Leadership Begins at Home

If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything
by Ann Crittenden

The acclaimed author of The Price of Motherhood blows away the myth that the job of raising children is not "real" work.

After reading numerous bestselling management books, Ann Crittenden noticed that the advice was shockingly similar to that found in parenting books. After more than one hundred interviews, Ann also discovered that everyone felt the skills they learned as parents made them better, more effective managers and workers. Illustrating the countless lessons learned from raising a child that are directly applicable to the workplace, with insight from prominent women in a number of fields, Crittenden discusses how child-rearing:

• Calls for multitasking and sharpens focus in the midst of constant distractions

• Enhances interpersonal skills, including win-win negotiation

• Develops the ability to motivate and empower others

• Requires a keen sense of fair play and integrity

Full of positive, real-life stories and exploring whether corporate culture has begun to recognize the value of parenting, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything is a groundbreaking book that validates what working mothers have known all along.

When a two-year-old throws a tantrum in the grocery store, or a teenager yells "I hate you!" parents often think, "If I can get through this, I can handle anything."

Most mothers and fathers know in their bones that raising a child is the hardest job they've ever had. And, even if child-rearing is not that difficult for some, it is certainly comparable to dealing with adults, whether they are superiors, clients, coworkers, employees, or thin-skinned friends. Anyone who has learned how to comfort a troublesome toddler, soothe the feelings of a sullen teenager, or managed the complex challenges of a fractious household can just as readily smooth the boss's ruffled feathers, handle crises, juggle several urgent matters at once, motivate the team, and survive the most Byzantine office intrigues.

Leadership begins at home.

Women have always known this on some level. For eons, they have understood that the skills, the organization, and the sheer character it takes to manage a family are relevant to coping with other challenges in life. "It's obvious that the skills of parenting cross over into business," says Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. "People are people, and the same basic principles apply."

As long as mothers remained confined to a domestic ghetto this insight could be ignored, dismissed, or chuckled over. The subversive maternal insight that childish behavior often suspiciously resembles the behavior of grown men in groups could be treated as a joke. Now that women have risen in the professions, business, and politics, however, they can see for themselves that conscientious parenting is one of life's great credentials. They recognize that the considerable skills they practice at home are transferable to the workplace. At long last, that truth is coming out of the closet.

Two recent surveys of successful female managers have confirmed, almost by accident, that parenting teaches transferable skills. A survey of sixty-one white, well-educated female managers by the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, looked at whether multiple life roles enhanced or detracted from effectiveness at work. The women reported that all private roles enhanced their professional performance, but mothering was by far the most frequently cited. Some of the women had even been told by coworkers that they were much better managers after they had children. "Get a life!" in other words, may be sound career advice.

Another study by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women of sixty prominent female leaders, including CEOs, college presidents, lawyers, doctors, and writers, also found that virtually all those who had children thought that being a mother had made them better executives. The authors were surprised by this unexpected finding. Having children, the women reported, had been an excellent training ground for leadership. "If you can manage a group of small children, you can manage a group of bureaucrats. It's almost the same process," said one of the women.

Interestingly, the younger leaders were more apt to see child-rearing as a relevant credential than the older generation of female executives, who had often had to behave like a man in order to get ahead in a man's world. Nearly half those age forty-five or younger viewed the maternal role as a preparation for leadership, compared with only 10 percent of older women. "It's a sign of their comfort with motherhood," said Sumru Erkut, author of the study. "In the past, women checked their womanhood at the door."

Surveys like this don't prove a causal link between being a parent and being a better manager. They may simply reflect the supermom phenomenon: Highly energetic and talented women who become successful also tend to take on multiple life roles, including motherhood. The fact remains that many competent mothers are convinced that the practice of parenting contributes to a higher performance at work. Nancy Drozdow, a management consultant with the Center for Applied Research in Philadelphia, and a mother and stepmother, sums it up neatly: "People become better managers when they take their parenting seriously."

Intriguingly, new brain research suggests that there may actually be a genetic basis for a relationship between nurturing and certain competencies. A recent study done on mice by two Virginia neuroscientists found that hormones released during pregnancy and nursing enrich parts of the brain involved in learning and memory. Moreover, these positive changes appear to be permanent. The news prompted headlines that PREGNANCY MAY MAKE YOU SMARTER.

