MOTHER'S AND LEADERSHIP
Mother's Hone Leadership Skills on Career Breaks

USATODAY
1/9/2003

Linda Coe, a former banking attorney in Washington, is holding one cookie and looking at her two plaintive little girls. Time for the kind of classic negotiation that happens just as often in a playroom as in a corporate boardroom.

High-powered female professionals such as Coe are taking time out of their careers to stay home with their kids, but they're not leaving their leadership skills behind. In fact, mothering may be the best place to practice and learn leadership.

A mini-migration is taking place, according to a recent article in Business Week magazine, as women who have been running hard on the career track take a detour onto the mommy track for a while. The Harvard and Stanford business schools have done studies that demonstrate the trend. Of the female business school graduates from the Harvard classes of 1981, 1986 and 1991, only 38% are still working full time today.

Last year, USA TODAY reported that labor-force participation among new mothers dropped for the first time in nearly 25 years. One explanation for the trend was that women are having children later in their careers. These women have more secure financial situations and higher education, making time out from work a more viable proposition. Sharon Hoffman, the MBA program director at Stanford University, calls the phenomena "stopping out."

Some analysts worry that stop-outs may be turning back the clock after feminists have spent years fighting for the right to occupy the CEO's suite. Even with an upsurge in men choosing to stay at home, women are still far more likely to opt out of the workforce when children are born. But mothers at home can gain a leg up for their return to work by taking advantage of mothering as a leadership proving ground.

The idea isn't a new one. Eleanor Roosevelt noted that "a home requires all the tact and all the executive ability required in any business."

Today, best-selling author and management guru Peter Senge would agree. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge claims that the real skills of leadership mirror the skills of effective parenting. Ann Crittenden's bestseller, The Price of Motherhood, makes a powerful case for recognizing the skills and value of raising children.

New evidence that those skills transfer to the work world came as a surprise finding in a recent study by the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College.

Sixty female leaders ranging in age from 30 to 70 — including CEOs, politicians and women with public profiles such as syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, poet Maya Angelou and television correspondent Lesley Stahl — were interviewed for the study. Many of the women used maternal and family roles to describe their leadership or the leadership of other women. One said the head of her department was admirable for her "motherly traits," meaning the way she focused on the positive and watched out for people. Mothering was the metaphor that defined leadership for these professionals. This was particularly true for women of color.

The women in the study talked about leading "warmly, like a mom," rather than using the typical sports or military-focused metaphors of the workplace. In an interview I had with a French mayor this year, she spoke of connecting with voters as if there was "an umbilical cord." Maternal metaphors are authentic for women, just as learning leadership is a natural result of raising children.

While interviewing women for a book on Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership, I found a powerful connection between leadership learned on the mommy track and its transfer to the workplace.

Pamela Toutant, a management consultant, spent years at home with her two kids. She emphasized the interpersonal skills that grew from her experience. "If motherhood doesn't give you the skills to deal with sometimes difficult people in challenging situations, what does?"

Other women talked about multitasking, collaborating, delegating responsibility and communicating values as mothering skills that enhanced their professional leadership. In the Wellesley study, women spoke of team building and the ability to manage people as skills they transferred from home to work.

Some employers are enlightened enough to appreciate the transference of skills. In 1997, when Barbara Mossberg applied for the job as president of Goddard College in Vermont, she was asked about her life's most important accomplishments. She wrote about her children, saying that "creating a nurturing structure in which to witness and guide the growth of unique human beings" was a fabulous accomplishment. She not only got the job, but the board posted her response on the college Web site as well.

But Mossberg's experience is not the norm. Although U.S. corporations are beginning to recognize the importance of work/family balance, no similar recognition is given to the skill development mothers transfer from home to office. Just look at the 2002 listing of the 100 best places to work published by Working Mother magazine: The selection focused on flexible scheduling, advancement for women and time off for new parents. The next step is for companies to do more than accommodate and tolerate time off for child raising. They need to place value on the leadership skills and insight that women gain while "mother" is their principal job title.

Employers are only half the equation. Women returning to the workforce need to treat their mothering time as consequential a résumé item as any previous job. Conventional job-counseling wisdom labels time out for mothering as a résumé "gap" to be glossed over at interview time. That's bad advice. A résumé line that reads, "Successfully mediated the conflicting demands of household stakeholders," is as valid as "led negotiations for product development." Or as one mother, an America Online executive, said to me: "Being able to deal with 3-year-olds is great training for dealing with executives. Both have short attention spans and are given to temper tantrums."

Women who are "stopping out" are busy juggling kids' sports schedules and doctors' appointments. They're building a work ethic in their children one homework assignment at a time. They're negotiating the politics of play dates and building the collaborative skills of the home team. When they're ready to turn in their diaper bags for briefcases again, they'll return to their offices with new and richer leadership skills.

And as these mother-leaders move into top corporate jobs, more of their male counterparts might also decide that stopping out for some at-home leadership training is a good idea.

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