CEOs and MOTHERS
Many CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) and senior executives of both large and small companies, as well as government organizations often attend prestigious colleges and graduate schools in preparation for their careers in business and government. Additionally, they frequently spend years in positions within their organizations that provide training, experience, and insight. Many of these executives also insist on continuing their education through seminars and the reading of business journals. All of this education costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and an equally exacting commitment of time and energy.
The purpose of all of this education is to prepare the executive to lead an organization in the following areas.
- Creating Strategy and Tactics
- Managing, Motivating, and Caring for employees
- Taking risks (calculated) required to keep the organization viable
- Handling difficult, even disgruntled, though valuable personnel
- Carefully managing finances and financial expenditures (Managing a budget)
- Growing the company
All of this education is indeed valuable and necessary for CEOs to be successful in operating their organizations. Yet it can be suggested that there is one more step necessary to fully complete the education of a senior executive. That is to spend some time observing one or more of the most successful and committed executives in the world.
- An executive who, day in and day out, faces most of the management issues and decisions that are experienced by any senior executive.
- An executive that manages valuable personnel, some of whom possess challenging and difficult personalities at times, yet who are extremely valuable and indispensable to the organization.
- One who manages a budget which contains more restrictions than one that is developed for a company in distress.
- One who takes calculated risks in delegating authority to inexperienced personal to monitor new employees
- One who has a plan and willingness to add employees to the organization.
- An executive who handles with care the individual who thinks he is the Chairman of Board and has all the answers and thus must be managed with “kid” gloves.
Who is this epitome of executive leadership and craftsmanship? Many of the full time mothers of this world!!! (This is not to contend that working mothers do not have the same skill set as full time moms.) It is seriously recommended that, part of any executive training; the executive should spend a week monitoring the actions of a mother, one who preferably has three or more small children. It will not take long for the trainee to witness and learn from the mother the qualities of leadership, patience, planning, budgeting, managing difficult personalities that include the personality of the husband, and, most of all, a caring for the “employees.”
Executive leadership forums, graduate schools, seminars, etc. are all valuable tools for increasing the leadership skills of executives. Real life observations of effective mothers would provide even greater insight and educational value.
I would readily volunteer my wife as a mentor for this training exercise, but our children are now grown and my wife has taken on a new responsibility – helping God organize and manage heaven.
The Fourth Commandment – Honor your father and Mother…..but especially your mother.