"I'm not your mother!"
Why leadership sometimes feels like babysitting, and why that’s OK.
My two sons love to play “I’m better than you!” Their sibling rivalry extends to every corner of life – they constantly compare who is taller, stronger, better at school, sports, music, fashion, gaming. I once caught my older son trying to stamp on his baby brother when he was just a few months old. Even now they are teenagers, verbal jousting often leads to physical blows. They call on me to act as referee, although they claim to enjoy the constant teasing and wrestling.
The fighting at home used to make me less tolerant of workplace conflict. When I was in charge of the Reuters offices in Amsterdam and Zurich, I felt like the “bickering brothers” had followed me into the office. Supposedly sophisticated journalists had tantrums that matched those of my toddlers. Team members came to me to complain about fights and petty rivalries with colleagues, plus a host of personal problems.
I often had to suppress the urge to say: “I’m not your mother!” Some days I felt I had to handle enough childish behaviour from my kids. I didn’t want to manage it in my team too. I hear the same frustration in my coaching and leadership courses. Managers often tell me: “I don’t want to be a babysitter. Why can’t they just grow up?”
Every leader, whatever their gender, faces demands to do some kind of “mothering”. Some managers think that this often invisible, “emotional labour” can be outsourced to HR – or to more supportive colleagues (often women) – so they can get on with the “real work”. In a newsroom, an editor might believe that their main responsibility is producing journalism or devising strategy, rather than worrying about issues like team dynamics, career development or mental health.
Kim Scott, a former tech executive, says they are wrong.
“This is not babysitting. It’s called management and it’s your job!” she writes in her book Radical Candor. “Emotional labour is not just part of the job. It’s the key to being a good boss.”
I have come to realise that my experience of domestic conflict resolution made me a better manager, even though juggling both at the same time was draining.
Where are the office “fathers”?
Tamu Thomas, a workplace coach, recently went viral when she declared that women are sick of doing more of this work than men. “Women are still expected to hold the emotional weight, the logistics, the people, and the outcomes. Silently. Skilfully. Without complaint,” she said.
“Men who were never taught to carry the emotional or logistical weight of adult life are now leading teams, managing departments, founding companies and shaping workplace culture. We don’t want to be the mothers of the workplace!”
Tamu’s post got me thinking. In the work I do around empathetic leadership and mental health in journalism, the people who volunteer to support their colleagues, and who turn up at conferences and workshops on these topics are predominantly women. But men are increasingly speaking up on the issue.
And I have worked with many men who are much more emotionally aware than some of my women bosses. In fact, at leadership courses I run, plenty of men describe themselves as the “integrators” in their organisations, while many women prefer to be “pioneers” or “drivers”, labels used to describe working styles in this Deloitte model.
Deloitte defines “integrators” as empathetic, diplomatic and relationship oriented and says they might find it hard to work with “drivers”, who are technical, quantitative and logical. Then there are the “pioneers” who are outgoing, spontaneous and adaptable. Drivers and pioneers are most likely to be promoted to top leadership positions, Deloitte says. The last group are the “guardians” who are practical, detail-oriented, and reserved: they make sure everybody sticks to the rules and the deadlines.
Gender expectations
Of course, most of us are a mixture of these archetypes and the best teams needs a good balance of styles. But one thing is clear: there are strong social expectations on women to play the integrator role, at home and at work, expectations that many of us also internalise without realising it. On the other hand, male leaders are often expected to focus on excellence rather than empathy.
A Deloitte study of top executives found women and men in the C-suite were as likely to be Pioneers, but more female executives were Integrators than Drivers, and a much higher proportion of male executives were Drivers than Integrators.
I usually prefer the integrator role, but I wonder how much of that is due to gendered conditioning. I also gravitate to the creativity of the pioneer and I had to adopt more of a “driver” ethos to succeed in the high-pressure world of news agency journalism.
A senior man at a media organisation told me that for years he had resisted his own preference to be a caring manager due to a macho culture that prioritised innovation and results, bringing him to the brink of burnout.
Meanwhile, one woman manager I know likes to get things done rather than spend a lot of time on hand-holding, but says she feels judged by her empathetic male director who suggests she should be more patient and caring of staff.
And another woman executive, who describes herself as an integrator, chafes when her pioneering male boss wants to focus on ideas and leave her to clear up the emotional and logistical messes he leaves behind.
Women leaders face a classic double bind – if they focus on results rather than people, they are not considered likeable, but if they play the integrator role, they are not taken as seriously as men, as
describes in The Authority Gap.
My top tips on how to apply these ideas:
- Train managers to recognise their own preferred styles and those of their team members and boss.
- Make sure leadership teams have a mixture of styles. Don’t just promote the pioneer or driver and assume an integrator or guardian will be happy to play a supporting role.
- Reward invisible – and usually underappreciated - care work in organisations, often done more by women, for example by setting up peer networks to support staff.
- Challenge the likeability trap – women who don’t conform to social norms around mothering can make great leaders but will have to steel themselves for constant criticism – possibly also from themselves.
- Challenge stereotypes about male leadership styles too – promote your empathetic men.
While my sons still love to fight, there is one thing the brothers do agree on: their mother is a bit too keen on models like the one from Deloitte that put people into boxes. But I know they can help us understand each other and defuse potential conflict so I will be sharing more of them in future newsletters. And I guess I got something right on the parenting despite all the conflict. My oldest son recently made me a card listing four types of parent: Boring, Neglectful, Aggravated or Cool.
What I am reading:
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - I inhaled this story in a day. It features two millennials living the hedonistic hipster dream of Berlin in the 2010s. It is a devastating portrait of an empty, self-obsessed era of “plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi”. The best line: “Their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn’t eat tuna.”
Transit by Rachel Cusk - I rushed to buy this book after loving the the first part of Cusk’s trilogy - Outline. But I found this one less engaging, although the portrayal of the pure hatred of a writer’s new neighbours in London and interactions with the workers renovating her flat were vivid (especially as we’ve been living in a bathroom building site for more than a year, although our neighbours are much more tolerant).