Don’t mother your team
I had heard this more than once during my two decades as a working professional. The implication was clear enough that nurturing, supporting and caring for team members was somehow thought to be unprofessional, a form of weakness that would in some way undermine my authority. The very word “smother” betrays its origins, right, think about it, it is rooted in the term “mother” which by extension implies that maternal instincts were inherently suffocating rather than sustaining.
But what if we have all had it wrong all along? What if the lens itself was overwhelmingly masculine? As part of the Women Emerging expedition for women leading in India, I was asked to explore fundamental questions around leading where the questions of the kind that include the following: How do you lead? What essence do you bring? What core elements of your leadership deserve nurturing and which should you jettison? These probing questions led me to a startling realization, that many aspects of women’s leadership were so often dismissed as ‘soft’ and unnecessary in the workplace, when in fact they may be precisely what organizations need most.
The fellowship introduced us to a framework built around four Es – Essence, Elements, Energy and Expression form concentric circles, while the fourth E of Energy, flows between them, spiraling upward as it generates momentum. This Energy must remain rooted in Essence, one of the Essence that resonated with me, was motherness. It resonated not as a biological designation but as a paradigm of leading, almost like a cornucopia of traits ranging from empathy and resilience to assertion and care. It describes how I have always led, though it was rarely celebrated. Sometimes care came in the form of open sharing of what the team members felt about their work and why they felt they were not able to give it their all, at others it was about why they needed to explore what they wanted to do in their professional lives! It was guided with the lens of well-being not compromising the work rather focused on being authentic in feedback and enabling the team members to do their best!
My reflection took me back to the women who shaped me. My mother, a first-generation professional, left her native village in Kerala to enter government service in another state. She learned a new regional language, gained confidence and led in her own distinctive way. The battles she would have to hold her space and have her say forged the way I showed up for myself and my friends every day! I remember how she stood up to the drunk husband of our house help and ensured our house help was safe! How she spoke up when a neighbor ill-treated their pet! A firm believer of owning her space and being authentic, I remember how she was kind to people who came to her! Her assertive self often came to the fore when she was pushed around, quite literally, when in a crowded bus in Ernakulam in Kerala she raised her voice when a drunk passenger misbehaved with her and she ensured that the passenger was deborded! That was how she taught me to stand up for myself and never stay quiet when justice was at stake!
And then there was my Ammuma, my mother’s mother, my grandmother, someone who spoke her truth loud and clear despite the constraints placed upon her. She was not allowed to study further. She was not allowed to teach. But she taught anyway. Her eyes held rage and wisdom, twin flames burning in one ancient lamp. She bore children who would study, work and walk through doors she never got to open. She fought battles inside her home and outside it, with no journal to document her wars, victories or quiet revolutions. Her motherness was her inner journal. Nature was her witness. With no vocabulary to name her trauma, she couldn’t count her wounds. But lead she did, just in the way rivers keep flowing, the way roots keep reaching. Organically and naturally. Today, I sit in the space she created, jettisoning old thoughts that try to limit me, reframing conditioned ways that would have me be small and voiceless. I lead with creativity, with pace and sometimes with pause. Sometimes with a brief breath between battles, other times blindly, but always guided by that inherited motherness, that inner journal that energizes me.
Women have always led, everywhere. We need our space and our voices to be recognized, for our leadership to be seen as legitimate, expressed in our own way. My grandmother’s voice lives in my voice, her fire in my bones. Her life, her essence and the way she led continue to guide me. This is the legacy I hope to pass forward, a leadership that lingers long after we are gone, creating spaces for those who come after us to lead in their own authentic ways. It is time we stopped asking women to choose between being effective and being themselves. Perhaps the real question is not whether motherness belongs in leadership rather it is why we ever thought it did not!
About the Author
Dr. Varsha Pillai is Gender Advocacy Specialist a fellow of the Women Emerging expedition.
