How Today’s Moms Re-enter the Workplace Successfully

Returning to work after a career break? This can be challenging but it’s also an opportunity to showcase resilience, adaptability, and a unique skill set. Here are ten tips I learned from this inspiring book - The Comeback by Cheryl Casone. What is your biggest lesson learned as a working mom? Share in the comments section.

1. Strategize Your Comeback

Start by reassessing your career goals. Think about what aligns with your current skills, interests, and lifestyle. Be intentional and strategic about your next move, ensuring it supports the kind of professional and personal life you envision.

2. Own Your Story

Be transparent about your career break without making it the focus of your narrative. Use this opportunity to highlight transferable skills—such as organization, multitasking, and problem-solving—that you’ve honed during your time away from the workplace.

3. Polish Your Resume

HR professionals spend an average of six seconds scanning resumes. Ensure yours is concise, visually appealing, and tailored to highlight the experiences that make you a standout candidate. Emphasize both your professional achievements and any relevant activities you engaged in during your break.

4. Embrace Networking and Learning Opportunities

Don’t let new technologies or workplace dynamics intimidate you. Take advantage of online courses, workplace training programs, or even insights from your kids to get up to speed. Networking within and outside your workplace can also open doors to opportunities and provide invaluable insights.

5. Seek Mentorship from Senior Women

Identify women in leadership who inspire you and reach out to them for guidance. A mentor can provide advice on balancing work and family, navigating challenges, and achieving your career goals while staying true to yourself.

6. Build Your Support Network

It truly takes a village to raise a child. Trust others with childcare responsibilities—be it family, friends, or professional services—and believe that your children will thrive even while you’re at work. This will help ease guilt and allow you to focus on your professional growth.

7. Identify and Leverage Your Skill Set

Every experience, professional or personal, offers a chance to grow. Even roles you may initially consider less significant can demonstrate your maturity, adaptability, and work ethic. Use these as opportunities to shine and make meaningful contributions.

8. Strike a Balance with Colleagues

Full-time work and parenting can leave little room for after-hours networking. Instead, find ways to connect with colleagues during work hours, such as grabbing lunch or coffee. Commit to attending one or two out-of-office events a month to maintain strong workplace relationships.

9. Be Authentic and Confident

Age and experience are advantages—use them. Stay true to your values and let your authenticity set you apart in the workplace. Your professionalism and ability to balance multiple roles are assets that can inspire trust and respect.

10. Be Kind to Yourself

Let go of guilt and focus on your goals. Balancing work and family isn’t about choosing one over the other; it’s about creating a life that honors your ambitions and supports your loved ones. Celebrate the progress you make and take pride in being both a great mom and a successful professional.

What to do when everyone looks to you

What to do when everyone looks to you

I just finished reading an inspiring book - The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou. Julie unexpectedly got into management at the age of 25. She says all she knew about management was best summarized in two words: meetings and promotions. She grew her management skills over time.

Here are my top lessons from her book:

What exactly is a manager’s job

A manager's job is to build a team that works well together, create processes to get work done smoothly, and support members in reaching their career goals. Supporting and caring for someone doesn't mean always agreeing with them or making excuses for their mistakes. Management means bringing people together to achieve the best outcomes. The best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not just telling them what to do.

Management starts with managing yourself

No matter the obstacles, you first need to get deep into knowing yourself - your strengths, your values, your comfort zones, your blind spots, and your biases. When you fully understand yourself, you will know how best to support your team. When you invest in personal learning and growth, you're not just investing in your future but also the future of your team. The better you are, the more you can support others.

Create a concrete vision

Though it's common to hear words like help, improve, and enhance when talking about goals, they don't paint a clear picture. An inspiring vision is tangible and bold. You know instantly whether you have hit it or not because it is measurable. Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly, what do you hope for two or three years compared to now?

Hiring well

It is a manager's role to hire. Yet, hiring is not just about filling holes. If you approach it that way, you will not bring in the best people. It's about figuring out how to make your team and your life much better, and an opportunity to build the future of the organization.

Best feedback meetings

A great feedback meeting gets everyone on the same page about what the success of the project looks like, honestly presents the current status of work, clearly frames open questions, key decisions, or known concerns, and ends with agreed-upon next steps including when the next milestone or check-in will be.

Leading a growing team

I should aim to put myself out of a job: as my team grows in size and abilities, I must grow too to keep pace as its manager. The act of constantly trying to replace myself means that I am creating opportunities to stretch my team and myself.

