When daughters take over

January 15, 2014

Lady Mary Crawley, played by Michelle Dockery

This morning I had a conversation with Amy Katz, who heads the consultancy Daughters in Charge. I came across her by accident when I was on the 85 Broads site last week filling out my profile details. I spotted her company name and immediately gravitated towards it. I’ve done various stories on family businesses over the years, including one in 2012 on Generation Y business owners who hire their parents (in my interviewees’ case, it was their mothers who joined the company). But I’d never thought much about what happens when a daughter, rather than a son, steps into the family business, most often run by her dad.

If you’re one of those daughters, or if you know someone who is, I’d love to hear from you, because I’m planning a future show on this topic.

Amy says various issues can crop up when a daughter joins the family firm:

• Some fathers alternate between being extremely protective of their little girls and wanting them to be gung-ho about the business. So on one hand they encourage their daughters to be at the company all hours, learning everything they possibly can and putting it into practice. But when the daughter gets pregnant, Dad becomes highly traditional and feels she should leave work to raise her family – something he would never suggest to his son if the son’s wife or partner had a baby.

• Some parents use the ‘don’t call me Dad’ tactic – they want a daughter to get used to calling them by their first name at work. Amy says this kind of approach can inhibit a lot of women from being able to develop a style of their own at the office. This is often particularly tough for women in a male-dominated environment. 

• Managing authority can be tricky for the daughter walking into the family business. She’s known many of the employees (often men) since she was a kid. Now she may have power over a lot of them. Discovering what kind of leadership style is comfortable for her, and them, is a challenge.
  
  Lady Mary of PBS’s Downton Abbey (above) is dealing with some of this at the moment. Her father doesn’t want her pretty head bothered with matters of business related to the family's vast estate, even though she has ideas about how to improve things. Attitudes have changed considerably since the early 1920s - today, after all, fathers are actually welcoming their daughters into the family firm. But old perceptions about women’s roles and demeanor are still lurking in most workplaces - and in the brains of many parents.

The curse of career comparison

January 13, 2014

Well, you could say both careers were related to those particular assets

I began my newsletter today by admitting that I'm finding it tough to get back into the swing of things this month. I've been feeling sluggish, unmotivated, like I'm not quite strong enough to set in motion the heavy wheels of machinery that make up my work life. These wheels came to an all but complete halt over the Christmas/New Year break. They needed to, as I was exhausted. But as someone who works for herself and is usually pretty driven, I'm feeling bad that my usual motivation is not rushing back in the new year.

As I've looked around me over the past week I've come across plenty of people who seem to be thoroughly motivated, have work raining down on them, people who are, in short, doing very well for themselves. Inevitably, I compare myself, and that results in me doing myself down even more ("What is wrong with you?"). So I was glad to come across this piece today called Escaping the Comparison Loop - it's by Lauren Bacon, who has appeared on a past show and writes a thoughful blog at LaurenBacon.com. She points out far more eloquently than I could (there you go - comparison in action) that by constantly ranking ourselves next to other people we are: 

• Losing sight of our own priorities and values
• Sucking away our productivity
• Making a world where if one person is excellent at something - the person we envy - then there's no room for anyone else to be good at it too (which is false)
• Making other people into 'gurus' when they're actually human beings like the rest of us
• Missing the fact that when we look down on - or up to - someone else, it may be because they're doing something we don't dare to do ourselves. Lauren uses the example of someone she used to work with who was an avid self-promoter - an office experience I can relate to. She hated it (as did I), but ultimately realized the problem was her, not him (again, ditto). She didn't have the guts to go all out and talk about herself the way he did, didn't think she was worthy enough to merit the attention and questioned what people would think of her if she did show off a bit - all common female reactions to the idea of letting others know about our achievements. 

This may seem petty, but I believe a lot of these small things can add up and sap our energy over the long term, making us less effective overall, and certainly less happy.

Lauren and Tanya Geisler, who did a TED talk on impostor syndrome, another largely female affliction, are soon launching a workshop on how to quash your inner comparison freak and get out of that mindset altogether.

I'd love to know whether women are more apt to compare ourselves with others than men. I suspect so, but have no proof.  

New year, new project?

December 31, 2013

“Discerning the difference between good, hard work and burdensome, draining toil (that ends up fruitless and misery-making) is key to bringing into being what you long for most.” – Kathy Caprino

We’re on the cusp of a new year, and that means we’re already seeing a slew of headlines of the ‘7 Ways to a New You!’ or ‘5 Ways to Achieve Success in the New Year!’ variety. We all need a bit of inspiration at the start of a new year. But as time goes by you become more and more aware that real, messy life isn’t as simple as a series of bullet points.

So I was really pleased when just before Christmas I discovered this video (below) by career coach Kathy Caprino, who some of you will remember from my fifteenth show, Do We Have to Fit In? In the video Kathy answers a reader's question about why her passion project, a travel blog, is proving so difficult. She was thrilled to start this on-the-side work, and is disappointed to find the going - coming up with content, building readership, etc. - incredibly tough.

