Nneka Orji: Chief Operating Officer, Morrinson Wealth Management, UK

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“So many outcomes are often the result of sometimes small decisions that aren’t constructively challenged with another perspective,” says Nneka Orji, who is willing to be that voice in the room.

Nneka speaks to speaking up when it’s uncomfortable, why mentoring is a key part of people management, and the value of knowing who you are.

From Consulting to COO

After acquiring a Masters of Engineering degree from Oxford, Nneka went into consulting in 2010, first with Accenture and then with Deloitte UK.

Born in India and having grown up across Nigeria, France, Trinidad and the UK, Nneka loved the variety of working with different people and cultures to address diverse problems at a challenging pace.

She earned frequent promotions across her ten year stint in management consulting. As she kept learning, the lifestyle of business travel suited her.

During her time at Deloitte UK, she did a secondment as Chief of Staff for the Chairman’s office. Considering him her first sponsor—a leader who cared, pushed and supported— Nneka gained insight into the mechanics of being in an influential position, running a large organization and interacting with leaders.

She joined Morrinson Wealth Management as Chief Operating Officer in 2019. Nneka highlights that it’s a misconception that she works only with people with great wealth. Often she’s working with clients who are trying to make the earnings they have work best for them.

“They’re trying to plan ahead and look at: How can I make the most of what I’m earning? How do I build a life that’s in line with what I want to deliver for my family, for my loved ones?” she says. “Giving them the financial education, awareness and savviness to manage their own finances and to live the lives they want is really fulfilling.”

Daring the Discomfort of Using Her Voice

While accustomed from school and engineering to being in male-dominated environments and often the only black person in the room, let alone black female, Nneka says that the playing field of financial services has still compelled her to thicken her skin, become more assertive and use her voice.

Several times, she has braved speaking up in a tough moment—both in support of fairness for others and for herself.

Nneka recalls one compelling example from her consulting days when she was in a meeting focused on the consideration of candidates for promotion. When she heard more senior colleagues vaguely describe why a certain female manager was not ready for promotion—such as from a “gut feel” or because of “cultural fit”—she challenged her seniors to be specific, direct and transparent.

“I said, ‘Why is it gut feel? Why do you think she’s not ready? Have you actually given her feedback?’” says Nneka, recalling they hadn’t. “I said, ‘It’s not fair on that individual to give these vague responses. We need to be really clear. She wants to progress. If there’s concern, it’s only right that we tell her, rather than effectively leading her on.”

“I was definitely challenging beyond the point they were comfortable, and I walked out of the room knowing I had pushed,” she recalls. “It’s not that I had anything to gain personally, but I felt that it’s only fair to everyone to have someone to speak for them, on their behalf. If I was in her situation, who would stand up for me?”

While she could have deferred to her senior colleagues, Nneka chose a clear conscience. Nneka reflects the discomfort was likely because she was touching on affinity bias or another elephant in the room that may have been unconscious, but so often proliferates the status quo.

“These kind of decisions affect people’s careers, successes and progressions, how much they’ll get paid and how much they can save and invest and so on,” states Nneka.

Speaking up for herself, Nneka has stood her ground amidst men twenty years her senior, only to earn their respect from her work. She also once directly expressed disappointment in a senior partner’s response and leadership when after three years of working for him, she approached him to talk an issue with one very difficult female client and his immediate suggestion was she must have done something wrong to invite the conflict.

“I feel it’s important to make sure it’s clear what you will stand or what you are willing to accept, in terms of basic respect,” says Nneka.

Supporting Others To See Their Potential

“I haven’t had formal mentors to be very honest,” says Nneka, though she has leaders to bounce perspectives off of. “But you can put together the strong points that you see in different leaders and create almost your own fictional mentor in that way.”

She’s inspired to emulate the leaders whom she looked forward to working with—who pushed her in the best way and with whom she came to learn more about herself and her abilities.

“I do see mentoring as a core part of managing, because you can manage as a task manager and the tasks will get done,” Nneka notes. “But what I’m trying to do is to be an inspiring leader. I try to instil a sense of raising aspirations; maybe a team member started their career thinking this was your limit, but actually they have so much more potential, if they want to do more.”

Nneka values communication and saying or hearing it like it is, so nobody suffers in silence while their needs go unknown.

When Nneka took on managing others, she didn’t realize how rewarding it would be. “When a team member comes and says I’ve developed so much over the past year because of your influence, it gives me a strong sense of fulfillment.

Nneka has been a formal mentor for over a decade, with the Social Mobility Foundation, working with graduate mentees with a socially or economically challenged background, and also with the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women, working with entrepreneurial women in countries like India or Kenya or Israel.

These experiences have enriched her so much, she also considers them “reverse mentoring”.

“I like to see how different people think and how different people’s life experiences have shaped who they are, and how that informs their thinking,” says Nneka. “There’s something about learning about someone else’s perspective on life, and being open to finding out something that you might not have known. That’s the thing I love the most.”

Knowing Who You Are

Nneka feels her support system, both her family and working with people who have her best interests at heart and gave her a platform, has supported her fast growth.

She recommends being “intentional about choosing who you work with”—seeking out people who accept you for yourself and push you in a good way while having your back.

She feels that early on, her parents helped her to know who she was, down to pointing out the reality that she would often be unique in the room—as a black female in the schools she was in, and in her working life, especially as she moves up in leadership.

“Some people would say you shouldn’t necessarily point out or emphasize the difference,” reflects Nneka, “but I think it was so helpful in terms of me knowing who I was and who I am, and being true to myself. Of course I wasn’t always as confident in this respect and I’ve grown a lot since, but being comfortable in your own skin, in terms of your own history and culture, is critical. As long as you know who you are, you know your motivations, your boundaries and you make decisions in line with these.”

Nneka has worked some long hours, and suspects that subconsciously she has been motivated to overwork as a proactive measure against casual suggestions of gender or ethnic minority initiatives playing into her promotions, a frustrating undermining of accomplishment that black women are more likely to be subjected to.

“Sometimes you don’t have to work as hard as you do to get the outcome that you want,” she has come to realize. “I think that’s probably a lesson I am still learning.”

Nneka loves to travel, workout, dance and listen to both crime podcasts and inspiring podcasts during long walks in the sunshine—such as Oprah Super Soul Sunday, HBR Women At Work, The Wallet, The Tim Ferriss Show.

She’s inspired by “people who find their purpose and commit to positively influencing communities – small or large”.

By Aimee Hansen

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Grace J. Lee: Litigation Partner, Shearman & Sterling LLP

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Grace J Lee“As I was progressing within the BigLaw structure, the most important thing was not defining my success by the way that some tend to view it,” says Grace Lee. “I resisted my initial tendency to buy into the notion that if I didn’t make partner, that was somehow failure, or spoke to my skillset or my value.”

Lee shares on defining your own success, aligning with your personal priorities, and challenging the stereotypes of who you need to be in the role.

From Literature to Law

Lee contemplated a path in comparative literature, but was hesitant to commit to a life in academia. She also had been considering law school and discovered that law fulfilled her interest in causes for justice and allowed her to apply her literature skillsets.

