A-list Exclusive Interview: Mom-In-Chief author Jamie Woolf

Oakland resident translates her two decades of success training business leaders into an inspiring new book to motivate parents.

Over the past two decades, Oakland resident Jamie Woolf has consulted businesses and University of California faculty on the subject of leadership in the workplace. A mother of a teen and a ‘tween, Woolf realized her area of expertise is just as relevant to parents as professionals, which is why she authored Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family From Chaos. In addition to her new book from Jossey-Bass Publishing, Woolf’s writing can be found in Parenting magazine, Working Mother magazine, and on Huffingtonpost.com and Workingmother.com.
Woolf will be the keynote speaker at the Diablo Women on Monday, May 4 at the Claremont Resort. While Diablo Women is an invite-only event, we thought our readers would be interested in her story as well, so we had a chat with Woolf over lunch at Yankee Pier in Lafayette.

Diablo: Your background is in leadership consulting in the business world. When did you realize these professional skills were equally relevant to parenting?

JW: The process of writing the book came to me in a mild epiphany when I had my first child. After two decades of talking about managing conflict and challenges in the workplace—having a good sense of teamwork, all those skills that are talked about in the work realm—I thought, “why do we leave all these skills in the office?”

There were a lot of transferable skills from being leaders in the workplace to enhancing the experience as parents. I think we can make the job of being a parent more rewarding. Being a parent is a leadership job, its not just about getting the kids to soccer on time.

There are so many books about parenting are in my mind, but they are so much about the mundane aspects of parenting. I’ve always thought, “What about leadership?” You’re raising a human being, building a family. These are really important things.

Diablo: It seems like success in the workplace can be more easily qualified through promotions or similar recognitions than success in parenting.

JW: My hidden agenda was to exalt the work of motherhood. When Michelle Obama said that she was looking forward to being mom-in-chief, expanding the notion of leadership and creating this more exalted look at motherhood, that was really positive.

Diablo: The workplace and parenthood balance brings up the “having it all” issue—how can moms balance careers and parenting. I just heard a radio interview with Dr. Laura Schlesinger who has a new book out in praise of stay-at-home moms. Her angle seems that moms should not try to balance work life with motherhood, that they should stay at home.

JW: Of course, the mommy wars have been going on for years, and they get ignited again and again. I don’t think it’s a healthy practice to judge what anyone else’s choice is. What I despise about people like Dr Laura is the way they sit in judgment of people who make a different choice than theirs. Many moms have to work to make ends meet, they simply don’t have the choice to stay-at-home full time.

And as far as “having it all”—I don’t think you can do it. You can’t really have it all, it’s a myth. If you’re working out of the home , and raising your kids, it’s a lot of work. There’s just no way to balance it all perfectly. Our society is not set up to support working families, that’s the sad truth.

Diablo: What were the most surprising or helpful tips that you received from the interviews you did with CEOs/parents?

JW: I did about two years of interviewing hundred of moms and dads. The most surprising thing I learned in talking to these savvy businesswomen and men, is that they love being parents and see it as the most important work that they do. Yet the way that parenting was talked about, it was more about the logistics of parenting—the headspinning logistics, like how to carpool two kids to two different activities at the same time. Really mundane stuff

It took some work to raise the bar to talk about parenting as a leadership challenge. Even people that consider themselves very successful leaders in the work place, don’t necessarily consider themselves leaders in the home. I started to see these lightbulbs going off when people realized that getting your kid to take a bath and not squabble about it is about instilling some sort of respect in the house, not just an immediate task to get through because he’s dirty.

So it was interesting to see when the conversation went from logistics to a more strategic, sophisticated, and creative approach to parenting.

Diablo: What well-known CEOs shared their parenting challenges?

JW: Working Mother magazine publisher Carol Evans offered a lot of self-disclosure. She talked about the pressures of getting her magazine to stay afloat after she acquired it on September 11, 2001. Obviously, this was not the best time to take over a magazine, deal with advertisers, etc. She could be rational about the challenges though.

But then she started talking about her daughter’s eating disorder, and it became so much more emotional. This brought up an interesting issue. Parenting is much more emotionally charged than work is. At work we use our rational mind more to make good strategic decisions. We make so many parenting decisions based on our emotions, and we deal with more guilt, and are more self-conscious about failing our children.

Another example came up when I interviewed the head of Gymboree, Joan Barnes. She let her work life take over to the degree that she would up in the hospital. This brought up the issue of balancing priorities, which we can all relate to.

Diablo: I know a couple in the East Bay, and both partners have very successful careers and seem to have plenty of satisfaction in their jobs. As parents, however, they seem obsessed with having the perfect birthday party and all the best extracurricular activities for their kids, and nothing is ever a complete success. It gets to the point where everyone—kids, parents, family, and friends—are exhausted and stressed out about the smallest details. Do you see this a lot?

JW: Absolutely. I just wrote a piece about this for Parenting magazine. We do a number on ourselves about what makes a good parent. We compare ourselves to the person down the street who seems to have the perfect family and the perfect birthday party. But is it really so important that our kids have a better party than another kids? There’s this weird peer pressure that parents succumb to about these external choices, and you have to ask yourself, “what are our goals and what are our values as parents?”

I have had this experience with my own kid, who plays recreational soccer. She happens to be pretty damn good, so I started getting parents and coaches trying to recruit her for these competitive leagues. But what does this competitive soccer mean? What are the values here? Does it mean that we spend every weekend going off to tournaments all over the state and the kids don’t have a life outside of soccer? That wasn’t right for our family.

There is a syndrome called achievement biproxy—psychologists have named this for parents who get a boost from their kid’s success on the playing field. Robbing our kids of the best part of childhood, which is really quite ordinary. Kids are not bored anymore because they are going to enrichment activities day in and day out.

Diablo: Do you notice any differences between the issues that Bay Area parents had and those of people in other parts of the country?

JW: No, not really. I didn’t see any difference in the Bay Area from small town Kansas or small town Ohio across the board. The big issue now is this pushing of kids to be structured in every activity they do all day long.  There’s no more kick the can games on the playing field, now everything is structured. Parents swoop in, and are so involved with every detail of their kid’s lives that there isn’t room for challenges and facing adversity.

A lot of teachers, from elementary school teachers to college professors, told me that kids today seem to feel entitled to their success, they should not have to work hard for it. Consequently, the kids just don’t try very hard. They look at Wikipedia and the Internet for answers; their work is derivative and copied. It’s all about doing the minimum effort to get an A.

Diablo: What response have you received from the parents who have read your book?

JW:  I have received some inspiring e-mails. It completely makes my day when I get an e-mail that says that someone has used the ideas in the book as a step-by-step guide about how to deal with conflicts and parenting issues.

One chapter about power struggles has gotten a lot of response. I ask parents, ‘What do you want out of this conflict?” It’s not about winning or losing. I’ve gotten a lot of stories about specific conflicts—how do spouses discipline, how to put a kid to bed, that kid of thing—that tell me that the easing of these power struggles has been very helpful. The reason is that you’re able to look at bigger goals than the content of the struggle itself.

To read excerpts of Woolf’s book, as well as her various columns and blogs, go to mominchief.com.

 

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