Kathy's response resonated with me because it emphasizes that actually, achieving anything of worth in the world is hard. There are no five bullet points to success. This isn’t something we hear that much in western culture, where instant gratification and instant results are celebrated. But although we probably all know someone who appears to have achieved overnight success, it’s likely that a) it wasn’t instant at all or b) they were extremely lucky, benefiting from a combination of connections and serendipity. Most of us won’t fit into either of those categories. I’m in exactly the same situation as Kathy's correspondent with what I do with The Broad Experience. It requires an enormous amount of work to do the interviews and cut the tape and put it all together, not to mention the challenge of building the audience, and I don't yet receive any compensation for all this (which I do on top of other stuff). I regulary experience moments of exasperation where I ask myself, “Am I crazy to be doing this?” Then I get an email or message from a listener talking about how much they get out of the show and I stick with my gut, which tells me I am onto something. I'm listing some pointers on this topic below for anyone who is thinking about or has already branched out with their own, risky project, only to realize after months of work and seemingly little reward, God, it’s tough out there. Many of these come from Kathy's video.

• Creating something worthwhile is hard work. It just is. We hear far too much about passion fueling projects or new businesses, but passion does not make your business or project successful. People will not come just because you build it. Consistent effort is required. Go into your project expecting that. And it may take a lot (lot) longer than you expected to get the results you were hoping for. Be realistic. So much of what we see in the media sets us up for unrealistic expectations. 

• We all want things to fall in our laps because we think we've seen this happen to someone else we know, or someone we've heard about. Forget it. It probably didn't happen to them either. 

• Kathy emphasizes "essence versus form". She asks the woman who wrote to her if this travel blog of hers is the right form in which to present her passion for travel - maybe there's something else she could be doing that would let her exercise her love of travel but that wouldn't be so draining.

• Which brings me to a vital point Kathy makes about all of this. If the work feels like a slog, but one that is bringing you little pleasure or giving you no energy, you need to re-think what you're doing. If, on the other hand, you're like me, and the work you're doing energizes you and keeps you going, despite how hard it is, keep at it. Keeping going requires a combination of hard work, persistence, and guts.

 Happy New Year. 

Mogul, Mom, and Maid

December 8, 2013

"My house is dirty. While my husband has the time to clean, he has no interest. And I have neither the time nor the interest." - Liz O'Donnell

The other week I interviewed Liz O'Donnell, proprietor of the blog Hello Ladies and author of the new book, Mogul, Mom & Maid. Liz's book is one of quite a few coming out on women and work, and how women's home lives interfere with their work lives, yet it was in the works long before she or any of us knew about Lean In. Liz is the sole breadwinner in her family - her husband is the at-home parent to their two kids - and she wrote the book because while having a drink with a (working) mom friend one day, she was amazed to hear the woman say that her husband "complained if he got back from work and the kitchen was a mess." Since Liz and her husband were happily living non-traditional gender roles, she hadn't realized '50s norms still popped up elsewhere in her circle. For the book, she talked to scores of women about their lives and how they navigated the messy intersection of career and family.

My next show will feature Liz on why it's still far from an ideal world for American working mothers - and to some extent parents - and what we can do about it. Anyone who listens to the show or reads this blog knows how layered and complicated this topic is - Liz's book brings that home by detailing the stories of multiple women managing homes, careers, families and school schedules.

In the meantime, here are a few takeaways.

Schools need to catch up to modern life. Despite the fact her children's school is well aware she's at work in Boston while her husband is at home in the suburbs, if one of her kids is sick, the school calls her. Also, the scheduling drives her and many other parents nuts. Many schools plan events at short notice, meaning working parents often can't cancel work commitments to attend.

Women still do more housework than men and it eats their time at home. Often, women complain their spouse 'just doesn't see' the mess. Liz suggests women loosen up when it comes to cleanliness if they want to maintain some semblance of fun and/or sanity at night and at the weekends. She claims she and her husband haven't made their bed for years. Try dropping some 'must-do' domestic task for a week, she urges, and see how things go. You may get used to it, and in doing so, gain back some precious time.

Women are still, in general, the ones doing all the thinking about the house and the kids, and that affects their ability to be fully 'on' at work, because it sucks their mental energy. Even if their husband is a 'hands-on father', in the case of almost every woman Liz spoke to for the book, the couple defaulted to traditional gender roles when it came to worrying: the women were the ones whose headspace was taken up thinking about doctors' appointments, travel arrangements, furniture deliveries, etc.  Some of this, again, may happen because women either consciously or unconsciously see it as their role to handle all this domestic stuff. But surely it's worth having a conversation with a spouse about sharing some of this under-the-radar yet time-sucking cognitive space?

Motherhood is not necessarily a woman's most important job. "That phrase crops up in the media" all the time, says Liz, "You even have the president saying it. And I don’t buy it, for a number of reasons. One reason [if we're going to think this at all] is that we have to shift from 'motherhood' to think that parenting is most important job."

You'll hear more from Liz in the show coming out on December 15th.