“As a comparative literature major, I did a lot of exercises in explicating texts—you take a passage from a literary work, consider why the author chose the words they did, and where it fits in the broader context of the work,” says Lee. “In legal work, I was interested in interpreting words—words in statutes and court decisions. And making arguments about how certain language should be interpreted, based on word choices and the context, to support a thesis.”

Now in her 15th year at Shearman & Sterling (S&S) in New York and D.C., she is an industry expert—working with financial institutions and corporations on securities and antitrust litigation, commercial litigation, and regulatory investigations.

Defining Her Own Success

“Don’t buy into how other people define success. If you have a view of where you want to be in five or ten years, stay true to that,” says Lee, “as opposed to feeling like you need to be or do something that might be completely divorced from what makes you professionally and personally satisfied.”

While attaining partnership was a meaningful step in her career, it does not define her success, and she points out that many smart, successful people do not opt into or attain partnership.

“I think success is a very personal thing. For me, being able to have the different spaces of my life come together is success,“ she notes. “I’m able to have a career that I find fulfilling and kids who are fairly well adjusted. My kids see that what I do is not at their expense, and that my professional space means something to me.”

Aligning With Your Personal Priorities

For her personally, becoming a parent changed and clarified her priorities in a way that she never anticipated.

“I had a vision of the type of parent I wanted to be, and the type of lawyer I wanted to be,” says Lee. “I also realized that if I couldn’t be the parent that I wanted to be, then I wasn’t going to be happy even if I succeeded as a lawyer, and that became my guiding principle.”

To make this work, Lee did her best to fulfill her visions of both roles. She prioritized coming home to put her children to bed every night, and then working a second shift, often late into the night. “What that meant was that what could have been a work day that ended at 9 or 10 pm if I worked through the evening in the office became a work day that often ended well past midnight, because I took the time to go home, spend a little time with them, and put them to bed.” But for Lee, the personal sense of having given something the best that she could under the circumstances, was what was the most important.

“In order for me to not be resentful of the fact that I have a demanding job but instead grow in it, I had to make sure that I wouldn’t look back 20 years from then and feel that I had sacrificed my values as a parent to be a lawyer. I gave my best to both roles so that, many years from now, I hopefully wouldn’t feel that I had pursued one at the expense of the other and question those choices.”

Knowing her choice is her own, she emphasizes that your own priority is never wrong, whatever it is—it’s about aligning your life with your self-discerned priority.

“The trouble is when you’re trying to do something that doesn’t align with your values just because you feel like you have to do it,” says Lee. “I think that’s where the discord and the struggles really materialize.”

Lee finds it helpful to introduce the two parts of her life to each other. “After a long week, the physical office building was not the place I would have chosen to go to on a weekend. But it was important for my kids to be able to visualize me at work during the day, where I spend more time than I do with them.” So on some weekends, Lee brought her kids into the office where they would walk through the halls, sit at her desk and pretend that they were working. Lee also naturally incorporates her job as a parent in her conversations at work.

“Some people—especially women at least as I have observed—shy away from talking about their kids at work because they think they will be taken as less committed. I want people to understand that I have another demanding job that I absolutely love. It’s important for me to feel that my work is a safe space where I can talk about my kids, and the challenges and the demands of parenthood instead of pretending that I don’t have those issues.”

That openness has also paved the way for real meaningful discussions with mentors who have helped her navigate the intensity of BigLaw while striking the balance she personally seeks.

“So many great partners who have been mentors and friends over the years really helped me as I was trying to figure out my priorities and my definition of success. They didn’t just tell me what to do to get to the next step in BigLaw. They asked me what I wanted in life and in my career and shared their personal stories. Those discussions could get very granular—like, ‘What are your stressors? Let’s identify what they are, and see if it’s solvable.’” Even when the stressor was outside of Lee’s control, being able to identify it helped more than just feeling stressed.

Her mentors have also often become her sponsors, advocating for her and helping her to advance in the organization and with clients.

Growing Through The Process

“Take on as much as you think you can reasonably handle. And then stretch that a little. See how that works. And if that works, stretch it a little more. Do the very best to not turn down work,” says Lee, who focuses on the notion of building her personal value rather than billing hours.

“My brand and my value come down to my experience. The level of experience and breadth of different types of cases you get because you’re working more and stretching a little is huge. That experience becomes a big part of your value as a lawyer.”

For Lee, it’s not a particular case or moment that has been rewarding for her, but the relationships and overall growth that come with the process of working with her teams and clients to solve issues. “It’s the journey from Point A to Point B, from Point B to Point C, and so on, and then seeing the growth from Point A to Point X. It’s not any single moment, but it’s many blocks of moments of where I was and where I am now.”

Being Yourself, Not an Expectation

Though Lee works with many women, the industry and partnership ring are more male-dominated, so she values that her own trajectory helped to set an important precedent.

“It’s natural to look for someone you can identify with in the role you want to be in. I hope that I might be able to be that person for some.”

Just as Lee rejects the notion of adopting anyone else’s idea of success, she also challenges the notion that you have to be anyone else’s version of a lawyer.

Especially as she became more senior, Lee confronted expectations about how a successful lawyer looks and acts—such as the stereotype of litigators being loud and argumentative—but those expectations didn’t always match the ways that Lee speaks or acts.  Lee believes that you don’t have to fundamentally change who you are, or embody certain mannerisms every day, to be an effective advocate. “Having people from different backgrounds and with different tendencies in the leadership roles helps dismantle that and challenge that notion.”

Playing By Ear

Lee played the violin as a child, and as a parent follows the Suzuki Method with her children, which teaches children to pick up music through exposure and repetition before actually reading music, akin to how they pick up their mother tongue before they learn how to read.

With the method being based upon a parent-teacher-child triangle, Saturdays and even family summer holidays have often been focused around music classes and Suzuki camp. “It’s a refreshing change of pace. In my kids’ violin instructions, we are much less concerned about how quickly they can master something than we are at how perfectly they can learn it. An entire month can be spent dedicated to making sure they can play one musical phrase correctly.” Lee also loves how music brings her family together, including playing violin duets with her children.

Rounding back to literature, Lee is looking forward to reading a book she picked up some months ago at a local bookstore. “It was a ‘blind date’ book where the book is wrapped and you don’t know what it is, but it instead lists other books of similar sentiments. I loved the idea of it and all of the books that were listed on the wrapper, so picked it up with a lot of anticipation.”

By Aimee Hansen

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How To Disrupt Gender Bias in the Virtual Workplace

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Gender BiasWhat can leaders, managers, allies and women themselves do to minimize and challenge gender bias in the virtual workplace?

Last week, theglasshammer.com explored the impact of the virtual office in either neutralizing or amplifying pre-existing dynamics of gender bias.

Ultimately, the gender bias present in our cultural paradigm is also present in our offices, and this week we explore how to address it.

