Moms are the best managers because parenthood is one of the most basic forms of leadership. Tons of patience, empathy, planning, organising, innovation, and negotiation gets added to your personality with a child in your life.
This heightened multitasking ability helps mothers in dealing with work issues and multiple deadlines with more confidence and ease thus making them efficient managers and better leaders.
As cliched as it may sound, being a mother is a full-time job and as soon as you become a mother you metamorph into a more well-rounded individual, your perspective towards a lot of things, people and situations change. You become more aware of your actions and feelings of those around you. Call it maternal instinct or just increased observational skills, every mother is reborn with the child. Due to this massive change in personal lives mothers go through a transitional change in their professional lives too!
Here’s why mothers make better supervisors to their teams:
1. The Patient Multitasker
Tons of patience gets added to your personality with a child in your life. Suddenly you have two job titles – one is the official job title and the other of being the “Chief Chaos Coordinator”. From handling tantrums to fights between your children to coming home to a messy house with toys scattered all over the place after a hard day’s work mothers get used to handling chaotic situations with tolerance.
Have you ever cleared your mails in the kitchen while cooking with your toddler balancing in one arm? Ask a working mother she would have done much more! This heightened patience and multitasking ability helps mothers in dealing with work issues and multiple deadlines with more confidence and ease because mothers are used to dealing with much worse!
2. Heightened Empathy
For becoming a good manager you need empathy more than sympathy within you, so as to understand what the team members may be going through. Becoming a mother increases your empathy factor by many folds since the maternal instinct takes over.
Understanding why a team member wants to leave early for their kids dentist appointment or come in late because it’s their child’s first day at playschool becomes much more easier for a manager who is also a working mother simply because she has been on the other side of the fence and knows exactly why everyone deserves the best chance of balancing family and feelings with meetings and deadlines.
3. Plan B Expert
Mothers are experts in having backup options ready and by backup, I don’t just mean plan B sometimes mothers have a plan C and D as well just in case the need arises. As a mother, you don’t leave the house without two sets of clothing for your child, at least three different eats and four of the child’s favourite toys even if you are going to the store to finish errands.
This comes as a result of a series of learnings that come from being a mother, it becomes a lifestyle more than a habit gradually. Working mothers do not panic in a crisis, they try to make the best of a herculean problem because they are already prepared for rains on a bright and sunny day.
4. Negotiation Expert
Remember the days when your mother negotiated with you on simple joys of life such as eating vegetables in exchange for 15 minutes of extra playtime or you completing your homework in exchange for watching your favourite cartoon on television? Sometimes she was strict, sometimes she was soft but she got what she wanted out of you in the end. Mothers know how to get work done by hook or by crook.
Similarly, at the workplace, a working mother knows exactly what technique of negotiation will work on each member of the team whether it is sternness, appreciation or encouragement or a combination of all three. She knows what will deliver the results.
5. Master Innovators
Mothers are at their creative best when it comes to handling their children. From hiding broccoli in a pizza to make the best out of waste for their children’s fancy dress competitions, mothers know how to innovate while thinking creatively. This creativity works wonderfully well in a professional setting, mothers get so used to working with limited resources that being resourceful while thinking out of the box comes naturally to them.
Takeaway
Being a mother and having a job is like having two full-time jobs, however, you get paid for just one. As they say, the world thinks from their brains but mothers think from their hearts. A working mother can be a multitasker, a problem solver, a crisis coordinator or even an agony aunt, in short, a superwoman with superhuman qualities! Mothers have a 360-degree view of their surroundings and they mould their personalities to best suit the situation making them ideal supervisors and managers.
