they’ve been working.” Maternity leave provides women with time to think.
Perhaps most significantly, my interviews suggest that fast-track women executives with kids are less likely to opt out than women who have lower-level jobs. It stands to reason that most women with highly successful careers have more to lose by opting out than other women, that the financial rewards and satisfaction they derive from their jobs are greater than if they had been less successful. Therefore, while a woman in a dead-end job who has a child might find it easy to stop working, a woman in an exciting, fulfilling executive role will find such a prospect less enticing.
Opting out is also less of a possibility if you work in a motherfriendly environment. Many of the women I interviewed noted that they were eager and able to return to work after having children, because their organizations valued maternal leaders. Mindy Meads of Lands’ End said, “I am fortunate to work for a company that is so family oriented. I have been able to go to many of my son’s soccer games. There are lots of moms working with me, and kids are respected as an essential element of our lives. In fact, some of our senior executives occasionally bring their children along on European business trips.”
Myth #1: Motherhood will make it more difficult to get to the top. Corollaries of this myth include, “Moms can’t devote the time or energy necessary to qualify for these positions” and “Organizations are reluctant to select mothers for top jobs because of the fear that they will give in to the demands of their family over the demands of their jobs.” While some organizations may subscribe to this myth, most companies are more enlightened. The authors of “Leaders in a Global Economy Report” determined, “Women at reporting levels closer to the CEO are more likely to have children and less likely to have decided not to have children than women executives at lower levels.” (Galinsky, 3)
Shelly Lazarus, the CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, said, “It is certainly possible to be both a mother and a CEO. You learn how to set priorities, and you learn how to enjoy the ride.” Shelly noted that this belief isn’t necessarily shared by all women, as evidenced by a commencement speech she recently heard: “I was startled because the speaker gave a speech that you cannot have both. These were young, impressionable women, and she was telling them not to believe it. It really bothered me. There’s enough evidence that you can do both.”
No doubt, some women in certain fields and in specific companies will face roadblocks because they are moms. Balancing career and family certainly can be a challenge, but in the majority of situations, it is not an impediment to securing top corporate positions. In fact, the “Leaders in a Global Economy Report” suggests that motherhood is viewed as a positive rather than a negative quality when selecting candidates for executive positions. The tide is indeed turning. No doubt, organizations are recognizing that the qualities of maternal leadership—perspective, balance, nurturing, and so on—are exactly the skills needed to manage a diverse workforce in turbulent times.
Therefore, when you think about your motherhood decision, don’t beat yourself up because you chose to have kids and believe that you haven’t achieved your career goals because of that decision. Unless you work for a truly backward organization, this isn’t the case. Similarly, if you’re a younger woman trying to decide about becoming a mother, don’t let this myth stop you from starting a family if that is what you really want to do.
“Motherhood absolutely impacts your leadership style. It rounds you out. Overall, it makes you a more complete person. By virtue of raising children, you become a much more complete leader.” -Linda Wolf, Chairman and CEO, Leo Burnett Worldwide
To be or not to be a mother is a question that many executive women wrestle with, and most decide in favor of having children. Whether you made this decision long ago or are just starting to grapple with it, you probably have not given much thought to how it will increase your leadership effectiveness. Typically, women focus on more practical matters, such as how the time away— whether it is a relatively short maternity leave, a longer sabbatical from work, or a decrease in hours—will negatively impact their careers.
The executive mothers in this book did not experience a serious negative impact. And, while there’s no magic formula about when to have kids or how many to have, Appendix B summarizes the choices these women made. If you have not had children yet, thinking about this decision from an informed leadership perspective can be eye opening. If you have had children, you can learn a lot about how the decision may have shaped the leader you’ve become; it can also provide you with new ways to take advantage of this choice, even if you made it years ago.
As you saw in the last chapter, the dragon lady syndrome is not a permanent condition. Motherhood and an understanding of its impact can have a tremendously beneficial effect. Similarly, the very decision to become a mother not only changes your life but, as we will see, changes your leadership style for surprising reasons.
Mother Leads Best: 50 Women Who Are Changing The Way Organizations Define Leadership
by Moe Grzelakowski
Dearborn Trade - March 2005
232 Pages - ISBN 0793195187
I think the Table of Contents explains well how she has organized the book.