How Leaders Can Diffuse Gender Bias in the Virtual Office

An article in the World Economic Forum asserts that when it comes to bias in virtual meetings as in any context, “changing the environment in the room – rather than changing women’s behavior – should be the goal.“

“If we build a world in which women’s voices are valued and listened to,” says Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University, “they will speak up without having to be told to.”

“Smart companies create inclusive work cultures so that all employees actively support each other, particularly marginalized groups. Allyship and curiosity should be at the heart of a manager’s leadership, regardless of gender, to create a more inclusive, welcoming workplace,” says Serena Fong, Vice President, Strategic Engagement for Catalyst.

As leaders, meeting chairs can set the tone and expectations upfront, including implementing ground rules for discussions that mitigate some of the communication challenges and gender imbalances, such as a no interruption rule in Zoom calls.

As written in Forbes, reducing interruption requires the self-reflection of questions such as “Is this person making a point I need to add onto?” and “Am I listening equally to everyone in the room?”

Calling out when gender imbalances occur is another approach to being an ally on Zoom, as exemplified by an associate professor who let the men dominating the virtual conversation know that she was happy to hear their input, but also wanted to hear from the women.

Introducing positive interjections, such as “that’s a really valuable point” to validate, amplify and give pause of consideration to women’s voices is another strategy for leveling the field.

Putting workflow systems in place that ensure communication flow, project tracking and clear administrative responsibilities will also help reduce the amount of extra work picked up by women.

According to Fong at Catalyst, leaders should embrace these five key strategies to disrupt gender imbalances and build a more flexible, equitable and inclusive workplace for all:

  • Lead inclusively through crisis: keep inclusion front and center as you navigate the shifts in how we’re working currently and how we’ll be working in the future.
  • Tackle inequities, large and small: face biases and stereotypes head on through workplace policies and opportunities such as re-skilling your workforce, examining talent management, recruiting, and advancement practices for biases, and setting DEI targets and goals.
  • Connect with empathy: put yourself in your colleagues’ shoes and imagine what they might be experiencing vs. your experiences.
  • Trust your team: don’t micromanage projects and processes, and be transparent about when, how and who is involved when decisions are made.
  • Work remotely and flexibly: the pandemic dispelled many myths and assumptions about working remotely and flexibly. Take the lessons learned and incorporate it into the “new normal”.
How Women Can Ally Together in the Virtual Office

While not responsible for correcting gender imbalance, women can still be allies to one another in subverting gender imbalances of the virtual workplace.

“If you see a colleague being ignored or is trying to speak, say something. If you learn about an act of bias, think about how you can address it,” says Fong. “It may not seem like much, but it is infinitely better than ignoring it.”

Carol Vernon, founder and principal of Communication Matters, recommends for women to set the stage early for speaking up in a virtual meeting rather than waiting to have the perfect compelling thing to say, and to take the lead in introducing non-verbal expression to the meeting.

Another way of subverting bias is by actively reinforcing ideas that another woman has brought to the table and then re-accrediting the idea as hers, as While House staffers did during the Obama administration.

Women leaders have also told theglasshammer.com about actively inviting female colleagues who hold valuable insight on a topic to share their viewpoint, as well as instant messaging with coworkers during meetings to enhance solidarity and encourage each other to speak.

Nicki Gilmour, Leadership Coach, Organizational development specialist and founder of theglasshammer.com adds, “Creating psychological safety as the leader in the virtual room matters also, as who you authorize to not only speak but to demonstrate expertise matters. People will take their cues from you in person or otherwise about who is truly authorized to speak up. Asking for different people’s viewpoints from their perspective will not only add value but level the playing field for the quieter, more hesitant people on the call.”

Virtual gender bias is really just the same dynamics at play in a new space, but perhaps the playing field also allows for new disruptions.

By Aimee Hansen

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Mary Inman: Partner and Head of International Whistleblower Practice, Constantine Cannon LLP

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Mary Inman“It shows you how powerful a single voice is in this world,” says Mary Inman, who specializes in representing whistleblowers under the U.S. and Canadian whistleblower reward programs. “I think that’s our love as humans for the David versus Goliath story. We still want David to prevail, or at least be heard.”

With an innate penchant for fairness and justice from childhood, Inman says her family could have predicted she’d become a lawyer.

She entered law with the “amorphous notion” of wanting to do good in the world and affect positive social change. What was not clear, even coming out of law school, was what kind of lawyer she would be.

An Unexpected Expertise

After a couple of years clerking for federal judges in Maine and New Hampshire and one year inside Big Law at a large commercial law firm, a headhunter extended her a novel opportunity—join the new San Francisco office of a boutique firm specializing in representing whistleblowers.

Inman went from a passing familiarity with the subject matter to spending 17 years honing her craft with Phillips & Cohen, before joining Constantine Cannon in 2015, now splitting her time between its San Francisco and London offices.

“At the beginning of my career, there were only a handful of whistleblower reward laws. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have chosen a field that has grown exponentially. The success of the whistleblower tool in aiding law enforcement efforts has spawned more and more whistleblower reward programs,” revels Inman. “My practice allows me to aid individual whistleblower clients, while at the same time helping them expose industry-wide frauds—so it’s the best of both worlds.”

With 24 years of specialization, Inman is an author, regular speaker and recognized expert in the area of U.S. and international whistleblower reward laws, with their focus on frauds in financial services, healthcare, automotive safety and government procurement as well as tax evasion, bribery of government officials and money laundering.

Encouraging Whistleblowers to Speak Out

Though whistleblowers are often ostracized, Inman asserts they play a critical role in maintaining the healthy ecosystem of an organization.

“Companies have an autoimmune response to whistleblowers, seeking to expel them from their system,” notes Inman. “However, research confirms my anecdotal experience that they’re actually the good bacteria that keeps a company healthy. Because they have the temerity to speak up and alert you to problems before they metastasize into a public relations nightmare, whistleblowers should be viewed by companies for what they really are — forward indicators of risk and an invaluable part of a company’s risk management system.”

She compares it to interpersonal relationships: “Only someone close to you, who really cares about you, will tell you the hard truths.”

Most countries’ laws focus on the employment law aspects of whistleblowing — whistleblower protection from retaliation and reprisal after they have spoken up, allowing whistleblowers to challenge unlawful retaliatory dismissal, demotion or blacklisting.

U.S. and Canadian law differs in that it also connects whistleblowers with the law enforcement and regulatory agencies who can act on their information and redress the harm. Agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Department of Transportation (DOT) roll out the welcome mat for whistleblowers. Each agency has a designated Whistleblower Office specially designed to receive and vet whistleblower tips. Credible tips are sent to the agencies’ enforcement attorneys who frequently use the whistleblowers’ information to launch an investigation. If the agency goes on to impose a fine or otherwise sanction the wrongdoer, the whistleblower is entitled to a financial reward in an amount that is a guaranteed percentage of the fine levied or sanction imposed (e.g., the typical award range is 10 to 30 percent).