These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that pregnancy turns women inward and dulls their analytical skills. Clearly, that antiquated assumption makes no evolutionary sense. We know that human infants require more intensive care, for a much longer period of time, than the offspring of other mammals. We also know that the preponderance of this care has always been provided by females. It would be logical to assume that millions of years of evolutionary selection pressures may have given the human female brain certain cognitive advantages that facilitate the survival of offspring - such as the ability to remember and keep multiple tasks in focus simultaneously, the ability to read nonverbal danger signals, and a certain fearlessness when danger threatens. Research on how reproductive roles have shaped our brains, particularly the female brain, is still in its infancy. As this research is extended from mice to social primates, we may discover fascinating confirmation that responsibility for a child stimulates capabilities in parents that were never before imagined.

This book is based primarily on my own extensive interviews with more than 100 prominent mothers and fathers who have been the primary caregivers in their family. I talked with people who have been active, involved parents as well as successful in business, law, politics, diplomacy, academia, the entertainment industry, and the nonprofit world. (I tried to avoid interviewing the kind of parents described in the New Yorker cartoon showing two toddlers being wheeled in their strollers by nannies, as one tot says to the other: "My parents are the same way. Lots of ostentatious child-rearing, very little direct nurturing.") I interviewed far more women than men, simply because the daily work of child-rearing still remains an overwhelmingly female occupation. In 2002, for example, 11 million children had stay-at-home mothers and 189,000 had stay-at-home dads.6 Single mothers greatly outnumber single fathers (16.5 million vs. 3.3 million), and among married parents, mothers spend at least three times as much time on child care as fathers, and even more than that in the early years.

What's more, the multifaceted individuals who have been conscientious, hands-on parents and successful professionally also tend to be women. Of 1,200 executives interviewed by the Families and Work Institute in 2002, an almost equal percentage of men and women had children (79 percent of the women, 77 percent of the men). But 75 percent of the men had stay-at-home wives, compared with only a handful of the women.8 So, the great majority of the people who are in a position to compare the work of child-rearing with professional work are women.

I asked these people directly whether they thought they had learned valuable management skills from motherhood. Only a handful failed to see a connection. Here are a few typical comments.

• "Both parenting and managing adults require that you accept people for who they are, find out what they are good at, coach them on how to do their best, support them when they need help, and get out of their way when they don't." Pamela Thomas-Graham, CEO, CNBC.

• "Running a large organization is pretty darn close to running a kindergarten." Louise Francesconi, who manages 11,000 people as head of Raytheon's Missile Systems Division, which supplied the laser-guided bombs used against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

• "I'm concerned about all this commentary that you cannot have children if you're a successful executive. Nonsense! You're a better executive if you have kids!" Shelly Lazarus, chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

• "I'm a better manager because I'm a parent, not in spite of being a parent." Deb Henretta, president, Global Baby Products, Proctor & Gamble, and, with Lazarus and Francesconi, one of Fortune magazine's top fifty women in business.

• "I learned more about managing my subordinates and my su- periors from raising my children than from any management course.... Two-year-olds taught me a lot about customer service, managing by objectives, and utilizing a system of rewards to improve performance. Women who have managed toddlers can manage just about any crisis situation." Geraldine Laybourne, chairman and chief executive of Oxygen Media.

• "There is no better career preparation than parenthood." Shirley Strum Kenny, president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and mother of five.

• "When you need to lead people, when you need to organize people, there's probably not a skill set better than what the average mother knows at home. The same lessons you yell at your ten-year-old in a twenty-four-hour period are probably the same lessons you ought to apply in the business world." Ann Moore, chairman of Time Inc. (Moore's four basic rules: no whining; listen to the teacher; do your homework; and always remember to say thank you.)

Copyright © 2005 Ann Crittenden

About the Author

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist and the author of three previous books, including The Price of Motherhood, a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other national publications. She lectures before dozens of diverse organizations each year and is on the board of the International Center for Research on Women.