Consulting is a demanding career, and so is parenting. Most people are doing both, and the first thing to go is their own health, friendships, and rest.
In this session, Honeycomb’s Colin Mann is joined by Georgie Rudd, accredited executive coach and author of The Working Parent Equation: Balancing Small Humans and Big Careers. She spent 18 years in global firms, including as Global Head of Learning at Baringa Partners. Her starting point is that the session will not change anyone’s work system, and most people chose a demanding profession for good reasons. What is available is the set of shifts inside a person’s own agency.
What’s covered:
The opening question, prompted by a to-do list written by her then seven-year-old that ended with “eat Milky Way”: what is yours, and where is it on your list?
Why family and work behave like two boulders rolling in from either side, and how health, friendships, and rest get squeezed out of the middle.
The BC era and the AC era (before and after children) and how long people keep running a blueprint for success that no longer fits. Marshall Goldsmith’s “What got you here won’t get you there,” applied to life rather than leadership.
A reflection exercise with your eighty-year-old self, set against Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: what matters now, what you wish you had done more of, and less of.
Why small changes beat wholesale change, illustrated by a senior manager whose shift was simply to eat lunch, and a Head of Transformation who waters the plants for ten minutes before the morning starts.
The Eisenhower matrix turned on yourself: do, delegate, delay, or delete, and the catch-yourself question, “How vital is it that I am at this meeting?”
Non-negotiables written in sharpie rather than chalk, set daily, weekly, monthly, and annually, with low stakes compromises at the other end of the spectrum.
The circle of support as a recruitment exercise, with seven roles to fill: coach, collaborator, connector, counsellor, champion, critical friend, and cheerleader.
Questions from the audience included:
– How to weigh near-term time with your children against the long-term case for working harder now.
– Whether to ask your children how the ‘balance’ feels to them, and what to do with the answer.
– Why the friends you take a career decision to may be the wrong sounding board, and what a more diverse circle gives you.
One to watch if you are holding a demanding consulting career alongside young children, or you lead people who are.
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