A mom’s day starts early, revs up quickly, and involves managing many moving parts. Typical duties include packing lunches, coordinating pickups and drop-offs, planning around school activities, and managing an entire family calendar. For many moms, caring for children is just a part of their job.
Recent statistics show that nearly 40% of U.S. businesses are owned by women and that the growth of woman-owned businesses in recent years has doubled that of those led by men. This underscores the fact that many moms also serve as CEOs. For these moms, daily responsibilities at work and home can quickly become overwhelming if not properly managed.
The following are some of the common challenges they face, along with some thoughts on overcoming them.
Time management and prioritization
Motherhood is the perfect environment for learning time management and prioritization. After all, moms must become adept at juggling multiple tasks while keeping sight of what matters most.
Because they must make every hour of the day count, moms who daylight as CEOs are also forced to excel at organization and efficiency. Pivoting between diverse needs and making quick and decisive calls is something they must do daily.
As moms add CEO duties to an already packed schedule, they can help themselves by leveraging modern time management and prioritization tools. Dozens of powerful apps are available for streamlining calendarization and project management, most providing mobile access so updates can be processed whenever moms have a spare minute. Essentially, these tools act like tireless digital assistants who can ensure key meetings, messages, and to-dos stay on the radar.
Prioritization can also help achieve the level of efficiency needed to thrive as both mom and CEO. Setting and staying focused on priorities ensures important projects have the time and resources required to keep them moving forward. Prioritization ranks projects based on factors like impact, value, and urgency, which can streamline daily decision-making. Priority apps can help with the process by guiding users through methods such as the Eisenhower Matrix or the MoSCoW Method.
Work-life integration
Unlike work-life balance, which seeks to keep personal and work life separate, work-life integration embraces the idea that the lines between mom and CEO duties may sometimes get blurry. When a child wakes up sick, moms may need to pivot the planned meetings from in-person to online. If a parent-teacher conference requires a morning commitment, moms might need to shift their schedule to include some evening hours. Work-life integration recognizes that a flexible schedule can prevent overlap from becoming stressful.
One key to successful work-life integration is prioritizing communication. Moms should make sure their colleagues and their families know where they can be flexible and where they can’t. They should also be open to revising their approach when integration isn’t working. Seeking feedback from all stakeholders—kids, clients, and employees—can help identify any blind spots and ensure moms maximize their impact at home and work.
Technology tools can also be valuable in this area, allowing moms to engage effectively even when they can’t be physically present. For example, emails can be answered while waiting in the school pickup line, and meetings can be attended remotely when unexpected events at home keep moms from making it to the office. To a certain degree, technology makes it possible to be in two places at once, which is a common need for moms who are also CEOs.
Guilt and self-doubt
No matter how skilled moms are at organizing their calendars and prioritizing their tasks, there will always be things that can’t be accomplished. When those things surface, moms commonly feel guilt—“I’m not doing a good job of being there for my family/company.”—and self-doubt—“I don’t have what it takes to do both jobs well.”
Navigating moments of guilt and self-doubt requires some introspection. Moms may need to reframe their feelings, reminding themselves why they took on the challenge and the value it adds to their family. Building a family and a business simultaneously provides financial support while communicating the value of pursuing passions to children.
To push back at self-doubt, moms may need to recenter on realistic expectations. Serving as both mom and CEO will mean letting go of some things that those who aren’t doing double duty may be able to accomplish. Moms can decide what is important and reasonable, then pursue it without feeling the need to apologize to anyone—including themselves—for not being perfect.
Seen from the outside, the complex challenges today’s moms face can seem like an impediment to their success as CEOs. The reality, however, is that the skills developed in motherhood—time management, resilience, adaptability, emotional intelligence, empathy, collaboration, delegation, organization, and long-term thinking—translate perfectly to the business world, empowering moms to carry out CEO duties with excellence.
Lindsay Dymowski Constantino is the President of Centennial Pharmacy Services, a leading LTC-at-home pharmacy, and co-founder & president of the LTC@Home Pharmacy Companies, emphasizing the provision of long-term care pharmacy services in the home setting.
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Dymowski Constantino