Читать книгу The Agile Executive - Marianne Broadbent - Страница 12

6

Decide your course and exorcise the guilt thing

Avoid decision remorse

When you make your choices, the worst thing you can do is to feel bad about them, or to keep regretting them. Your demeanour can and will impact those around you.

It helps to do whatever you can to minimise any tendencies towards perfectionism and to work out what you DON’T need to do. Setting expectations of those around you, at home and at work, is also important.

When she was a business executive in NAB, Lisa Gray (now CEO of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation) made sure that matters such as parent/teacher meetings at her children’s school were clearly marked in her calendar. They were initially entered in there by her then assistant as something like ‘external business meeting’. She changed that to clearly mark it as a parent meeting at the school as she wanted to set the example that it was okay to take a few hours out from time to time to attend to family matters.

Abigail Bradshaw started her career as a military lawyer and has spent the past five years in London and Canberra as a public servant in national security portfolios. She and her husband had many discussions about how to manage their different work and family demands. In the end they hired an au pair. At first they felt this was indulgent, but they came to the view that it was the best thing they ever did for themselves and their kids. It took the stress out of the beginning and end of each day and meant more peaceful, quality family time.

Yes, you do need to have the right partner (a REALLY important choice to make). It helps too to bring your kids up to be independent and confident individuals. Our four all learned to cook and clean, to take responsibility for themselves and to contribute to the running of the household. To this day, one of our sons is the fastest and best sandwich maker around. Another always has the most beautifully ironed shirts, when this is necessary.

Perfect is the enemy of good

As Gartner’s Robin Kranich puts it, ‘You don’t have to do it all. It’s about picking your spots and knowing that perfect is the enemy of good. Your ability to give yourself permission to lower some standards so you can preserve emotional capital is a gift’.

Until after the birth of our fourth child, we did all the housework ourselves. This was not because we were particularly virtuous or enjoyed it. It was more of a financial necessity and we could manage doing it.

However, when heading back to work for that interesting full-time role in Education Headquarters, we discussed getting a cleaner in for a few hours once a week. Apart from the demands of our work and kids, I suffer from hay fever so cleaning for a couple of hours meant I wasn’t able to do anything but sneeze for the rest of the day. Besides two of the kids were now in primary school and the demands of weekend sports and music commitments were making their presence felt.

Robert wasn’t keen to have someone else come into our home, but in the end, I just organised it. It gave us back a bit more time and made my Saturdays more enjoyable. And Robert never regretted it either!

When our boys were in the later years of high school and early years of university, each of them successively took on the paid role of house cleaner. It was not a difficult job, they could do it at a time that suited and they had good supervision. Each of them did a good job.

We did offer the job to Katie when our youngest son went off to do other things, but she declined. She had already organised paying jobs that were more aligned to her career goals.

Our kids also learned a few other skills along the way. Katie attributed some of her formidable social skills to her experiences with the Australian Children’s Choir through high school.

She loved the choir and singing and wanted to join more of their specialist groups. The problem was that rehearsals were about eight kilometres from our home, with no easy public transport access. One of us could usually pick her up in the evening but getting her there by 6pm was a challenge.

The deal became that if she could find another family who could get her there, we would bring her and the other chorister home. This meant that on her first rehearsal she always had to find out where everyone lived and then negotiate some car pool arrangements.

She was good at this and I don’t think she missed any sessions in which she really wanted to participate.

Don’t make a habit of bringing home gifts

In all my travelling for work I never felt obliged to bring home a gift for our children as a matter of course. If I saw a T-shirt or a CD or something that one of our four children would love, I might buy it. But that didn’t mean I bought something for the other three.

Our kids understood that (I think!). I am aghast when women or men rush around buying presents on work trips. What this often conveys is that idea that, ‘I am away therefore I am being neglectful/not a good parent. I am buying you something to compensate for that and make me feel better’.

Often all it does is set up a situation where your kids expect to be compensated because you are doing what your role requires. My perspective was to get them accustomed to the way the world works.

Having said that, I should add that my frequent commitments to be at Gartner Headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, meant regular trips to New York City, a 45-minute commuter train ride away.

This often meant a weekend afternoon pouring over the stock at the iconic and rambling Colony Music store near Times Square. Many (many) dollars were spent in that store over the years for two children in particular—one who is the professional musician (­trumpeter) and music teacher, and the other who is a performer, music theatre actor and musician.

The Colony Music staff there were the human embodiment of what Amazon does today, ‘If you like this then you will like that’.

I would sometimes arrive with a list from the two performers in the family and the staff would be impressed with my knowledge and taste for the latest in jazz and Broadway or off-Broadway’s ‘hot’ new songwriter/musical team. Maybe that was partly why the kids were ever so understanding of their mother’s wanderings.

Our kids knew that someone might get something that Mum had seen and thought was a good idea at the time, but they would not all get presents just because I had been away doing my job.

When travelling for work, enjoy the surrounds

One of my other insights was that, if you travel, don’t rush home with things half-done. Stay another day, or whatever it takes to arrive home with the work done so you can be fully present (at least for a while) or take some downtime. Go visit a gallery or museum, walk around whatever city you are in to soak up the atmosphere, go do some shopping, watch a play or a sports game. If you do that you are more likely to be more relaxed as well as more interesting to talk to when you get home!

I have to confess that Robert was not fully aware of this policy of mine until quite recently. A couple of years ago, I led one of those lunchtime sessions with a ‘Women in Technology’ group. Also on the platform was a Human Resources Executive of one of Australia’s largest companies. After I made my comments about the value of taking some downtime, she came up to me to thank me for the advice and told me she was going back to the office to redo her schedule for her London trip the following week to include an extra day out.

She ran into Robert and me in the foyer at an event a little while later, where she commented to Robert that he was clearly a very understanding person. I then had a little bit of explaining to do.

As a friend of mind is fond of saying, ‘Not everyone has to know everything all the time’.

The caveat: we each have different drivers, different comfort levels

Each of us is different. My purpose here is to illustrate how we deal with ourselves, using some of my journey, and that of some other women, to provide context and learnings.

I don’t expect others to copy the way I have approached things, and I expect not many would want to!

As Jody Evans indicated, there is no one right way. We each find ourselves in different circumstances, we were brought up differently, have varied experiences and different levels of tolerance for ambiguity and stress. What is really important is for each of us to understand our own motivations and strengths and play to those.

The leading Company Chairman and Director, Elizabeth Proust put it this way, ‘Women need to work with each other, build great networks, take a few career risks, and also ensure that at least one domestic skill is a major deficiency. Mine is cooking. I don’t and won’t cook’.