“What a whistleblower actually wants is someone to do something about the wrongdoing she’s uncovered,” says Inman of her clients. “The North American reward programs ensure that the whistleblower’s concern will be taken seriously and dealt with by the regulatory authority. This active solicitation and empowerment of whistleblowers, using supports like mandatory financial awards and designated whistleblower offices, has put agencies like the SEC on the map with their successful deployment of whistleblower information to impose over $2 billion in fines on companies violating the U.S. securities laws and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Other agencies have taken notice and reward programs have been spreading rapidly both within the U.S. and across the globe.”

The Courage of the Individual Voice

Inman notes that our childhood conditioning creates internal conflict—we were all encouraged to speak up when we saw something wrong and yet we were discouraged from “snitching.”

“Everyone has had a whistleblower moment—a time when you spoke a hard truth, then something negative happened to you, so it can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re in the heat of that moment,” she says. “Whistleblowers are those people who can’t abide by it, and actually turn off the personal warning signals that stop so many of us—such as the practical need to keep our jobs, a refusal to risk what we’ve worked and trained for and not disrupting our family lives.”

By the time her clients come to her—whether for a financial, healthcare or manufacturing fraud, or other corruption—they have usually had their voices silenced. Inman finds it rewarding to welcome those who have been marginalized, to let them know they’re not alone and to validate their reality in a moment when they’ve often been gaslighted and pushed to doubt themselves.

“There’s something really profound about taking someone who’s ‘in extremis’ and hopefully putting them into a place where they feel empowered again,” she says.

Inman sees it as her responsibility to go beyond being a legal advocate and to help her clients step back and consider what is at stake, not only for the individual whistleblower but for their families as well. With that wider consideration, they can undertake their personal risk/reward calculus and figure out what, if any, action is right for them.

“Once you’ve blown the whistle, you can’t unring that bell,” she remarks. “It’s a life-altering event.”

“Very few companies want to hire known whistleblowers,” notes Inman, who has recently campaigned to challenge companies to walk their talk. “If you truly believe in speak up and it’s not just lip service, then hire a former whistleblower. What says more to your employees that you value speak up than that you have purposefully hired someone who did?”

The Power of the Collective Voice

“Even though you’re the lowest in the pecking order, trust your instincts; you’re often in the best position to know that something’s wrong,” she tells fresh-eyed business students when she guest lectures in business ethics classes.

From the recent Ukraine whistleblower on the Trump Administration to the Me Too movement, Inman has characterized this as a time of “unprecedented speak out”—citing research that says people are speaking out in record numbers since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

She thinks that technology has played a role, with the development of anonymous reporting tools and sites such as WikiLeaks and GlobaLeaks fueling a brand of leaktivism that has allowed crowdsourced journalism models like those employed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to use this data to fuel impactful investigations like the Panama Papers, Luanda Leaks, and FinCEN files, to name a few. She also cites speculation that the rise of the remote workplace leaves workers feeling less connected and for new hires leaves little opportunity for the casual indoctrination about turning a blind eye that can be subtly communicated in the office. She also thinks there’s collective frustration that “the top 1% has become increasingly untouchable.”

“Speaking out is an act of rebellion, of people saying ‘no more’,” says Inman. “It gives me hope and restores my faith that the voices of individual citizen watchdogs can be heard and continue to serve as our first and last line of defense against fraud and corruption.”

Inspiration From Cross-Disciplines

“Don’t just stay in your lane and look at thought leaders in your field,” says Inman. “Adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. Teachings far flung from the legal world have been the most valuable to my career.”

As her husband is a filmmaker, tech and film are two peripheral realms from which Inman derives creative catalysis.

As an example, Inman was inspired by the Callisto app (technology to combat sexual assault)—created after the documentary film “The Hunting Ground,” which focused on the epidemic of campus date rape.

If a student does not want to file a report, the app allows them to confidentially record an assault incident within the Callisto database for possible future reference, in a form of information escrow. But the app also facilitates collective action, allowing the student to be contacted again to reconsider speaking up collectively in the event others subsequently make reports about the same assailant.

Inman was inspired to consider the possibilities of this approach for whistleblowing.

“You’ll take inspiration from the strangest places,” says Inman. “Don’t expect it in your industry. Expect it in the unexpected places.”

Rise to Those Opportunities

“My most defining life lesson is to accept every challenge and say ‘yes’,” says Inman, whose whistleblower practice pushes her out of the risk-aversion common to lawyers. “I’m inspired by my clients. Every day, their moral strength and bravery pushes me to step up my game.”

In the “scrappy creative environment” of the entrepreneurial, contingency-fee plaintiff side of law, Inman has learned to “fake it until you make it.”

“Just take the opportunity and watch yourself rise to the occasion. You’ll surprise yourself,” says Inman. “A lot of people are paralyzed because they’re too worried about making mistakes. Embrace your mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, you’re doing something right, you’re taking risks and trying on something new. That’s where the growth happens.”

One of the risks Inman took was to advocate for taking on a “small case” involving an odious practice in what her instincts told her was a corrupt company. It later turned out to expose an industry-wide fraud and was a very rich lesson in validating her intuition.

“What I learned is that when a place is that corrupt, that’s not the only bad thing that they’re doing. As we investigate, that corruption is going to expand,” says Inman. “I love the psychology of what makes people decide to cross that ethical line.”

Your Voice Matters Because You’re A Woman

Inman accredits her grandmother, a county clerk of court, as her original mentor. She used to take her to court and whisper, ‘We need more women lawyers.’

Reflecting back on University of Pennsylvania Law School, Inman now realizes what a powerful mentor Professor Lani Guinier was for her (now at Harvard Law School)—because she was a passionate woman that deeply inspired Inman to throw herself into her vocation.

“At a formative phase like law school, it’s so fundamental that you have a woman who inspires you,” says Inman. “I don’t think at the time I assigned as much significance to it as I do now.”

Since then, most of Inman’s mentors and champions have been men with daughters. She is passionate about mentoring, including speaking to her sons’ classmates about being a woman in law.

When it comes to empowering her own voice, Inman takes license from the research that public companies with women on their boards are more effective than those who don’t.

“That gave me the empirical data that my voice is valuable precisely because I may have a different perspective. I feel more compelled to speak out because I’m often the only woman in the room and I often offer a very different perspective,” states Inman. “It makes intuitive sense that we’re better when we’re challenged and have different points of view. So being a woman has encouraged me to speak up and share my mind, especially in male-dominated situations.”

Her sons are 19 and 14, and she’s been taking up surfing lately to share time with them. Inman’s other passion is yoga, and the alchemical practice of sitting with discomfort and staying present.

By Aimee Hansen

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Is Gender Bias Amplified in the Virtual Workplace?

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Virtual workplaceWhile remote working is a key element to creating more gender equality, the coexistence of the virtual workplace alongside virtual schooling has exacerbated the disproportional hours women spend on caregiving and domestic work, driving women to exit the workforce or consider downshifting their careers.

The dissolution of physical boundaries between home and office and classroom very rarely affords a woman with children “a room of her own” in which to conduct her professional life, unlike her male counterparts.

