The Career Encouragement Blog

Advice For Young Women

Over the past 2 years I have been working on a research project where we are conducting focus groups with mothers who have professional careers.  We have been asking the mothers how they combine a career and a family, what resources they rely on, how the "changing landscape" in America is impacting them, and whether/how they experience flourishing.  It has been such a privilege to hear their stories - I am impressed and inspired every time I listen to a group. 

We conclude each session by asking the women what advice they would give to young women who expect to become working mothers one day.  Recently, one of our participants (we'll call her Alice) offered the two pieces of advice .  Alice is the mother of three children under 5, and a Director of Organizational Change at a Fortune 500 company. He husband is building a business.  He is having success and his income is consistent, but Alice provides the health benefits for the family. 

I was intrigued by how clear and passionate Alice was in offering the following advice (paraphrased):

1. First, no matter what you want or hope your life will be like when you're a mom, plan on having to work.  It's just unrealistic to think "Oh, I'm going to marry a man who can make enough for the whole family I'll stay home with kids."  You can end up in a great marriage to a great guy, and still have to go to work to pay the bills.  That's just the reality for most of us.  So plan on having to work, and build your career accordingly when you are young.

2. Second, get a career with a name.  This is just my perspective maybe, but it seems to me that if you ever want to be able to scale back to part-time it's just easier if you have a career with a name on it.  I am a Director of Organizational Change - what does that mean?  How can I do it part time?  My dentist just went down to part-time and she's so happy.  It just seems that it's easier for her because everyone knows what a dentist does, so it's easier to plan on how she can help her practice by doing it part-time.

Alice's advice made perfect sense to me.  I always planned on being a stay-home mom, and it just didn't work out for us.  So I feel I have scrambled more in my career that I would have if I had planned all along to be a working mom.  Also, as an independent HR consultant, I have been very blessed with part-time work that has allowed me to schedule around my family priorities and school commitments.  But I must admit that I do feel a wee bit of stress at times when people ask me what I do.  It feels a little ambiguous because I do what my clients need to have done, and I cannot always predict what that will be.  I've often thought that it would be nice to have a clear name for what I do that was immediately understandable to others - something like a "dentist" maybe?

What do you think of Alice's advice?

What is it about Sarah?

What is it about Sarah Palin that generates such rancor from other women?  I cannot count the number of columns, blog postings, and comments that have suggested that she is either a) unqualified, or b) needs to get home with her family, or the latest, c) she looks too good in her fancy new clothes.

I submit to you that the rancor has far less to do with her experience and policies (because let's face it, few of us really understand public policy to the degree that our posturing and blustering around the water cooler would suggest), and it has far more to do with the fact that she's not listening to the critics, she's not backing down, and she looks like she is having a good time on this journey. 

For some reason, many women don't seem to like seeing other women look happy.  Too many feminists draw far too much of their inspiration from women who are angry, combative, and blaming.  They are less likely to draw inspiration from women who simply chart their own course and live it well.

For the past two years I have been privileged to be part of a national research project where we are interviewing working mothers about their notions of "flourishing" and how they are able to do that in the context of their busy lives.  I say "privileged" because I have been so inspired hearing the stories of these women - how they seek out avenues to grow and use their talents, and how their families are better off even if the logistics of being a working mom can be daunting. 

One of the recurrent themes that intrigues me is the number of participants who say part of how they are able to flourish in their lives is because they rarely listen to advice.  One woman said, "People will tell you what to do.  Don't listen to them.  I will even tell you what to do. Don't listen to me.  You have to figure out what works for you."  As a result of this "no time for guilt" approach, these women are running departments, running companies, leading civic organizations, and raising their families, and - by their own definitions - flourishing. 

One woman told me, "If start getting stressed about the different messages I hear about what I should be or what I should do, I just tell myself, "Okay - there maybe some truth there that you need to pay attention to, and once you go workout, then you can take 30 minutes to think it through and decide what to do about it.'"  The result of this approach is that she looks and feels fabulous, and she doesn't spend a lot of time second guessing her own decisions.  She is happy and it shows.

These interviews have made me realize that I personally have wasted far too much time apologizing and cringing for my choices, instead of reveling in my modest successes and seeking to grow my talents and contribute even more.  And, to my shame, these interviews have also made me realize how quick I am to judge other women simply because they dared to set big goals and go for them, and they looked  happy with the results.  For some inexplicable (and frankly, lame) reason, I take their accomplishments as a personal judgment on me and get irritated.  The worst part of this counterproductive behavior?  It sets a wretched example for my 12-year old daughter when I constantly battle myself or other women about our choices instead of reveling in them - it doesn't give her permission to live her life and go for her dreams regardless of the naysayers.

