I became a mother at 40, so by the time my daughter came along I’d already spent a good twenty years working.
I was pretty good at work. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I mean I knew how to work. I knew how to get things done, how to step up when something needed doing, how to stay late if we were up against a deadline. I travelled when I needed to travel. If something changed at the last minute, I moved things around. Work needed something and, generally, I found a way to make it happen.
Then I had a child and suddenly there was this other person in my life who really didn’t care if I had an important meeting. It didn’t make me care less about my work. That’s the thing. I think we sometimes talk about becoming a mother as though your priorities change overnight and suddenly work doesn’t matter anymore. That wasn’t my experience. I still wanted to be good at what I did. I still wanted to contribute and be the person people could rely on. I just had a lot less room to move things around.
School holidays are probably the most obvious example. They still make me laugh because the maths is ridiculous. Your child gets weeks and weeks of school holidays, you get considerably less annual leave, and somehow you’re supposed to make those two things work together. Of course you do. You take some leave. Your partner takes some. You find a holiday programme. If you have family nearby, maybe they help. You make deals with other parents. You look at your calendar and your child’s calendar and start moving things around like some sort of deranged game of Tetris. Then you go to work.
I’m making light of it, but I think there’s something in that. Because I was good at making things work long before I became a mother. Most of us who’ve spent any length of time in organisations are. We learn quite quickly that being someone people can rely on is a good thing.
It is a good thing and I don’t want to throw that out. I like working with people who care about what they do. If we’re in the middle of something difficult, I want to know that the people around me will step up. I want to be one of those people too. I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something well, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working hard. I certainly don’t want us to get to a place where every time work asks something difficult of us we decide it’s an infringement on our wellbeing. Sometimes work is hard. Sometimes life is hard.
The bit I’m less sure about is what happens when you become so good at making it work that nobody, including you, stops to ask whether it’s actually working.
For years, if an opportunity came along I would ask “Can I do this?” Can I manage the role, handle the responsibility, make the logistics work? Often the answer was yes. It has taken me a lot longer to realise that there’s another question: do I want the life that comes with doing this? Those are not the same question at all.
Motherhood make it much harder for me to ignore because suddenly my choices didn’t only affect me. It wasn’t just a question of whether I was willing to stay late or prepared to catch another plane. I could still do those things, and I did. Sometimes I wanted to, and the opportunity was absolutely worth it. But I was now much more conscious that there was a life happening around the work.
Honestly, there had always been a life happening around the work. I just hadn’t paid as much attention to it.
That’s what I’m seeing differently when I think about leadership too. When you’re leading people, the ones you worry about tend to be the ones where something is obviously not working. They are not delivering or they are missing deadlines. The person who keeps dropping balls will eventually get your attention.
It’s surprisingly easy to pay less attention to the person who keeps catching them. Give her something and it will get done. If something goes wrong, she’ll sort it. You know you can rely on her, which is wonderful when you’re the person who has to get a whole lot of things done through other people. And because everything keeps getting done, there isn’t necessarily anything telling you to look more closely.
I’ve been there. Of course I gave important work to the person I knew would deliver. Why wouldn’t I? But I’m not sure I always thought about what it took for that person to keep delivering. That’s different.
Someone can be excellent at her job and be moving heaven and earth behind the scenes to stay excellent. You don’t necessarily see that because the work keeps arriving on time. I think working mums can be particularly good at this. We make plans and backup plans. Sometimes we have backup plans for the backup plans. We know which meeting absolutely cannot move and which one might. We get good at appearing in one part of our life while quietly managing the other part somewhere in the background.
That doesn’t mean every working mum is struggling, by the way, and I don't want to turn it into that story either. I love being a mum and I’ve loved a lot of my work. Sometimes the juggle is fine and sometimes it isn’t. I think the difference is much easier to see when you actually know the person.
It sounds obvious, but I’m not sure the workplace has always worked that way. We’ve been very good at knowing people professionally: what they are good at, what their goals and gaps are, what they need to develop for the next role. All useful things to know.
There’s another kind of knowing that’s less tidy because it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into a development plan or performance conversation. It means knowing something about the person who has the goals and the gaps, and what else might be going on in the life around their work. That doesn’t mean we need to know everything. I don’t particularly want to tell my colleagues every detail of my private life, and I’m sure they don’t want to tell me theirs. But there’s a difference between having privacy and having to pretend that the rest of your life has no bearing on the person who turns up at work.
Maybe it’s simply knowing someone well enough that there’s space for them to say, “Look, I can do this, but I can’t keep doing it like this,” without you immediately thinking they’re not committed. Or someone can say, “School holidays are a nightmare this year. Can I work differently for the next few weeks?” and you don’t quietly wonder if she is still serious about her career.
It doesn’t mean you have to say yes to either of those things. There is still work to do. Customers still need things and deadlines exist. Other people in the team have lives as well. If one person puts something down, somebody else may have to pick it up. That matters.
We lose something important if we forget that work is an exchange. I give something, you give something and we rely on each other. There are times I’ll do more because you need me to, and hopefully there are times when you’ll do the same for me. What’s changing, I think, is that we need to be able to talk more honestly about that exchange. Not just, “Are you getting the work done?” but, “How is this actually working?” Those can have two completely different answers.
That’s where my own view of leadership has changed. I used to think a leader needed to know how to get the best out of people. Even writing that now feels slightly odd, as though the best is something sitting inside them that I need to extract.
I’m interested now in creating the kind of relationships as a leader where we can be honest about what good work requires. I can expect a lot from you and you can expect things from me too. We can care about the work, do it well, step up when we need to and still be able to say something isn’t working. None of that means there’s less commitment. It just asks more of the relationship.
I still like being relied upon, and that’s not going anywhere. I like knowing that if I say I’m going to do something, people believe me. I want my daughter to grow up knowing that working hard and becoming good at something can be enormously satisfying.
I just don’t want her to think that because she can carry something, she has to keep carrying it. I don’t want to be the leader who looks at someone doing everything beautifully and assumes that I don’t need to ask how she’s doing.
Maybe what makes work worth it isn’t only the work. Maybe it’s being able to do work that matters to you, with people you can rely on, without having to disappear from the rest of your life to prove that they can rely on you.