Never stop talking about what is important

Embrace telling people what you care about. Assume that for the message to stick, it should be heard ten different times and said in ten different ways. The more you can enlist others to help spread your message, the more it is likely to have an impact.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel," Maya Angelou.

Management starts with managing yourself. Photo credit: Pichastock

Socrates and Gossip

Photo credit: Eye for Ebony

There is a Jewish proverb that cautions that what you don’t see with your eyes, you should not witness with your mouth. There is also a Turkish proverb that warns that anyone who will gossip to you about someone else will gossip about you with others.

According to a 2009 study conducted by Dr. Nicholas Emler with 300 volunteers, people spend up to 80 percent of their conversations discussing other people and their habits. Interestingly, Dr. Emler observes that gossip has some social benefits like offering a means for people to connect and learn more about others that they have never met. Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I would like to share with you the history of gossip, how to tell the difference between gossip from a good conversation and how to discourage gossip.

Back in the early days in England, gossip was a good thing. It meant companions at child birth. Yes, the group of women that attended a childbirth session to support the midwife or the expectant mother was actually referred to as the gossip. The verb “to gossip” was first used by Shakespeare in a birth scene to describe the idle talk that the relatives of the pregnant woman had as they waited on the midwife.

However, with time, gossip evolved into a conversation that involved rumors or hearsay about the affairs of others. Mary Gormandy, author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips cautions that gossip has serious consequences to human relationships and development including the loss of trust, reduced teamwork and productivity.

So you might be wondering how do we tell the difference between gossip and a good conversation. To help us understand this, I would like to share with you the story of the great philosopher Socrates. Has anybody heard that story about Socrates and gossip? Socrates was once stopped by an acquaintance as he walked through the markets. “I’ve something important to tell you,” the acquaintance said. “It’s about your friend.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Socrates said. “But, don’t tell me just yet. I run all information through a Three Filter Test to ascertain if I want to know it.” The man looked somewhat puzzled as Socrates continued, “First is the filter of truth. Whatever you want to tell me, have you seen or witnessed it first-hand?” “Umm…I actually heard it from someone,” the man said, “and, it is from a trusted source.”

“Alright. But that does not pass my first test,” Socrates added, “since you don’t know whether it’s true.”

“Second is the filter of goodness. Is that a good statement you want to make about my friend?” “Not really. That’s the reason I wanted—” Socrates interjected, “So, you want to tell me something bad about someone but don’t know if it’s true.

The last is the filter of utility.” He continued, “Your statement about my friend, is that going to be useful to me? ”Not really as such. I just wanted to share”

“Well, if the information is not necessarily true, it is not good, and, it is of no use,” Socrates concluded, “please, I don’t want to know about it.” Therefore, according to Socrates, a good conversation includes information that the speaker has experienced first-hand, speaks positively of the subject and is useful to the recipient of the message.

Mary Gormandy advises that if gossip comes your way, rise above it. So the next time someone approaches you with gossip and you want to discourage him or her, do the following. First, find out the speaker’s intention. For example, feel free to ask him: why do you want to tell me something about Sandra? This way you rack his brains and make him understand you are a responsible person. He might say something like, I just wanted to make you laugh or I just wanted you to be amazed at what happened to Sandra last week. After this proceed to ask them; would you stand by your word if I reported back to Sandra whatever you want to tell me? If they answer to the affirmative, give them a choice to proceed.

Eleanor Roosevelt would not have put it any better when she said –small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas. Ladies and gentlemen let us take up the challenge to be more mindful of our conversations because words once spoken cannot be recalled.

The Abilene paradox: Go along to get along?

Photo credit: Christina-Wocintechchat

Last week, one of my sisters posted her new hairstyle on our WhatsApp group. How do I look? She asked. Within a minute my other sisters had posted Wow! Nice! Chic! Fantastic. All the good words. My sister’s natural hair is long and silky so when she put a short weave, I thought Oh no! It looked bulgy, rough and seemed to be weighing a tonne on her. But guess what, I put up a thumbs-up emoji for her. Perhaps you have done that too before? Told someone something completely different from what you felt or thought? Perhaps not. But what does my sister’s hairstyle have to do with you? Just like I shared a false opinion with her not contradict my other sisters, so sometimes we go along to get along with the majority.