Like her or not, Sarah Palin's behavior is very permission-giving for working moms.  We can choose to let that either inspire us or scare us.  Regardless, I have a feeling that whatever the outcome of this election is, Sarah Palin will not be overly concerned with how women judge her personal choices.  She will simply continue on through life with an attitude of not backing down from challenges, and enjoying herself along the way.  My commitment for the upcoming year is to do more of the same!

Invisible Mothers

Hat tip to Elizabeth at Almost Got It for posting a link to Invisible Mothers on her blog.  I'm working on a paper and this is relevant!

Warning - this is not a light read!  It's the result of an academic study conducted by Sociologists who completed a "content analysis" of motherhood myths and ideologies in popular magazines.  Here's a teaser:

Feminist scholars have explored how current motherhood ideologies ... project White, middle class mothers" experiences as universal and ideal (Collins, 1994). ...Although the conventional motherhood ideology maintains that mothers should not work outside the home, economically or financially privileged mothers continue to hire working-class women, and Women of Color, who are often mothers themselves, to perform the more arduous childcare work (BlairLoy, 2001; Chang, 1994). Thus, the construction of motherhood, particularly in the form of dominant ideologies, may have little correspondence to the lived social realities of mothers.

I'm currently working on a research project called "The Changing Landscape of American Women" where we are conducting focus groups with three populations of women: Farm and ranch women, Latina Immigrants, and women with "professional" careers.  Our site is working with the latter group.  All of the participants have at least one child living at home and work at least 30 hours per week.  Analysis of the data is ongoing, but one key theme is clear - these are not women who are looking to "opt out."  They acknowledge sometimes feeling "invisible" in places like churches and schools; but overall they are embracing the contradictions of work and family, and they aren't concerned with what the traditional media says about them.  It's been inspiring to listen to them!

Check out the entire article here and please be so bold as to leave a comment:  Tell about your experiences as an employed mother, your plans to become an employed mother, or just your observations of the phenomenon!

Returning to Work after Staying Home with Children

Brazen Careerist says you can quit work for awhile to have kids and your career will be just fine.  She makes some really great points in this posting.  I would also add two of my own:

1) Have a plan.  You don't need to have every detail worked out, but have a general idea of how you might ease back into the workforce when the time comes. Will you stay involved in professional associations?  Read trade journals?  Take a few classes?  Whatever it is, having some basic ideas about what is going on in your career will help you avoid the occasional moments of "What have I done to a perfectly good career?!" panic that plague most women that transition from career to at-home status.

2) When you do apply to return to work, be honest about your skills.  I get concerned when I see advice to at-home moms that they can sell their PTA committee experience as management experience in a job interview.  The fact is that running the PTA carnival does not equate to managing a department of full-time employees.  The former definitely requires communication, budgeting and persuasion skills.  However, it does not equate to the day in/day out 8-5 schedule of coaching direct reports on their career development goals, writing and delivering annual performance appraisals, and preparing Board reports; not to mention having the deep industry knowledge that is typically required when you move up the chain of command. 

I am NOT trying to be discouraging to at-home moms who are returning to work - I am simply saying that you will interview better if you demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of the environment you are seeking to enter, how it differs from the environment you have been in, and what qualifies you to make that transition smoothly. 

Stay focused on these elements of your career, and you can definitely enjoy your time at home knowing that your career will be just fine. 

Skills-based Pay vs. Job-based Pay

Ann Bares has a thought-provoking post on whether the predictions that companies in the future will move to skills-based pay vs. job based pay will come true.  Her conclusion is simple:

"Don't write off the job, or job-based compensation systems, quite yet."

And she notes in the comments section that:

"The idea that functional organizations will disappear from the business landscape [feeds] a lot of career misperceptions."

Ann's comments really resonated with me.  So often it seems that much of the career advice out there hypes the notion that in our world of fast/fluid companies, people and team skills are all you need to get where you want to go.  I am concerned that this advice is raising a generation of generalists who don't see the value in specialization. Time bears out that specialization combined with good people/team skills will lead to greater opportunities and greater income for most people. 

Perhaps even more importantly, a strong specialization combined with great people skills will also often lead to better options for work-life balance.  It's easier to ask for flex-time or part-time if your skills are in high demand and your reputation is positive!

What's your timeline for building a career and a family?

Careerbuilder recently posted this article on Job Goals for Every Age.  The suggested progression of goals throughout the decades of a lifetime is somewhat traditional.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - tradition becomes tradition for a reason, right?  The notion of starting off by building a positive work record, and then moving to establish yourself as a leader seems to make sense.  But the idea that mid-life crisis hits at 40 seems a bit outdated.  I am neither a boomer or a Gen-Xr - I'm smack in the middle and claim neither as my posse.  And it seems to me that those in "my generation" experienced a "mid-life" crisis in our early 30's when we were having our children and trying to figure out the work-life game. 

Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling do a great job of exposing why the traditional career path just doesn't make sense for many of us in The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream.  The authors deftly articulate how the convergence of family growth and career growth during our 30-something years is at odds with social structure in the United States.  I've read a lot on this topic, and their exposition of how converging trends in history bring us to the state we are in today is one of the best I've read.  They note that:

"What is key is that both the breadwinner/homemaker gender divide (of paid work and unpaid family care work) and the life course as a three-part sequential age divide (education, employment, and retirement) are social inventions, products of industrialization, urbanization, suburbanization, and bureaucratization.  They have become a taken-for-granted part of the landscape of American culture, shaping the institutions that sustain the American way of life."

From an individual perspective, it is easy to feel guilty or frustrated when it seems like it's impossible to fit work and family neatly into one lifetime.  This book does a great job of normalizing those frustrations.  Who wouldn't feel stressed trying to orchestrate a two-worker household in a society that is set up on the assumption that someone is always home (think school schedules, service providers, doctors office hours, etc.)? The artificial gender and age divides super-imposed on our society affect our reactions without us being aware of it most of the time.

The authors aren't able to offer solutions to the work-family conundrum at an individual level.  Those are nuanced, complex decisions that families have to make together.  But they do provide a perspective on the broader context in which we are living our lives that is useful for helping us frame our daily challenges.   It's also a perspective that helps us be more careful when reading career advice and to take articles like the one from Careerbuilder with the proverbial "grain of salt."

The Joy of Juxtaposition

A few years and one house ago I noticed a Japanese Barberry bush in an arrangement at the local nursery.  I was so captivated by it's burgundy beauty that I purchased 3 to plant on the side of my garage.  The result was "okay."  The shrub that that was so gorgeous in the middle of a planned arrangement at the nursery was unimpressive when planted beside more of itself. 

Those of you who are gardeners/designers recognized my mistake immediately - by repeating one element over and over, the features that made it beautiful/special became lost.  I neglected to juxtapose my shrubs with complementary plants that would showcase their burgundy beauty.  Without contrast my garden had no interest to hold and direct the eye.

The concept of juxtaposition is an important one for us to remember when planning our careers.  I get concerned with some career advice I read out there that suggests that the path to fulfillment is to find a way to get someone to pay you for "doing what you love."  Too often now I have seen friends and colleagues try to turn a hobby into a career and end up crashing and burning emotionally and financially.  I think it's because when they focus on "following their bliss" they end up with lives that lack the joy of juxtaposition. 

I love what Mary Pipher says in her book Shelter of Each Other:

"Most of the unhappiness in the world is caused by people who are 90 percent happy, going for that last 10 percent."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think it's such a bad thing if you don't enjoy every single minute of your work.  It's normal, and even a good thing.  The stresses of our jobs and the challenges of dealing with difficult people can all serve to create a personal showplace for the things in our lives that we love - our hobbies, our families, and our friends.  When we think of our work situation in this way, it becomes easier to accept the normal stresses of working in an organization with others who feel, think, and see things differently than we do as a natural part of life. 

I've since moved from the house where I planted the 3 barberry bushes.  Here in my new home my kitchen window overlooks my neighbor Mary's lovely, lovely yard.  In one bed she has a single barberry bush surrounded by a blue spruce, a rhododendron, and some ferns.  The effect is simply stunning - especially right after it rains.  It gives me great joy to stand at my kitchen sink and admire the contrast and interest in how her plants are arranged - and it reminds me daily to be grateful for the contrasts I get to experience in my work!

Working Moms: Whose map are you reading?

I like Kathleen Deveny's pragmatic view on the media-created "mommy wars" that add peripheral stress to the already full lives of moms with careers.  In Yummy vs. Slummy (Newsweek, August 13, 2007), the single working mother writes:

"I am bored to death with talking, hearing and reading about motherhood. I know all about the war between working mothers and women who stay at home with their children (though I see little real evidence of it). I'm fed up with snotty message-board posts... We have become Narcissist Mommies, obsessed with defending our parenting choices. Yes, motherhood is exhausting. Sure, husbands could be more helpful and bosses are always demanding something on the day your kid comes home with lice. The challenge of finding good, affordable child care is no joke. But we didn't exactly invent kids. "No one can ever understand how difficult it is," ... "But once you are a mother, you need to get over it. There's no need to whine about it."" (emphasis added)

Well said.  Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves and everyone around us is to realize that our life is what it is and to set about making the best of it and enjoying it.  Many of the popular books on motherhood/working moms acknowledge that there is no universal best way to be a mother - but they also subtly imply that somehow we should be able to define and create a "right" situation for ourselves at the individual level. In reality, our needs, decisions, and daily actions are complex and intertwined.  There will never be one right thing to do - not even on the individual level. 

