Important skills and lessons can be learned anywhere at any time, and we know that life lessons – those taught to us through personal experience or challenges rather than from a book or teacher – are often the most important and valuable.
Being a mother is one of those life lessons that lends itself to wonderfully fabulous skills that become transferable to a workplace setting, particularly one with leadership roles. Many people reflect on their childhood and call their mothers heroes for good reason. Regardless of whether they were working moms or stay-at-home moms, they took on so many demanding roles (caretaker, role model, confidant, disciplinarian, chef, cleaner) that were often not acknowledged at the time, and they would do this in stride.
Leadership is not just about being the bull in the boardroom – it’s about communication, compassion, and patience, and mothers have a great tendency to exhibit these qualities, lending them to become great leaders in the workplace. From CEOs to teachers and students of high-level courses like an online PhD in nursing, mothers know how to take on multiple responsibilities, manage their time well, and communicate effectively.
Communication
Parenting is all about how you communicate with your child. Positive communication between a mother and child requires the parent to pay attention, respect a child’s thoughts and feelings, and managing the tone of your voice. Mothers who are able to do this will help their child build confidence, self-esteem, and happiness, as well as encourage them to be the best they can.
Using the exact same techniques, good managers are also excellent communicators who work to encourage and support their employees. Despite the different relationship types between a mother and child, and a leader and employee, communication remains a core component of an effective relationship, and the skills a mother has gained doing this are transferable to the office.
Negotiation
Mothers are also excellent negotiators. Whether its promoting peace between two fighting siblings, bartering a chore schedule, or reviewing bedtime, mothers are the absolute masters of the art. These negotiation skills are also invaluable in the workplace, where leaders often need to utilize this skill to navigate contracts, apply for additional resources, and work cross-functionally with other teams within a business on a single project.
Emotional Intelligence
Mothers are often the ones who teach us how to how to express our feelings, as well as how to understand and share the feelings of others. Teaching and displaying empathy is important for leaders to better relate to their team and their issues, to help inspire loyalty, and to foster a more productive and positive team environment.
Compassion
Critical thinking and sound logic are often two of the key traits businesses want in leaders when it comes to decision-making. Using compassion while decision-making is far less spoken about, but no less important. Mothers are inherently compassionate, and this ability to see both challenges and opportunities with a lens that sits beyond just ‘rational thinking’ and instead also focuses on the human side of the issue is an incredibly powerful tool that is often unconsidered.
Patience
Lord knows a mother is patient. While repetition is essential for early childhood development, it can become wearing for the parent at the other end of it who has helped count to twenty half a dozen times or explained how to spell “dog” for the umpteenth time. The benefit of learning this kind of patience, though, is that a mother who is also a leader in the workplace can stay calm under extreme pressure or during tricky conversations and will likely be able to keep everyone on board and on track without high levels of frustration creeping in.
Time Management
Effective time management is the backbone of any mother’s day. Juggling multiple demands has become second nature to them. From managing doctor appointments to meal prepping, carpooling to after-school activities, grocery shopping to walking the dog, they do it all. When leading others at work, the ability to prioritize and manage time efficiently is also vital to create a hard-working team whose output is always top-notch. Mothers who have had plenty of practice time managing at home will have no problem excelling at it in the workplace.
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