In my research I sought to find out: was there a name to that kind of behavior and what would be the consequences of that behavior to an organization? In 1974, Jerry Harvey, a professor of management science at the George Washington University went out together with his family through the sweltering heat of Texas 170 kilometers away to catch a bite in a town known as Abilene. On returning home, each of the four family members discovered that none of them had really wanted to go but had tagged along with the presumption that the other had wanted to go. The fact that four sensible people provided an opinion opposite to their true thoughts and feelings led professor Harvey to study the behavior. He termed it the Abilene Paradox and from his research, it affected up to eighty percent of employees in an organization.

So what makes an organization to be caught up in a situation where it collectively makes a decision contrary to the thoughts and feelings of individuals? According to Prof. Harvey, people naturally want to belong in a group. People also assume that there could be repercussions for sharing alternative ideas. During one of my meetings with an organization that advocated for social justice, one speaker listed rape as a minor offense. My eyes popped-out, my head boiled, I wanted to shout. But wait! no one else seemed to have noticed and I imagine contradicting a popular colleague would have caused me alienation. I shut up embarrassed and let it pass. 

The Abilene paradox can have serious consequences on organizational resources. In a project I was part of, our team developed a mobile phone app to help communities report social injustices. The initiative was great as it would have saved the organization travel costs. The project was set for piloting with 2,000 with a benevolent fund of twenty thousand US dollars. This included funds for software development and community training. Over coffee, my colleague and I noted a huge gap. Many of the women had basic phones with no space for the forty MB app. But we dared not to dampen the team’s spirit. The project was in the final stages and the team was excited about it. But as you can imagine, the fifty-thousand-dollar project failed at the piloting stage. 

Rooting out the Abilene Paradox keep teams motivated and take ownership of work projects. Rossbeth Canter, a professor at Harvard Business School suggests one-way managers can encourage team members to express what they really think is to present them with two or three options. And then allow them to analyze the pros and cons of each option and come up with a collective decision. Rossbeth further suggests that when running a project, managers must include checkpoints to permit their project team to pause, regroup, and consult before moving forward. Todd Ballowe suggests that managers should assign leadership roles to different team members for diverse ideas and create avenues to voice an opinion. This include talking to people on one on one, creating an anonymous hotline or conducting a private vote.

Frank A Clark says and I quote, "we find comfort among those who agree with us and growth among those who don’t." Organizations hire people like you and I for our unique knowledge and expertise. That expertise goes to waste when we hold back opinions when key decisions are being made. I now take steps to voice my opinions more backing them up with data. Why not take up the challenge too. You never know, you could save your organization twenty thousand dollars.

Nairobi city center turning women into tomboys

For a woman to be regarded a lady it is said that she must act like one. True. However, the environment must also nurture that kind of growth. As much as the Nairobi city center is inevitable for work and pleasure, it fails to offer a conducive environment for ladies. These streets leave no room for elegance and etiquette. Only recently did City Hall send a delegation of hawkers, matatu operators and bodaboda riders to a bench-marking trip in Kigali, Rwanda. Did they learn anything? Is the county government able to bring on some order and sanity to the streets of Nairobi? 

Take for example the state of our roads, most of them lack designated crossing points and even where there is one, motorists continue to ignore the traffic rules as they speed off to reach their destinations. As a result, here is what applies when crossing the road: Look left and then run to the middle of the road as the speeding matatu misses your back by a whisker then look right before crossing the rest of the road. In between however, one has to make do with the bodaboda that pop in from any given direction.

The other challenge is the crowded state of the city center especially on weekdays. To walk from the Koja bus stop to down town Afya Center, a lady has to maneuver through a whole lot of people including pesky parking boys, menacing street boys, beggars and unruly hawkers. As a result, ladies firmly clutch on to their handbags for the fear of any eventuality.  

It is enough that our roads are stressful to maneuver so when rain is added into the picture, a lady will shed tears. The unprecedented pool of water that one has to jump over is unbelievable. No wonder ladies carry two pairs of shoes-adorable high heels for office and rough shoes just for the streets. When a lady finally makes it to the bus stop, she still has to push through the matatu door in the disorderly bus stops. There is no order or comfort on these streets and the city center and the public transport is a mess. 

If the Nairobi County Government truly wants to improve the city environment, then they must look at the solutions from a lady's point of view. Let the county find ways to de-congest the city and apply by laws that will enable a conducive environment for all.