And now the remote workplace itself—the virtual meeting room and Zoom office—is introducing a mixed bag of gender-related impacts, neutralizing some imbalances while magnifying others.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Could Neutralize Gender Bias

As of February, researchers in Forbes reported that sentiments towards moral, motivation and collaboration related to the virtual workplace have been dropping into negative territory since November among executive leaders. Yet women leaders remained more positive than men—especially in relation to impact of the virtual workplace on productivity, decision-making and communication. Women leaders were more positive about the chairing of online meetings and that it sets the space that ‘ensures all team members can contribute to meetings’.

While men are socialized to establish dominance and position in team communications, women are inclined to establish relationships and build trust. Some research has indicated that virtual media, with a lack of non-verbal cues and three-dimensional richness, can led to greater misunderstanding in communication, but also diffuses the ability for men to dominate team interaction.

“With completely remote-meetings, the physical and social dynamics of in-person conversations unhinge the norms of hierarchy,” speculates UX researcher Allison Yu. “In Zoom, everyone is literally on an equal grid.”

Yu points out that when the active speaker is everyone’s primary focus on a Zoom screen, the act of cutting someone else off simply becomes more blunt. The virtual office also mitigates height bias, which favors men.

Whereas access to senior leaders is generally lower for women and women of color especially, Yu argues access becomes more equalized in a virtual workplace where some of the more exclusionary casual networking meet-ups, cultivated through affinity bias, aren’t as frequent or prevalent.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Is Proliferating Gender Bias

On the other hand, the virtual meeting room is also playing out to magnify pre-existing gender dynamics—such as male executives winning competency points for speaking longer while women lose them, passion expressed by women leaders being perceived as overemotional by male counterparts, men being 33% more likely to interrupt their female than male colleagues (manterruption), women speaking up 25% less than men in the meeting environment, and live reverbalizaton and appropriation by men of ideas previously introduced by a female colleague.

According to Catalyst research, 1 in 5 women has felt ignored and overlooked by coworkers using video calls. 45% of women business leaders say it’s difficult for women to speak in virtual meetings and 42% of male business leaders agree. Additionally, 31% of women and queer/non-binary respondents reported “getting talked over, interrupted, or ignored more frequently during virtual meetings than those held in person” in a July 2020 survey by the Society of Women Engineers.

In September, University of Iowa Grad student Claire McDonnell shared a video call recording on TikTok entitled “live footage of being a woman in STEM” that went viral within 48 hours. The clip shows her repeatedly being interrupted by fellow male students when pitching project ideas and having her own ideas appropriated and re-presented by her peers, though she was the only with with actual work experience with the topic.

As written in the New York Times, Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen asserts that the remote workplace amplifies pre-existing conversational imbalances in who gets heard. Whereas men will tend to be argumentative and speak longer to convey authority, women will often be succinct, self-deprecating or speak in more indirect ways to not take up more space than necessary and be likable.

“Women are systematically seen as less authoritative,” said Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University. “And their influence is systematically lower. And they’re speaking less. And when they’re speaking up, they’re not being listened to as much, and they are being interrupted more.”

As put forth in Fast Company, women also have weaker informal relationships at work and office politics are still at play as “the official virtual meeting represents only a fraction of interactions, and real power dynamics will move backstage, excluding women as needed.”

Research also shows more women (46%) are struggling with group work than men (37%), often picking up more of the undefined, collaborative-based tasks and carrying the load of remote office housework. Also, “when faced with poor visibility or communication on what their colleagues are doing, many women compensate by working more,” an impulse which can be amplified by lack of co-presence in the remote working office.

How to Diffuse and Disrupt Virtual Bias?

While the flexibility of the remote workplace is generally supportive to gender equality, and virtual meeting rooms could counter or neutralize aspects of gender bias, the last year has revealed that entrenched cultural gender dynamics will reveal themselves, sometimes more so in altered circumstances. If gender inequality is inherent within our culture, it’s frankly alive and well in our virtual offices.

Next week, we will explore how leaders, managers, allies and women colleagues can play a role in addressing and mitigating the dynamics of virtual bias.

By Aimee Hansen

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Alison Hoover: Partner, Banking Transformation Leader and Advisory Diversity & Inclusion Leader, PwC U.S.

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Alison Hoover“It took a long time to shake imposter syndrome. I’ve shifted my perspective now to believe that being a woman is an asset,” says Alison (Alie) Hoover. “It’s not just this sideline thing. It’s as much part of who I am, the same thing as being smart or outspoken.”

Hoover talks about going part-time after motherhood, growing her leadership confidence and how she is approaching diversity by championing the upside.

Braving the Part-Time Conversation

Four years into consulting, Hoover went on for her MBA at Kellogg School of Management. She joined Diamond Technology Partners, the hot tech boutique, after and continued on with PwC, when Diamond was acquired in 2010, where she is currently the banking transformation leader.

But her career almost ended abruptly after she had her first baby. Hoover returned to the office, after 12 weeks of leave, on a Monday morning in 2002. By Wednesday at 5pm, she had quit her job.

“I literally threw all of my stuff in the trash, all the notebooks and articles and old project folders.” And she recalls saying, “There’s no way I can do this. I have this baby. It’s impossible.”

After moving to Washington, D.C. to be near family, she decided on her daughter’s first birthday that she did want to work, but part-time. She decided to brave the conversation where she was a “known commodity.”

Hoover phoned a Diamond partner in Chicago and proposed to be their person on the ground in D.C., to help build the firm’s newly started public sector practice, at three days a week. Successful, she ended up being the first to pilot a part-time work arrangement.

For seven years, Hoover worked part-time, upgrading to four days a week once she became a director because “I felt like at three days a week, I could be an individual contributor. I didn’t feel like I could effectively manage other people.”

While still in her part-time stint, she had a second daughter and became a Partner at PwC.

“Honestly, if I hadn’t had the opportunity to work part-time, I don’t think I would be in consulting at all anymore,” she reflects. “Maybe I made partner a year or two later. I’ll never know, but the flip-side is I wouldn’t be here at all. I wouldn’t be sitting in a leadership position.”

Asking, Receiving Support and Valuing Yourself

“You have to ask for what you need and what you want,” Hoover notes. “No one’s going to be mind reading that you need it and give it to you. Sometimes, you have to lay these things out.”

Hoover not only had to ask for part-time, she also had to train her teammates to consider when she was available and not. It also helped that her husband is a huge supporter of her and has been an active co-parent, and she notes that having people around her—a husband, parents, colleagues, partners—that believed in her, maybe even more than she believed in herself, mattered.

Her bosses even reflected to her that she could work at 80% and still get as much done as others, so she didn’t need to sweat the clock.

When she made partner, Hoover remembers a PwC leader advised her: “’You are a partner now. Work when you want to work. Do the work that you need to do, and don’t worry about the rest.’”

Hoover had to get past the hesitation of asking for support from others by reminding herself of the value she added, and that giving and receiving support were more than reciprocal.

“When you’re giving it, it’s what you’re supposed to do, it’s your job,” she comments. “When you’re asking for it, somehow it feels like a favor. I think that’s how we’re wired.”

