#40 Life hacks from our peers: the importance of Real World Role Models

We’ve been running Real World Role Models sessions at
MyCollective for over two years now, and it’s one of my favourite
formats - modelled on our Get Inspired podcast series, but
featuring speakers who may still be less well known, but are
closer to our participants in terms of where their lives are at
the moment.

Our podcast guests tend to be board members, professors, book
authors - experts who speak eloquently on our core topics, most
of whom had children themselves 10, 15, sometimes 20 years ago.
But the world was different then; we’ve seen a real shift happen
in the past few years, with COVID and the quota and the lack of
skilled labour all changing perceptions both of what’s possible
and what’s necessary. That has resulted in a power shift in the
labour market which means that if you’re coming back from
parental leave now, you’re coming back to a different situation
than previous generations.


That’s why Real World Role Models is so important to me. Usually
we don’t publish these sessions, but the speakers at our most
recent session - Dagmar Schaefer, Maria Ostrowski and Nele
Pollmann - very graciously allowed us to record the first part
our conversation, so that we can share some of their wisdom.
Their advice broadly fell into three categories -
for people about to go on parental leave: prepare your next
career step before you go. For example, you could find someone to
replace your current role permanently, with a view to taking a
higher position when you come back (armed with all those parental
skills which are of course also leadership skills!) Instead of
creating more work for your manager, create a solution - and then
make it happen.
for people in the process of returning from parental leave: set
up the space and time that you need to be able to breastfeed /
parent in your workplace, so that it becomes manageable and not a
constant source of stress.
for people back at work properly: you’re in the efficiency zone!
You will notice that you are more effective at work than you’ve
ever been, but the hack here is to make time to network and to
keep that connection to your group and peers. Working parents
tend to be very efficient at home too - but here it’s important
to delegate, and to share the entire responsibility package with
co-caregivers, not just individual tasks.

#realworldrolemodels #impulsesessions #getinspired #mycollective
#parentalleave #elternzeit #workingparents