Instead of treating our lives as a battleground between good and evil, we need to see ourselves as explorers on a journey .  We can scan another mom's map to get an idea of the terrain we might encounter ahead, but ultimately - as explorers - we need to create our own path.  The inevitable twists, turns, and occasional backtracking are what makes the journey uniquely ours.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Would you rather be home with your children?

I was in a Christian bookstore the other day checking out the books in their career section.  I'm not sure why I torture myself in this way - I think I do it just to remind myself that there is definitely a need for the book about spirituality and work that I have rattling around in my head.  Don't get me wrong - I enjoy going to the Christian book store and find many helpful and encouraging resources there, but I do wonder about a lot of the career advice I see in this particular venue.

Anyway, I was looking at books written for working moms when the banner across the front of a "book that shall remain unnamed" caught my eye - in bold letters it proclaimed "75% of working moms wish they could stay home with their children!!" I laughed out loud.  Why?  Because I bet 75% of working dads wish the same thing! But books advising women on how to "get back home" very often miss the point that this is an impossible goal without a meal ticket (i.e., a well-employed husband) funding the way. 

As I said in a previous posting about working moms:

When one parent stays home to take care of the domestic duties, unless a trust fund is involved, it usually necessarily implies that another parent is working harder and longer.  The net result for children is reduced relationship with the working parent and a one-sided view of how life is organized.  This can hardly be considered ideal for children.

I have no problem with the choices that couples make together regarding how they will run their family.  But I do have a problem with career advice that implies that if women just give up pedicures and lattes, they can ditch their career with the only result being a more blissful, less-stressed life.  There are many, many repercussions to giving up a career to stay home with children, not the least of which is the extra pressure placed on a spouse to bring in 100% of the income, benefits, and future retirement for the family. 

My point is this - over the 18+ years that a couple may spend raising children, the decisions they will make about who stays home, for how long, when to use daycare, etc. are complex, nuanced, and will change over time.  A headline that screams "75% of working moms wish they could stay home with their children!!" is not encouraging or instructive.  It is sensational and even inflammatory - I'm not convinced it will lead to wise discourse on successful family management. 

If you are a young couple thinking about or recently starting your family and trying to figure out the whole work-family thing, I encourage you spend time thinking about the following questions:

• As a couple, what is our philosophical perspective on work?  Is it a means to an end (i.e., a paycheck)?  Is it an expression of our God-given talents?  Is it a way to contribute to a better world?
• What messages will our choices about working/staying home send to our children?
• What do we think is the "best" way to raise children.  How did we come to this view?
• What is our view of daycare?  How did we come to this viewpoint?
• How much of our desire to stay home/keep working is driven by personal goals and how much is driven by what we feel is best for our family?  How will our personal desires/goals impact each spouse/the children?
• Who are some successful families I know and admire?  What are the different types of work/family situations they have created?  (If you think about it, you probably know people who use daycare full-time and have successful families, and you probably know people who have a parent at home full-time and have successful families - you likely know people in both situations who have unsuccessful families as well).
• How do we think our desires and goals regarding work and family might change over time and how do we propose to manage that metamorphosis?

You've probably already guessed that there are no right or wrong answers to these questions.  And this list of questions to ponder is by no means exhaustive.  I pose them here simply to illustrate that the discussion of work/stay-home deserves more complexity and nuance than it is often given. 

Happy journeying!

10 Tips for Creating Better Work-Life Fit

I love summer - warm weather, vacations, time with the family! All of this extra time and fun with the family can sometimes lead us to think about the way we are balancing work and family, and perhaps long for some changes.  These longings can prompt us to make some needed changes. However, if we're not careful, it's easy to let this desire for more family time cause us to make changes that are unnecessarily drastic. 

I've talked to clients who are practically panicked about their desire for more family time after their first summer weekend at the cabin.  They start talking about quitting their job, or starting a business so they can work from home.  While these can be great work options, without a plan in mind, they likely won't produce the results you imagine. 

When you start feeling this way, it's important to take a step back and consider what work-life balance looks like to you.  As yourself:

• How much of what I want do I have already?  (What am I grateful for?)
• How does my current work situation benefit my personal life?
• What "tweaks" can I make to improve my sense of work-life wellbeing?

Cali Yost offers 10 Tips for Creating Better Work-Life Fit on her website.  My favorites are:

#2 - Small changes in your "fit" can make a big difference.

and

#6 - Start with what you do want, not with what you don't want.

Take a look at Cali's suggestions and see which ones make sense for you!