Stepping Up To a Leadership Mindset

Prior to becoming a partner, Hoover remembers wondering aloud where the senior women were to support her. Someone in the room called out: “You’re a director, you’re pretty senior now. Who are you turning around and reaching to?”

It was a teachable moment.

“I realized that I had been so self-focused, wondering where the help was above me, that I hadn’t considered that someone might actually be looking to me to help them,” admits Hoover. “There’s the little factor of that voice, ‘Who am I to help anybody else?’”

Hoover realized that even if you still have your own learning curves or insecurities, others are taken their cues from you as a leader. You have accrued guidance to give to others.

“What you realize, more and more, and especially as a partner, is that while you might feel like the same person in your own head,” she says, “your positional authority and tenure creates an obligation, and there is something valuable you have to share.”

When appointed to lead the banking transformation team, Hoover was tasked with leading more senior and more experienced partners. Initially, she stepped tentatively into the role, until a boss pulled her aside and reiterated she had been chosen for a reason.

“Sometimes we all need that kick. It gave me more confidence,” she recalls. “He was giving me permission, in fact a mandate, to lead these other partners.”

“So much of consulting is built on expertise and knowing the most about a given topic, but there’s so much about leadership that is not just about knowledge but behaviors and other skills,” Hoover notes. “That was a mind shift for me, that I didn’t have to know everything about everything to lead other people.”

She prides herself on her integrity of word, ability to get things done and adeptness in leveraging her network for other people’s benefits.

“I think one of my biggest and best skills is being that connector who is bringing things together, connecting ideas and people, to help them advance whatever their agenda may be,” she says.

Affirming A Culture of Inclusion

“As one of the fewer women leaders, I feel a great responsibility to be present and accessible and visible,” says Hoover, noting it’s a personal choice, as often the responsibility for showing up for diversity falls too much on the shoulders of the under-represented.

Hoover is also PwC’s U.S. Advisory Diversity & Inclusion leader, and she falls into stride when talking on D&I. Having significantly less than 50% women in the partnership ring (PwC transparently publishes their diversity report) is one priority.

“My focus is twofold. There’s the very public, very visible things like representation. Who are we hiring? Who are we promoting? Who are leaders?” says Hoover. “But I think so much of those outputs is the result of the small, everyday decisions that the majority, for the most part, are making. Who gets staffed on a project? Who gets called on in a meeting? Who makes the dinner reservations? Who talks first? Who gets the chair at the head of the table? Whose e-mail are you responding to first?”

Hoover threads that conversation across conversations and decisions—suspecting those “everyday nudges help to tweak behaviors that over time add up to massive impact. “

“It’s often much more who are you helping versus who are you hurting, because I think 99% of the time, people are not intentionally discriminating,” she pinpoints. “How do we harness the good intentions of our leaders to create a more inclusive culture on a regular basis, and change all of the things that people unconsciously do that are not increasing inclusion? A lot of what I’m very focused on is subtler culture dynamics. Like, what does it feel like to go to work every day? How much do you believe in your ability to succeed and to make an impact?”

She indicates that her approach to that conversation is to positively reinforce the inclusive-habits that leads to organizational wins—more “carrot” than “stick”.

“How do we tell those stories where people are actually doing better or winning because of their inclusive behavior? Every time we get that note from a client impressed at the number of women present and speaking in the session,” she says, “I want to celebrate the successes, advancements, achievements and accomplishments.”

As well as accountability metrics, Hoover emphasizes the importance of top leadership in driving cultural change.

“I think everyone’s looking for that silver bullet around implementation, and cultural change is always a challenge, regardless of what element of culture you’re trying to change,” observes Hoover. “But those key decisions—tone at the top, who are your leaders, who and what you’re celebrating, transparency—go a long way.”

Outside of work, Hoover loves to cook homemade meals, spend time with her 15 and 18 year old daughters, keep up with politics and enjoy the outdoors as much as she possibly can.

By Aimee Hansen

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OP-Ed: Why Female Leaders Experience More Burnout and What to Do About It

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Jessica ThiefelsWhile COVID took a toll on all of us, women in the workplace are feeling the burnout effects at higher rates than their male counterparts. Data from a 2020 McKinsey poll found that:

  • 53 percent of women reported feeling job-related stress, compared to 46 percent of men
  • 37 percent of women felt exhaustion, compared to 31 percent of men
  • 32 percent of women felt burnout, compared to 28 percent of men

The disparity is even more obvious at the senior level. For example, 54 percent of senior-level female leaders felt exhausted compared to just 41 percent for men, and 39 percent experienced burnout with only 29 percent of male leaders reporting the same.

To counteract widespread burnout as a female leader, it’s important to understand the root causes of your work-related stress and find actionable ways to avoid it. Here are some strategies you can use as a female leader in the workplace fighting burnout during COVID and otherwise.

Understand the Relationship Between Mental Health and Burnout

Burnout is due to chronic stress, fatigue, cynicism, and lack of accomplishment, according to a study from Frontiers in Psychology. What’s more, the research indicates that burnout often shares commonalities with depression and anxiety.

With stress at the root of burnout, it’s vital that you not only be aware of how stress levels can impact your mental health but your physical health as well. You may not notice the stress if you’re used to it, but you might notice these physical stress indicators:

  • Tense muscles
  • Blood pressure increase
  • Increase in heart rate
  • Hyperventilating
  • Off-balanced digestion

In “How to Free Yourself From Stress”, HealthMarkets explains that the real trouble starts when this stress becomes chronic. They explain, “The constant physiological response wears us down, affecting several major biological systems. Our stores of energy drain. Our bodies produce fewer infection-fighting T-cells, so our immune systems become weak, making it easy for illnesses and diseases to push their way into our lives.”

Fight burnout: Use an app like Symple to track your daily mental and physical health. It’s easy to ignore stress when it’s become the norm for you. This small step will force you to focus on your overall health each day, which can point you to burnout before it becomes a problem.

Fight Back Against Social Media Fatigue

Female leaders are expected to write sharp industry articles on LinkedIn and promote themselves as the face of a brand on Twitter. Not to mention, it’s often a component of our personal lives. Yet, excess social media consumption can also lead to burnout.

The problem is that too much social media exposure is dangerous to mental health, especially for female leaders. Recent research has found that social media fatigue is a legitimate condition that can lead to anxiety and exhaustion.

As a modern successful woman, you’re constantly taking in the highlight reel of your peers and colleagues. To make it even worse, instances of “mom-shaming” for working mothers are on the rise since the start of COVID-19.

Fight burnout: How often do you mindless scroll on social media? Probably more than you think. Set social media boundaries so you can still show up where you need to, but walk away when you don’t. For example, you set a rule that you can’t look at social media until 10 am and then you put it away for the night after dinner. If you can’t stop yourself, let your phone do the work with an app like Offtime.

Untangle the Excessive Demands on Female Leaders

Based on the same McKinsey data, COVID-19 workplace shifts caused unequal challenges for female leaders, especially when compared to men. The pressures of household responsibilities, fear of suffering job performance, and lack of flexibility/work-life balance forced many women to scale down their careers or leave their job. One in three working mothers faced this decision due to limited childcare options.

