My Maternity Lesson #3 — Stay humble
The hours after baby was born were the most heavenly I will see in a while. In the room of the midwife centre, my baby slept 6 hours straight, skin to skin on his father’s chest, as I re-gained some energies through sleep.
In the morning, we welcomed my sister, my mum and my dad to the ample, cosy suite that was our NHS(!) room. To me, it felt like my family was swinging by a hotel during a weekend getaway. Without too much trouble, I had my shower and we all got ready to return home. As usual, I took charge of the packing and I also got involved in the transport planning for the five and a half of us. Saying goodbye to the midwives felt like summer farewells at the school’s gate.
How high spirited I felt. How was that possible? I had just given birth!
At home, I am beat as I stay up chatting with my family (against mum’s advice to go catch some rest) and I insist in helping to arrange food and beds for everyone to spend the night.
And so it continues for one week…
By day 5 I am welcoming guests home and by day 7, well, basically we host a little party home as planned and surprise visitors crowd our living room.
Until I collapse.
As some visitors depart and more arrive, I am feeling exhausted. My recent onset of milk production follows me flowing across the bedroom as I wobble from side to side looking for any respectable piece of clothing I can pick off the floor and wear. My face is swollen in sleep deprivation and my entire body is feeling beaten (now that the pains of labour are finally kicking in). My mind is empty, I can barely formulate logical sentences.
I had walked out of the hospital like the Bride. Then, the hormone adrenaline gone, the weight of early motherhood had hit me in full. I felt the loneliest I had in a long while — yet three loving, perfectly capable helping hands and caring hearts were at home with me.
I try to pull it together. But instead, I burst into dramatic sobs and I start calling out all that is frustrating me. As I take it all out, the perfect domino of my support line falls into shape. My sister to the cooking, my husband to the washing, my mum with the baby. They sort out the spoken and the unspoken troubles. One by one.
It was immediately evident to them who could help where in a way that had not been apparent to me.
At times of crisis, those that are at the helm of organisations (or governments) have a choice, every day: to adopt an optimistic, learning attitude towards failure, call for help and stir direction, or to stick to the course and pedal even faster, hoping to make it quicker through the problems — yet inevitably crushing with the problems.
For the 2008 financial crisis the most truthful analysis in my view was that of New York Times journalist A. R. Sorkin, and not economists or “finance experts” commenting on it. Sorkin had intimate knowledge of the characters involved in the crisis. In his book Too Big to Fail, Sorkin exposes the conversations by the American establishment which reveal the obstinacy, the greed and the lack of humility that ultimately drove a handful of key institutions in the US to make decisions which caused a downturn of global scale.
Substantial research shows that humility predicts effective leadership. According to Dr. Robert Hogan, of Hogan Assessments, “humility is associated with minimizing status differences, listening to subordinates, soliciting input, admitting mistakes and being willing to change course when a plan seems not to work”. Neuroscience even tells us that seeking feedback augments and not crushes our drive (the more one focuses on the feedback, the more several brain regions get activated, particularly memory, and the more committed to act one becomes).
Google has looked into the advantages of humble leadership and — Google being Google — they even built an AI product to spot this trait amongst new recruits.
Why then, if humbleness contributes to shape performance, is this character trait not sought more in leadership? Calling out failure, stepping down and asking for help is not something we like doing. Especially at work where promotions are not handed out over shows of humbleness. No performance scorecard I was ever given — or indeed, that I ever drafted — contained the box “is quick at calling out personal failure and stays humble through change”. Yet when exhaustion strikes and lucidity leaves the leader, stepping down is the only way for others to step up their game.
As a working parent — yet new tag for me!, I worry about what leadership example I set for my kid. As such, I have also grown uber-critical of the type of leaders I myself choose to follow. Too many Diversity & Inclusion events I am invited to are fixated on working mothers’ apparent aspirational goal of “having it all” (sadly the same logic is not applied to the other partner too and thus fails to be truly diverse and inclusive). What I have learned through the initial, hard months of motherhood is that “having it all” translates to “doing it all”. Well, that’s not sustainable. When ‘high’ on adrenaline I was not the best version of my mother-, wife-, sister-, daughter-self.
In current times women and men have the great responsibility to design the road for resilience for the new generations to come. Because we may not be able to control cyclical economic crises but we can certainly contain man-made ones. This requires character. Character traits like humbleness to call out personal failure and to seek help when needed.
