If you're a good leader, you can thank your Mum
What on earth did their mothers think? In the crisis hours, through the cold Canberra night, when the numbers were counted and re-counted, what did the mothers of successive Australian prime ministers think?
When Rudd went, then Gillard went and Rudd returned. When Abbott went and Turnbull arrived. What were the leaders hearing from their mothers, whether explicitly down the phone line or in imagined form, from the grave?
Were they proud of their kids' chutzpah, or were they ashamed of their treachery? Did the mothers simply play the role of active listener? And did those conversations always end in a plea from mum to "call me when you get there and don't forget your manners"?
On Mother's Day, it is timely to consider an inarguable foundation of leadership: mothers make leaders. Your mother – with all her love, mistakes and otherwise – made you the leader you are today. She does, and always will, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "carry the key to your soul in her bosom".
A quick kicking of maternal tyres amongst prominent leaders helps our consideration of this. Our (current, but don't blink) Prime Minister Turnbull exhausts and overwhelms us with his constant proving and re-proving of just how spectacularly clever he is. He was delivered to us this way by his brilliant, absent mother. "If I work harder and do better, will she come back?" he recalled thinking as a child, he told the ABC's Australian Story.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in the bleakness of Communism. Her mother made plans with her for the future, a future of a united Germany, which she insisted would give her daughter greater opportunity than the little girl could then imagine.
President Obama's leadership ideals started with a single mother who agitated for societal change, planting the seed of what Obama himself called his "audacity of hope".
Every leader has a mother, whether present, absent, toxic or unconditionally loving. And every person's leadership style was developed when they were toddlers, in response to that mother. The Jesuits are largely credited with the maxim "Give me a child of seven and I will give you the man". Let's give Francis Xavier the benefit of the doubt and assume that if he were around now, he'd be gender inclusive, and let's also agree that in many ways, he's right.
Who taught you how to handle a betrayal of friendship? Now, in the office, we call that "building trust" and "teamwork". Who was there when you didn't make the soccer rep. team? Now we know that as "building resilience" and "feedback". When you wanted an ice cream and knew you'd have to work out a way to get it, how did you convince your mum? This was the beginning of your "strategic thinking".
Leaders and their mothers have a lot to answer for.
There's the exceptional leader I know who told me of the pivotal decision her mother made on schooling. She is an identical twin and the two girls, who were inseparable during their primary school years, were sent to separate high schools. Their mother trusted them to deal with being apart, knowing that this was their best chance of fully developing their distinct identities.
The twins each became school captain at their respective schools, an impossibility had they stuck together. While remaining closely connected, each twin has contributed enormously to society in separate fields: would this have occurred if not for that pivotal decision?
“It’s impossible to over-state the power of a mother.”
There's the man, in a large leadership role, whose mother saw and seized his opportunity, knowing it depended wholly on her own broken heart. She was a single mother in the bush, working part-time. He was a smart kid. She couldn't afford expensive schooling but she knew his intellect was his gateway to choices she never had. So she prioritised his study above all else, tracked down scholarships in obscure corners and he did better in year 12 than anyone – mum included – expected. She never told him of her own heartbreak when he inevitably left for a prestigious university, then a shiny job in the city.
He now leads a big business. His reverence for the mothering he experienced is demonstrable in his leadership decisions. He's the first to find new ways to support employees balancing work and parenting responsibilities, and his sense of responsibility is the foundation for his leadership: he knows what had to happen to get him there.
Then there's the narcissist leader, and you've worked with this one. He's incapable of empathy. The needs of others – personal time, assistance, explanations – are invisible to this leader. He's so very hard to work with, but he's ubiquitous (and often omnipotent) in our corporates. As a child, he so beguiled his own mother that she created his narcissism, ignoring any opportunity for him to learn respect or compassion for others, constantly reinforcing his supremacy.
You'll have worked with the paranoid leader who is perpetually gossiping about workplace Armageddon, creating and propelling conspiracy. What was his mother always so worried about? Is that why he feeds on fear? It brings to mind that definition of a sweater: "a garment worn by a child when his mother is chilly".
The disillusioned leader is a drain. She never believes anything can be improved. You may know her, she always clutches defeat from the jaws of victory, always finds a way to make the eminently possible uninspiring. What did her mother teach her about her own limitations? Perhaps she was once the girl I saw in the park recently who told me she wants to be a singer one day, but whose mum responded, "darling you're a terrible singer, don't be ridiculous".
What about the pleaser leader, who goes along with things and never really states her intention, never demonstrates her inherent wisdom and power, for fear of upsetting? Did she learn how to do that from a mother who was a sufferer – as so many caring mothers are – of the burnt chop syndrome? It was Oscar Wilde who said "All women become like their mothers, and that is their tragedy." (He added, "No man does. That's his.")
It's impossible to over-state the power of a mother. Whatever she did, whatever she gave you, she put you here. And it is an almost un-losable bet that at all times, she was trying to protect you.
I have a friend – powerful corporate job, big leadership gig – who tells me she has a staff member in her team whose sole responsibility it is to recruit assistants for the (mostly male) executive team. That's because, as she puts it "when they're hiring assistants, the guys generally forget about capability and instead hire someone they either want to sleep with or be mothered by". And the Oedipal prospect of hiring someone who fulfils both those needs is not unheard of, either…
There's another man I know who has thousands of staff, and earns millions: at the age of 50 he remains his mother's whipping boy. She calls and says she wants that particular hand cream from that specific store and she wants him, not his assistant, to be the one who goes and gets it. And, amidst his 100-hour working week, he capitulates. The impact of this relationship is devastating for those around him: he is so dominated by her that he is unable to have an equal relationship with any woman – he's scared of their power and so suppresses women at every opportunity.
Executive recruitment and leadership development brings a range of psychometric testing. Amongst all the Myers-Briggs and 360-degree feedback exercises, I submit, for your consideration, The Mother Index. In this, participants rate themselves on key leadership attributes in one room, while their mothers rate their progeny on the same attributes in another room.
When the returns are in, the responses from the mother would doubtless be more insightful for the leadership coach who is deciding how to tackle their subject.
Really, how your mother treated you is not your fault, but it is your opportunity. The only certainty any of us can have is that we wouldn't be here without our mothers. However your mum did her job with you, she did it. And I'm betting she did the best she could with what she had. She'd want us to remember our manners, so let's say Happy Mother's Day to mothers of leaders, past, present and future.