It’s even tougher is when you’re the solitary female in your position. The report explains, “Senior-level women are also nearly twice as likely as women overall to be ‘Onlys’—the only or one of the only women in the room at work.” This circumstance sets the stage for microaggressions, criticisms, dismissals, and high-performance stakes, all of which contribute to female leaders experiencing burnout 1.5 times more than male leaders.

If you add childcare into the equation (working mothers currently spend 15 more hours on domestic labor per week than men), it becomes an impossible situation.

This is when it becomes important for organizations to play a role in helping women mitigate their burnout.

How Organizations Can Help Female Leaders Combat Burnout

You’re likely not the only woman dealing with this burnout in your organization—and in some cases, it takes the organization to make changes for you to be able to better manage the stresses put on women in the workplace.

Consider using these strategies to recognize and counteract burnout for women company-wide:

  • Promote mental health awareness: Ensure transparency surrounding mental health benefits, I.E. therapy and other available resources. If your benefits plan is lacking, Eric Freedman, founder and CEO of eSkill, suggests circumventing financial barriers by exploring options such as telehealth counseling sessions or access to mobile wellness subscriptions. Companies can also provide mental health support with group meditation classes. Organizations including Nike, Google, and Sony have built this into their company culture.
  • Support working mothers: Assist working mothers in finding solutions for childcare or allow for more flexible hours for those who also home-school their children due to COVID. Don’t just to send an email or memo, but make changes that help women make these changes in their workday. What’s more, female leaders can lead by example by setting boundaries, like being offline at certain times, so their direct reports know that it’s acceptable to do the same. Check out this Fast Company piece, which highlights how other companies provide for the “patchwork of childcare needs” of their employees.
  • Get real: It’s important that company leaders don’t just talk about these things, but they take real action. This will look different for each organization, starting with getting serious about allowing for greater flexible schedules, getting realistic about workloads and where support is needed, updating paid leave policies, and even discussing whether female leaders’ pay is equivalent to the work they’re doing.
Female Leaders: Support Yourself and Others

Whether you manage women in leadership positions, shape your HR policies or workplace culture, or are a female executive, you’re likely experiencing burnout in some way. The first step to solving this issue is understanding where the root causes are and then taking real action to provide solutions. It’s time to put sustainable policies and processes into place so female leaders can do their job without an impossible burden on their shoulders.

Jessica Thiefels is the author of 10 Questions That Answer Life’s Biggest Questions, podcast host of Mindset Reset Radio, CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting and founder of the Femxcutive Personal Brand Coaching Program. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur. She also contributes to Fast Company, The Ladders, and more. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Leah Meehan: Enterprise Data Governance, Measurement and Reporting, State Street

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Leah Meehan“The most important thing is to listen to your gut. Whatever it is, the voice in your head, there’s something that just drives you,” says Leah Meehan. “I have zero regrets in life because I’ve made every decision I had to make with the best information I had at the time.”

Meehan also talks about translating between worlds, the most important time you’ll ever invest in, diversifying your personal board of directors and creating balance through a fake commute.

Listening To Your Gut

With a master’s degree in criminal justice from Boston University, Meehan’s path threw a curveball. After about five years of working as a Correctional Program Officer, Meehan knew that civil service was not for her.

She did not resonate with the annual cycle of indiscriminate pay raises for which performance was irrelevant. She was one of four women out of a class of 84, and often had to remind herself that she had earned her place there as a woman, just like everyone. But what leaving really came down to was the undeniable knowing in her gut and heart.

“I started talking about leaving, and people thought it was crazy because the retirement package is so good and the stability and pay are good,” she recalls. “But it was one of those things in my gut that I knew I had to do, no matter, and I’m so glad I did.”

Once she first crossed to the private sector with Fidelity Investments, Meehan was involved in employee background investigations and from there she moved to analyzing behaviors related to money laundering. From there, she eventually moved towards her current focus on data governance, now with State Street.

Translating Between Two Worlds

With data and analytics becoming an even bigger part of our lives, Meehan’s work is moving and expanding, faster than ever.

She loves the ability to reach through the hard evidence of the data to prove or disprove something that the client perceives, sometimes opening up a whole area of insight they had not even considered.

“I’m a visual person and when you visualize data, it’s amazing how that can get across to people in different ways and in different languages. It doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert, an extrovert, a data person or not,” Meehan says. “When you see a visualization you know what that means—there is an art to that.”

To craft a compelling story for her clients with the data, she has to be able to listen closely and bridge the numbers with what is important to them.

“If you’re not gearing your data towards your audience, it can be totally lost on them, or falsely interpreted,” says Meehan. “You have to understand what the client is doing, what’s important to them, what their end goals are, what their process is, how they view success or failure and then you need to interpret that in the data.

“I think my job over the last 15 years has developed to be an interpreter between the technical and the business side,” she continues. “That middle section is where I live.”

Investing In Fostering Connection

Meehan feels that the most valuable mentor-mentee relationships she has developed over the years are those that came together informally, through meeting casually and recognizing a connection.

“I’ve also been lucky throughout my career to have several people sponsor me, and I mean they would go into a room and fight for me—a job, a raise, a promotion, taking on a new project,” she says. ”I’ve been fortunate to have that, and I’ve also worked hard at fostering those relationships.”

Meehan recognizes that with work to do and often pending deadlines, dropping everything to go for a half hour coffee can sometimes feel like time not well spent.

“But to me, it’s the most important time,” she iterates. “If you make those personal connections with people, it will help you down the road, personally and professionally.”

Even now, she finds nothing more rewarding as a manager than watching her team members grow and advance to dreams they have aspired to, no matter where it might take them.

“I encourage that, and to think I had a small part in their progress makes me happy,” reflects Meehan. “When I see my team doing well, spread out over the years at various firms doing what they love, and still coming back to me to let me know how they are or to ask for references, that’s what makes me the most proud.”

Diversifying Her Board of Directors

Meehan is a big believer in cultivating your own personal board of directors—the people that you can call on as advisors from a personal and professional standpoint. Recently, she’s been focusing on bringing in a greater diversity of perspectives to bounce ideas off of.

“I realized the people I go to often are very similar to me, so when I go to them for advice, they’re probably going to give me what I want to hear,” she observes. “So I have one person on my board who has been a friend for a long time, and he tells me ‘how it is’. He does not hold anything back, to the point it sometimes upsets me, but he’s helping me to move ahead; I need more of those people, to diversify my board.”

Creating Balance in Covid Times

Certainly the remote working office has impacted office dynamics, including going from wearing a suit everyday to yoga pants. But the stronger impact for Meehan has been on her work-life balance.

“In the beginning of Covid, we thought we were the lucky ones because all of our friends with kids were really struggling with homeschooling,” says Meehan, speaking for her husband and herself. “But then we went through a period where we worked more online, and our work-life balance got thrown completely off.”

Meehan realized that her friends with children at least had some consistent schedule of making dinner, putting kids to bed. Her husband and her did not have the external pulls on attention, so could work into the night and barely make dinner.

