Intro to Chief Mom Officer

I'm two weeks into my first C-Suite role...!

I just started the hardest job in the world.

Two weeks ago, I became Mom to a hungry, opinionated little lady named Eva (shout-out to postpartum insomnia for fueling this post!).

In my professional role as a leadership advisor and executive coach, I help my corporate and private equity clients articulate what their C-Suite leaders need to deliver in the next three to five years (the scorecard¹) as a tool for making more informed decisions on hiring and developing talent. All this to say – I’m pretty familiar with ‘big, important jobs.’

Yet when you compare the job of Mom to the most complex C-suite role, it stands up well. The role of Mom is higher stakes (lives vs. profits), more ambiguous (there is no scorecard!²), and it has a much longer time horizon (three to five years in role? Ha! Try 18 years, with frequent but unpredictable stints in active management and a lifelong mandatory board seat).

I’ve always been acutely aware of the tradeoffs between career and family, having seen them play out personally and with my clients. At the same time, in my (admittedly very brief) time as a parent, I’ve found my business background to be an asset. One of my business heroes, Clay Christensen, was the mastermind behind a Harvard Business School class called “Building and Sustaining Successful Enterprises,” known as BSSE. On the last day of class, he would ask his students to apply the business frameworks they learned over the course of the semester to their personal lives. His book How Will You Measure Your Life?³ synthesizes the insights he gathered from those sessions over many years.

I’ve realized that I’m using this same concept in parenting. The decisions moms must make are endless. The accumulated learnings from my ten years in strategy consulting, three years in leadership advisory, and yes, one glorious semester in Clay Christensen’s BSSE course(!)⁴, have helped me navigate this complexity.

Several things have become clear to me in my first two weeks as Mom:

• I’m the boss now.⁵ I may not be the top boss anywhere else in my life, but with my daughter, the buck stops with me. I am fully on the hook for making the best decisions I can on her behalf, which is equally daunting and empowering.

• I’m not an expert. This is my first baby. I acknowledge that I am way out of my depth here. However, I’m committed to ramping up quickly and bringing curiosity, openness and tenacity to the challenge.

• Not everyone thinks the same way. When my doula visited me at home for a post-birth check-in, we got to chatting and she observed (out loud) that my brain “works differently.” (Really, how so? Tell me more…⁶) Apparently, the extent to which I rely on pragmatism and cold, hard logic – even during such an emotional time – is different from her other clients.

• I can’t do this alone. I have already sought and received help from so many people on my journey. Family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, medical professionals, my doula… the list goes on and will only continue to get longer over time.

At the end of the day, while I am laughably unqualified to offer parenting advice (see “The Fine Print” below), I am decently qualified to share my personal perspective on the journey that is motherhood, and some of the tools I have found helpful.

I’m a Chief Mom Officer now. It’s serious business, folks.

~

What do you wish you’d known 2 weeks into being a parent? I’m all ears :)

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Digressions:

1. The scorecard method used by ghSMART is detailed in Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s Who. I highly recommend reading the full book, particularly if you’re someone who makes talent decisions. But if you’re not up for it at this point, you can opt for a short video by Geoff Smart himself here.

2. There is no single, universally accepted scorecard, that is. Scorecards prove invaluable to help employees focus on what matters and tactically, provide a structure for ongoing reflection and feedback. Every Mom should consider creating a scorecard for herself that reflects her and her child’s unique circumstances, needs, and preferences and use as a tool for ongoing accountability.

3. Again, I highly recommend the full book of How Will You Measure Your Life? (it’s on my annual reading list), but if you’re short on time, watching his Ted talk is a good first step. Start it ~4 min 12 seconds in if you want to skip his academic credentialing up front. (I’m a huge Clay fan and even I find this part unnecessarily drawn out.) The TLDR version: his business theories are uniquely helpful because they have shown causation vs. correlation over time. All the more reason we can feel good about applying them to parenting.

4. Note: It’s very hard to get into the session that Clay himself teaches, so I took the course with another professor. That said, Clay guest taught the last day of class just as he describes in his book and it was a business nerd’s dream come true.

5. I actually consider myself to be co-boss with my husband, but for simplification purposes, let’s table that for now.

6. ghSMART 101: you come across as more curious and open (and less judgmental!) when you avoid “why” questions. Opt instead for “what? how? tell me more…!” This is particularly important when you’re probing on something that may be uncomfortable for the other person to share.

 The Fine Print:

• My sample size is 1. My parenting decisions and outcomes are my own.  They are not tested or proven beyond Eva’s unique preferences and quirks. With the notable exceptions of Clay Christensen and parenting books, the frameworks I use are not specifically endorsed by the authors to be applied to parenting. My decisions for Eva will not be right for everyone. My intention in sharing my specific stories is to make the framework and process I’ve used more tangible. Tactically, the best way to leverage this type of content:

1.       First, apply your own logic and life experience to pressure test the framework itself.  Add anything I’ve left out, delete anything that doesn’t apply to you, and modify liberally to align with your own sensibilities.

2.       Input your own assumptions (your family’s unique values, circumstances, and preferences) into the modified framework to inform the right decision for you.

3.       Sense check, sense check, sense check. In business and in life, never blindly trust the output of an equation.

• Amazon assures me that if you use the links I’ve shared to purchase any of these resources, I will receive some sort of commission. I'm skeptical, TBH, but rest assured that any funds that do come my way will be directly routed to Eva’s 529 plan.

• I am not a doctor. Act (or don’t!) accordingly.