Parenthood – the best MBA in leadership
(This article is an adapted translation of Steliana’s October 2023 TEDx Constanta talk. It was originally created in Romanian, her mother-tongue.)
School prepares us for life, internships prepare us for a trade, but nothing prepares us for the role of a parent. The role of a
parent comes without an instruction manual. It involves a lot of adaptations and negotiations. I know this because I’ve gone through this process, and today I want to share with you how the leadership principles I learned in my job have helped me become a happier and more effective parent and how parenthood taught me to become a more patient and empathetic leader.
Twelve years ago, at the end of October, I was at home holding a few days old baby in my arms. I didn’t know what to do with her. I wanted to call my mother and ask her: Why? Why didn’t you tell me how hard this is? Why didn’t you tell me how everything changes? I didn’t call, instead, I adapted. Until 14 years ago, I had never thought about children. I was an ambitious girl in college with career plans. I left my hometown at 21 and Romania at 26. At 32 years old I was already a trainer in global leadership programs, living in an apartment near Oxford Circus. I felt privileged. In this context, at the end of 2011, I gave birth to my daughter Kara. She was a perfect baby who slept through the night. But unfortunately, I was far from being a perfect mother and faced many challenges right from day one. These challenges were of different kinds and evolved from week to week, from month to month. I will list the top 3 early challenges.
Challenge 1: My time no longer belonged to me, and I had no control over my schedule. Before becoming a mother, I worked a lot but had time for sports, hairdressing, and going out with friends. In the first month, I was occupied 24 hours a day with the child. I had completely forgotten about myself.
Challenge 2: Our daughter changed from day to day and from week to week. As soon as my husband and I learned a feeding technique that seemed to work, the child and the situation changed. Today she liked mashed fruits, the next day she threw them away. As parents, we had to upgrade our parenting software, from Parent 1.0 to Parent 2.0 and so on.
Challenge 3: As a new mother, I felt vulnerable, with a lot of responsibility in a foreign country. I worried by myself, not sharing with anyone at first, not even with my husband or family. In secret, I hoped that the ‘Steliana, the new mother’ experiment would end after a few months so I could return to my life before.
After struggling in the first few months in a mixed state of bliss and frustration, waiting for a miracle that would bring my carefree life back, the day came when I had to return to work. After the first week of integration, I was sent to deliver the leadership course that I held annually alongside other colleagues at a conference Centre, 30 minutes outside London. While speaking in front of about 25 technical managers from Shell, mostly men, who had recently been promoted to team leader roles. While teaching them about ‘Influence’ and telling them that people would follow their behavior and example, not just their words, I had a moment of revelation. I stopped talking, and then it hit me. I understood that the same thing applied at home, as a new mother. My daughter watched me all day and absorbed my stress and behavior. Being a mother is not just a caregiver role that feeds and clothes the child; it’s actually a promotion: a promotion to a leadership role in family life, and you share that role with the father, in a ‘management team.
Over the next three days of training, I started noting down all the parallels between leadership principles and those of parenthood.
For the Challenge nr. 1: Lack of time for myself. I realized I needed planning and prioritization. In business, we often have a list of tasks we want to complete by the end of the day. If we only focus on those tasks and don’t allocate time for ourselves, we end up exhausted. The solution? Organizing your schedule. A good manager organizes their schedule and blocks time for reflection, thinking, and strategy, not just execution. Why not do the same at home? I planned the daily and weekly routine for the baby but also scheduled my breaks for activities for myself, like sports, reading, walking with friends, etc. I set reminders and stuck to the child’s schedule to have control over my agenda. It didn’t end the world when I said ‘no’ to some relatives and friends who wanted to visit the child at 8 p.m. Instead, I had more energy thanks to sports, and I got back to my initial shape.
For the Challenge nr. 2: The ever-changing needs of the child, I adopted the principle of awareness of the attitude towards change and agility. In the business world, things are constantly changing – employees change, the market changes, socio-economic conditions change, pandemics, wars, or financial crises happen. Some leaders complain and blame the situation, while others adopt a constructive attitude and keep their antennas open for environmental changes, getting to work. They adapt their plans with agility and experiment with solutions. We applied this idea at home. My husband and I would alert each other when we noticed we were complaining about the situation. It was a kind of constructive feedback on victim language. When we faced a new problem with the child, instead of complaining to each other, we consulted and agreed on how to adapt our feeding, sleeping, or walking strategy. Instead of wasting time on self-pity, we focused on adaptation, mutual support, and agility in action.
For the Challenge nr.3: Feeling vulnerable, responsible, and isolated as a new mother, I adopted the principle of executive coaching of Awareness and Transparency. As long as negative thoughts stay in your head, they become worries. If you make them transparent, you can work with them and channel them towards ideas or solutions.
In my work in leadership coaching, I often advise managers who internalize everything and shoulder the weight of organizational responsibility to begin journaling their personal thoughts and dilemmas daily, with honesty and vulnerability.
I applied the idea of awareness and transparency at home. After many months of searching and sleepless nights, I started keeping a journal for my dilemmas in the new role of mother. It wasn’t that simple at first; the idea of a journal seemed straightforward, but the daily execution for a month became a challenge.
What helped me stay disciplined? Goals and structure. I placed a pencil and a notebook by my bedside and set a daily target to write one A4 page every morning. Initially, that paper was where I cleared my thoughts—it was a trash can for negative thoughts. Over time, writing became constructive, moving from complaints to ideas. That journal turned into a blog, and the blog became a book. About nine years later, it grew into a global community for mother leaders.
Not everyone can afford a leadership coach, but everyone can afford a journal and a pencil. That’s all you need to start. Using these 5 leadership strategies, I somehow managed to transform the stress of the new mother role into joy, a learning opportunity, and an inspiration for other parents. Addressing the challenges of the early years as a team, together with my husband, helped us welcome the arrival of our second child, our son Thomas, with more patience and wisdom.
As a bonus, the transition to motherhood taught me something extremely important in my career as a leader and coach: patience.
If you want to own your strengths as parent and leader, Let’s get in touch.
Steliana Economu is the author of Mothers as Leaders and an executive (team) coach that helps individuals and teams own their strengths by growing their positive intelligence(PQ). If you liked this article and want to enjoy more of this type of resources do follow mothersasleaders.com
