This Talent Experience Podcast episode sees us dive into supporting mothers and others juggling a career and caregiving responsibilities with Leslie Forde, who’s research helps mothers in particular make space for self-care. Leslie shares her story to what led her to develop Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs, using her ground-breaking research on working mothers and the stressful and difficult juggling act they have to navigate every day.
More recently she has been studying how the pandemic is affecting work and life for parents and gives tips for business leaders to develop a work culture that allows and supports caregivers to not only succeed and grow but to achieve leadership in their careers.
Here’s how the conversation went… This interview has been edited and condensed.
John Hollon: What led to your research work and the development of MomsHierarchyofNeeds.com?
Leslie Forde: Just over five years ago after I went back to work from maternity leave, which is a very fragile time for new parents and particularly for new mothers, within a few months of coming back I completely burned out at work. At eight months pregnant I had taken on a much larger role in the company and frankly I was a little nervous about it but I was assured that everything will be fine, we have your back, it’s going to be great.
Within three months of coming back I learned that one of my most senior people had left to go into a different division and I had three other people who all for various reasons had to suddenly go out on FMLA leave. I came back to this new job really, where my department was double the size. I was feeling exhausted and depleted. I was sleeping in one hour increments with a newborn but I was expected to deliver my strategic best and I felt hollowed out. I would be working away at one, two and three in the morning and trying to shield my sleeping baby from the glow of the computer and it just became unsustainable.
I left that job, a job that I once absolutely loved and within a couple of years I became really curious how other working moms were doing it. Because research is in my roots, I decided to reach out to some other people with this idea that I had. I was describing to a founder of a mental health startup why mothers are so stressed and I said, well there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and then there’s Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. As soon as I drew it on a piece of paper I became curious, how would other mothers describe and define this? What would it look like? Does it look like mine?
Hundreds of mothers later I refined it to what it is today and this framework still holds. The foundation of a lot of my research is that we’re often trying to juggle these impossible choices: the foundational priorities we have at the bottom (our children’s wellbeing and their milestones and household responsibilities, professional role) are always in conflict with the aspirational categories of the top, which is anything that we might want to do for our mental, emotional and physical well-being. It’s that tension that I became really curious about and started doing my own research studies into in addition to interviewing a lot of experts about over the past four years.
John Hollon: Tell me more about the research that drives it. What are the highlights and what jumped out at you about it?
Leslie Forde: It’s been really interesting. At the end of March I began studying the pandemic to really understand how it’s affecting work and life for parents. Although I began my work really focused on mothers, now that I’ve expanded to look at the pandemic and also on the employer side, I’m really looking at how caregivers are experiencing this. What I’ve learned is that everybody wants to be excellent at everything, which is probably not a surprise. People feel incredibly torn and distraught about the fact that they cannot do their best as parents and cannot do their best as workers, and cannot do their best as caregivers to themselves.
In the most recent study, which has been running since March, now about 44% of the parents in the study of close to 1400 parents have described that they are doing terribly or not as well as usual as workers. More than half (about 60%) actually feel that they’re doing well or better than normal as parents but that still means 40% don’t so it’s not a trivial number. To make up gains in productivity at work everyone’s abandoned self care, in fact 80% of parents have said they’ve all but given up self care.
It’s just not sustainable to not take care of your physical, emotional and mental wellbeing and to work without breaks.
Depending where people are in the world and how much of their community has opened or not opened, in many cases parents are still working locked down with their children, with their families and without a lot of access to resources that made the work-life fit happen.
John Hollon: The juggling act that people have had to deal with over the last year is incredible. There’s a great quote from you that I would love to have you speak about. You said: “Right now we don’t have a work culture in most organizations that supports caregivers, not just mothers, to succeed and flourish and grow and achieve leadership in their careers. Work as a whole, the system of work, the way it’s executed and the history of it doesn’t provide a framework that allows that for most people.” Could you unpack and expand on what was behind it and what you were thinking about? Has that changed at all?
Leslie Forde: What I think is really interesting right now is I’ve been researching all of the internal reasons that it’s difficult for parents to achieve leadership roles and to make this work-life combination fit. There are so many external and systems reasons and it goes back to around the 1950s when you had ‘the ideal worker’. I’ve seen it described in several studies where the ideal worker was usually a man and if that ideal worker was a father he had someone at home who was taking care of the household and taking care of the children on his behalf.
We had this expectation, which I think has persisted right to this day that during work hours, which used to be nine to five and of course now stretched to be much longer than that you’re on call, available, it’s the default and you can at a moment’s notice jump on a call and be at the ready. All of that has really influenced the way work happens. People ask for permission to leave early to pick up their child from school or soccer practice or daycare. People ask for permission if they’re going off to a doctor’s appointment or visit. There’s this expectation that all the time during that eight, nine, ten hour stretch, work is what’s happening and work is the primary focus.
