I couldn’t help but laugh a little when I read this week’s lesson and saw all the “Leader Attributes Universally Viewed as Positive”. What made me laugh wasn’t the list itself but the placement of the list right after the “glass ceiling” montage. There has been a lot of debate about the attributes and qualifications of a stay at home mother who is attempting to reenter to the workforce. Any successful stay at home mother the good ones and even some of the ones who are not so good have every single one of these attributes.
Most people do not put the ability to plan a ten year old birthday party on the same level of corporate coordination. These people have never had to deal with perfect party arrangement details in conjunction with keeping the underdeveloped brains of miniature humans busy from one minute to the next. At least I would hope that a group of grown up people wouldn’t need to be entertained at every turn. You want dependable. Hire someone who has been available every second of everyday for the length of their child’s stay on this earth. Dependable is getting puked on at 3 am by the youngest child and then still getting up at 7o’clock to get the older two off to school on time. If it’s a motivational person that you require to light a spark underneath her followers, watch how fast a mother can get her children to move simply by beginning to count to three. A confidence builder you say? If there’s one thing a stay at home mother gets good at after receiving years of macaroni collages it’s making her child feel like they just finished the Mona Lisa, and sometimes that work of art stays on the refrigerator until the glue wears off and the macaroni ends up underneath the fridge. Plans ahead? Why do you think moms carry big purses, it isn’t because we love lugging around fifty pounds of “just in case” on our shoulder. We are prepared. Sticky fingers, grab a baby wipe, runny nose, here’s a tissue, wet pants, got you covered. As a just leader we must not only be able to maintain peace among the natives when the oldest steals the youngest idea of being a pirate and begins retaliating with biting which is countered by hitting and so on; we must also be able to dish out fair and equal punishment to the offending parties. And then we say things like; “if you both decide to be pirates you can work together and find the hidden treasure I’m going to go bury right now”, win-win. All the while we need to motivate our two year old to potty train and convince them that peeing outside should only be done out of site and not in the neighbors flowerbed. All of that and balancing the budget.
A good leader surely is the combination of inborn traits and learned behavior. I would say that as the rule and not the exception most people can be perfectly groomed to slide into a position of leadership. The fast-paced and ever changing environment of a stay at home mom and her ability to grow with the changes is testament to her ability to learn new things. I’m not saying that every woman who has been a stay at home mom will be a good leader but I am saying that discrediting the knowledge that she has acquired over her years as a mother could prove to be a big mistake.
The role of leadership isn’t taken lightly and neither is motherhood. A person who has successfully raised her children who wishes to return to the work force has definitively had more leadership experience than a 22-year-old college graduate. People who don’t put stock in the fact that sometimes life teaches leadership better than work experience are not allowing the kind of diversity into their workplace that is needed to keep the company moving forward.
And that’s all I have to say about that!