“We had to take a step back and create some boundaries,” says Meehan.

In her remote home office in Boston, she has now created a “fake commute” at both the beginning and end of her workday to mimic the transition of her twenty minute walk to work—she goes on a walk and may do yoga or meditation. She blocks off an hour in the middle of the day as well for herself, and has dinner with her husband.

Together they share a passion for travel, have summited Mount Kilimanjaro a few years back and are bound for Antarctica in 2023.

By Aimee Hansen

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Remote Working Hacks: From And For Executive Moms

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When interviewing female executives for her first book, Pulitzer-winning career columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Joann Lublin, became intrigued by the strong representation of executive moms.

“I was surprised to observe that more than 80 percent of the women, irrespective of where they had landed in their jobs, had kids,” she recalls. “And when I looked at those who had become public company CEOs, the percentage was even higher.”

With a career focus on leadership and executive women, Lublin interviewed 86 prominent executive mothers for her recent book, Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life, to gain insight into juggling both managerial roles and families.

We spoke with her to glean insightful hacks from successful executives for managing the remote workplace, as it exists in 2021.

Not the Remote Office We Anticipated

While remote work is part of the solution towards gender equality, forced remote working in the COVID-19 context has been a curveball of mixed gendered impacts.

“I don’t think any working mother in America expected that the multiple roles that we were already playing—the first shift, the second shift, and what I call “the third shift,” the mental load—would all be exacerbated by the fact that now the kids would be stuck at home,” says Lublin, “and because we have gendered role expectations, mom would be seen as the primary teacher, caregiver, parent and all of the above.”

Lublin points out that mothers with children under 12 were nearly three times as likely as fathers to have left their jobs between February and August of 2020. As of November, research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported that when it came to parents with children under five, “while nearly all fathers returned to the labor force, mothers regained virtually none of their lost ground”.

“The solutions have to be both personal and societal. On one hand, women have to stand up and insist that parenting is not a solo art. To the extent there are two parents in the home and they’re both working, this has to be a co-parenting arrangement,” says Lublin. “By the same token, they need to speak up and make their needs known to their employers, who in turn not only must trust their employees to get the work done while showing maximum flexibility, but also need to be checking in frequently with their employees.”

Here are six hacks for managing the 2021 remote working office:

 

Set Your Availability

Whether company or individual-driven, Lublin observes the trend and importance of setting hours when you are unreachable.

One Gen-X executive, who has been working remote for years, agreed 7-11 am as her protected hours with her company, reserved for her yoga, exercise and morning routine with her children.

This executive also began scheduling outside interruptions to her day (eg. home maintenance) only during the fringe hours when she would normally be on her commute.

Coordinate Your Co-Parenting

One executive and her husband were each starting their own companies, now both at home with their four and six year old children.

“They initially winged it. It all happened pretty suddenly and you think, we’ll just sort of take one day at a time,” says Lublin. “That was not working.”

The solution the two former Nike executives turned entrepreneurs found for successful co-parenting was to create a  spreadsheet each Sunday night, where they blocked off work engagements and agreed three-hour shifts of rotating parenting responsibilities for the week. While they also learned to allow for flexibility within a plan, this helped them to both dedicate time to family and their work endeavors.

Another way to manage the overall household, says Lublin, is to involve older children. One executive rewarded her teenage daughter for supporting her six year old in doing her schoolwork from home.

Embrace “Work-Life Sway”

Lublin addressed the elusive idea that is “work-life balance” in a chapter called “Manager Moms are not Acrobats” in her first book, Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World.

“That quote came from an executive who strongly believed that this idea of work-life balance was an impossible ideal,” recalls Lublin, “that we could no more achieve work-life balance than we could stand on one leg for that wonderful yoga pose for 24/7.”

Early in her recent research, she came across work-life sway, an approach which encourages ebb and flow between life and work, immersing in whichever you are in right now.

“The idea of work-life sway is that when we have to be a 110% in the moment for work, we will give our all and then some,” says Lublin. “But if life invades or intrudes, if the water heater overflows or the toddler comes running and dumps the contents of her diaper on your lap, you won’t get flustered or totally fall apart or give yourself a guilt trip. You will sway to being present in the other part of your life. The whole concept here is to go with the flow.”

She cites an executive who left her office immediately when she received a video from her nanny of her daughter taking her first steps, and was then home in time to witness the second and third steps.

Release The Guilt

Lublin notes that Melanie Healy, now a Board Member, Investor and Strategic Advisor to many organizations, not only inspired the chapter title mentioned above, but also encouraged her to focus on ditching working mother guilt as “a complete and fruitless waste of our energy.”

If you sit down to eat dinner at 7pm with your children because the day was full until then, as an example, then celebrate that you’re sitting together for dinner rather than guilt yourself about the time.

Unlike many boomer moms, Healy did not hide the personal importance of her work, and instead involved her children in work decisions. She would share with them why a work trip was important to her as much as why their school and extracurricular events were important to her.

Another executive mother with young kids gave her children the power to invoke family time in the evening on demand.

Take Self-Care Time

“The book points out is that self-care is not selfish care,” says Lublin. “If we don’t take care of ourselves, we’re going to burn out.”

From taking two hours to herself on a Sunday when the other parent has the kids to taking a sabbatical, executives found time for personal regeneration to prove essential, even when they resisted doing it.

After a sabbatical, one executive mother decided no longer to be CEO of her company, and instead became Chief Visionary Officer to reduce the amount of operational work she was involved in.

Leverage Job-Share or Reduced Schedule

Turning to personal experience, the first time she proposed a four-day work week with a 20% cut in pay and benefits at WSJ, Lublin was declined.

At that point, she had one child under four years old and was just back from maternity leave with her second. But later that year, WSJ published a front-page story about moms returning to work after maternity leave only to throw in the towel. Norman Pearlstine, Managing Editor at the time, reached out to her.

“I could really relate to that,” she told him. “You know, I’ve got two kids under four. I’m working full-time and I’m dying. I really can’t do it. It’s just too much.”

He invited her to re-propose her reduced schedule and not only did she receive the four-day week work, she also kept full pay and benefits—with the condition she could not work on Friday at all or the deal was off.

Not only did the reduced hours not diminish her productivity, as her bosses had trusted, but she was promoted to management a few years in. Her reduced schedule helped her effectiveness and set a newsroom precedent that allowed other women to job-share.

Lublin advocates that women consider job-sharing as a strategy for advancing in management.

Recognize that Parenting Builds Your Leadership

Lublin feels that parents learn delegation, multitasking and other skills that help them become better leaders. “I think women in particular are able to hone certain skills that make them more effective bosses,” she observes, “particularly, they learn the importance of being an empathetic listener.”

She reflects that being a highly successful reporter did not prepare her to be a successful boss, but parenting was complementary and did help.

“Having children before I moved into management taught me how important and how good it is to be a great mentor,” Lublin concludes. “To be a good human being is to give back and pay it forward.”

By Aimee Hansen

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