It doesn’t really allow people to have caregiving responsibilities. It frankly, doesn’t allow a lot of people to have hobbies. I found that not only does this particularly harm mothers who still tend to take on the majority of household responsibilities and childcare, it also harms fathers who want to be hands on involved parents. It also harms anyone who has elder care responsibilities for aging parents. This system of expecting the ‘always on’ worker who does not have anything else going on in their lives for this large stretch each day is just not realistic anymore, but persists.
John Hollon: If you were talking to a group of business leaders right now, what’s the most important thing you would want them to know to help support moms and other caregivers who are trying to juggle a job and their caregiving responsibilities? What can they do to help?
Leslie Forde: There’s a lot that they can do. Two things come to mind. First, really look closely at those hidden rules that are in the culture because there’s usually the stated policies, what’s in the employee handbook and what’s on the walls with the mission or vision statement but then there’s how things actually get done. In most workplaces those hidden rules often don’t allow for flexibility.
You have people who are trying to now suddenly maintain their full time workload and perhaps have full time childcare responsibilities as well that they’re trying to manage simultaneously, which of course is somewhat impossible yet they are still expected to be in Zoom calls all day and to just port over the meeting schedule from the office to the home environment. They’re still being expected in many cases to be always on and responding to email, responding to Slack messages, responding to text messages within a moment’s notice.
By way of example, I had a leader once, this was long before I had kids, who had the expectation that anyone on the leadership team was expected to respond to her text messages, messages or emails within 15 minutes. I remember one night I was at dinner, it was unusual that I wasn’t looking at my phone for a long stretch of time and I went up to use the restroom. Checked a message from her, responded and she said ‘where were you?’ This was at eight o’clock at night. This is what happens though at a lot of workplaces. I loved that job and I have a huge amount of respect for that leader, but when I took that job I didn’t expect that it really meant that I needed to be responsive within 15 minutes every time I was sent a message no matter whether it was weekends, day or night. But that was really what the culture was.
Most people don’t know what rules they’re opting into. What workers need now, especially people with care responsibilities is real flexibility. Real flexibility doesn’t just mean working at home, it means not only are my hours different, my synchronous time that I’m available for meetings are available for calls should be different. I can’t be on call for eight, nine or 10 hours a day if I have to feed my children, get them on and off of their Zoom school calls. But it also means performance measures need to be different.
I’ve seen in our study, parents are terrified of performance reviews right now, they’re terrified of losing their jobs. The work and what the output is has to look different to deal with the fact that there are often less hours to apply to it, and that there’s less availability for synchronous meeting time.
John Hollon: My guess is if you had five CEOs or high level C suite leaders, and you told that to them most of them wouldn’t know how to respond. It’s something that they’ve never had to think about and so much of what we’ve had to do the last year as we’ve adjusted the business has been done on the fly. So you’ve got people now we’re working at home who suddenly had to adjust to that and it’s tough.
One of the problems that I’ve had with working at home, and I’ve worked at home for about 10 years, is that the old notion that when you work at home, you’re never off work is absolutely true. My eldest son and his wife both work at home and they’re both trying to teach their kids and monitor them on Zoom doing school at home. Every once in a while they’ll call us with a video chat that’s more for us to sort of babysit and chatter with the kids, because the parents don’t have time to get out of work. So it’s really tough.
Leslie Forde: Exactly. Though it’s challenging, people are afraid to have that conversation. To renegotiate the rules, because income is extremely important and in a pandemic health insurance is extremely important, which in the US is still directly tied to work for most people. Those conversations aren’t happening, which is why I think that if leaders are proactive about creating real flexibility, proactive about adjusting performance measures, proactive about killing those hidden rules that really make it hard for anyone who’s not ‘always on’ and available to be successful. That’s a transition we can make I think.
John Hollon: We believe everyone should have a job that they love one they’re passionate about. So Leslie, what do you love about what it is that you do?
Leslie Forde: I absolutely love having a platform and giving this voice to the benefits of self care, growth and wellbeing as being positively correlated with performance. Taking care of yourself makes you a better worker and a better parent. It’s often people who are not in leadership, I started with mothers who are often the least represented in leadership, have the least amount of discretionary time, but who are hungry to have a voice and hungry to be at the table. For all the years that I’ve been working and working at the senior level, those conversations weren’t happening, people weren’t sharing how they did it and people weren’t sharing how difficult it was. So having the ability to unlock people’s potential, give themselves permission, and give leaders and organizations permission to really think about productivity as correlated to wellbeing is something that I’m incredibly passionate about and I’m proud of.
