Before becoming your favorite author and speaker—come on, now!—I ran an executive search firm. We had 35 staff living all around the globe, from Seattle all the way to Siberia (literally). And yes, I know Seattle is not far from Siberia if you take the short way, but going the other way around, we had people across the United States, South America, several countries in Europe, and yes, in Moscow and Siberia, too.
We hired MOMS.
Not just moms, but moms-to-be, too. (And yes, this story could also apply to dads, dads-to-be, or young unmarried people—we had a few of those as well. But mostly? Mostly, it was moms.)
We hired the right talent for the right job at the right time. And those people were moms.
Why Did We Hire Moms?
When my business started to grow, I learned something very hard about myself: I was a terrible manager. I was an okay leader, starting to even become a good and maybe one day great leader, but I was crap at managing people. I just didn’t care about all the excuses for why someone couldn’t get their work done to the level of excellence that I (and more importantly, our clients) demanded. I much preferred to bring in challenging assignments and then praise my team for excelling at meeting even the toughest amongst them.
But, the more we started to grow, the more the team needed someone dedicated to their continuous learning, to the systematizing of standards, to (ugh) regular staff meetings. I met with a woman who was basically being sidelined in my old search firm because her husband was a foreign service officer, and he was about to move them to Moscow. I had already been doing this work from my home office for a decade, as had my people, and I didn’t understand why our old firm couldn’t let her do the same thing.
But they couldn’t. Or, they wouldn’t.
So, I told her that if she wanted to come work with me, she could manage (and eventually grow) the team. And, within a year, she texted that she had met someone in Moscow who wasn’t really looking for a job but who was too smart just to be another trailing spouse to another foreign service officer. And then it happened again, and again, and again
We realized that smart people marry smart people, and when those smart spouses are precluded from work because of foreign visa requirements, and also only want to work part-time because they want to explore their service post and raise a family, then their degrees and brains and drive are wasted without exactly the type of employment proposition we could offer.
Simply put: we gave them consonance.
Consonance is when the work you love to do is being called upon to solve a problem at hand, and you are being rewarded for solving that problem in a way that matters to you.
These moms had degrees in library science, research, sociology, psychology, and would be excellent researchers and interviewers. They were all married to people who chose a career of public service and we were doing specifically mission-driven executive search work. And they wanted to make some money but valued time, freedom, and flexibility more than dollars, so the part-time, client-focused, assignment-based nature of the work fit perfectly.
We gave them consonance, and in return, they gave us invested, excited, and engaged work.
