When you’re a working mom, we carry mom guilt because we’re not home for dinner or we miss a school play.
But when you’re a working mom who has to travel for work and spend most of the day attending meetings, there is double the amount of guilt because you know you’ll be away from the kids for days or weeks at a time.
I’ve been working with Kim as her Virtual Assistant for over a year now. I’m amazed at how easy she makes being a ‘traveling working mom’ look.
So instead of sharing some tips to show you how to make being a mom and career woman work, I thought I would interview Kim about it and here’s what she had to say…
Working Mom Interview
Tell us a little about your career?
I started out as an engineer working in the semiconductor industry. After a few years I realized I didn’t want to continue on that path so took a pretty big pivot into marketing communications working for an external agency. The first part of my career was in Silicon Valley during the high growth..com/.com/rising stars of Google and Facebook etc.
For family reasons I moved to the Twin Cities Minneapolis Saint Paul around 2007. From there I took another major pivot into the corporate world working for the Dow chemical company as director of communications for its water business. From there I took some rolls in marketing and digital and today I am the global leader for sustainability and communications for Dupont water solutions. I’ve been in the sustainability sector for the last 15 years and that’s where my passion lies.
What has been most rewarding about working in your industry?
The most rewarding part of my work is seeing the impact of ideas and how they can change peoples minds and behavior. Also working with our customers and helping them solve their sustainability challenges. That’s the most fun is that sort of collaboration with customers and with my team.
You obviously don’t have a traditional 9-5 job. Tell us about your support system.
The support system is critical. I’ll start with my family. My husband has a major support he has also a pretty intense job but doesn’t require as much travel and he picks up the cooking and grocery shopping as well as other things around the house so we really divide the duties up pretty Squirrley.
He’s also a very involved father who tends to know what’s going on with schedules and sports. It’s good to have that sort of partner so less things fall through the cracks. Then we have the outside help. I use the schools after care program as well as a personal nanny especially to help with mornings. Mornings are the hardest because everyone scrambling getting up and out of the house.
Outside of that, I have hired help for yardwork. At work I’m fortunate enough to have someone to help me with my calendar, schedule, travel and expenses.
Because I have teenagers who drive I also asked them to do shopping and errands for me. They tend to enjoy this activity anyway.
You’ve managed to become successful in your career and yet you still manage to be involved in your kid’s lives. Tell us how balance being a working mom and being a mother?
It’s been one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life. The support system certainly help. To be honest I’m constantly making trade-offs. I’ll take a redeye to get home so that I can take my daughter to school for example. I’ll leave work in the middle of the day to go meet a teacher and have to juggle and reschedule meetings. I do my best to make up at night or just be as efficient as possible.
I’m also learning the art of ignoring things and prioritizing constantly. I think if you can deliver a few big impactful projects for the business that’s the main thing. When I have to think through as I’m looking at the hundreds of emails in my inbox is which of these things trying to get my attention is what I’m going to be measured on and / or are important to my relationships such that I can get my work done which to be honest is more and more around influencing others versus having direct control.
If you could go back in time to when you were a first-time mom just starting her career, what advice would you give her?
Pushback on projects and things are being asked of you to do that do not line up with your key performance indicators. This can sometimes be harder than it looks because sometimes those projects are request from your boss or your bosses boss. But in the past month I have pushed back and packaged up and rolled off two big time sucking projects that don’t support my alignment to moving the business forward per my job role.
You might wonder how I did this and to be honest I think it has to do with the maturity of being able to articulate why certain projects don’t make sense and provide a solution for handing them off versus just giving a problem back to your boss.
Now there’s always going to be those things that stretch you where you have to lean in and show that you are capable of doing more but sometimes projects are just not value add. And I would say to my younger self take a step back and really think through what you’re doing and if it really is value add for your career, your business and your team.
What Did You Think?
I’m sure as a working mom, you can relate to Kim, I know I did! 🙂
Tell me what you think in the comments below and before you go, please share this post with the working moms you know!
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