E11: Advocating for caregiving skills and support in the workplace
with author and movement builder Amy Henderson
Key Takeways
I couldn't figure out why it was so hard to be a working parent, a working mom. And I didn't know if it was just me and my bad decisions and the unique shortcomings that I had, or if it was really just extremely hard to be a working parent.
After we were honest about how much we were struggling, the second thing to surface was that we were forging ourselves, that we were gaining something and that parenthood possibly more than anything else was forcing us to grow and evolve. And that the ways we were growing and evolving really mattered, not just in our personal lives, but also in our careers.
I discovered that the greatest potential for plasticity in the adult human brain for both men and women, regardless of whether or not they're raising a birth child, is during that first year of their child's life. How could we help companies recognize and realize the value of parents in their workplace?
These are the five main skills that parenthood is unlocking: courage, efficiency in productivity, emotional intelligence, enhanced purpose and the capacity to collaborate. And there's some really significant neurological research behind Parenthood's ability to unlock these skills. We spend money training our leaders to develop those skills. And parenthood possibly more than anything else develops them.
There were a number of other Fam Tech founders mostly female who were also building products and services to make the experience of the modern family better. If we can come together and shape name and drive the growth in our sector, that we're all going to be better, both individually as companies, but more importantly, broadly as a society. If we can make this part of the national conversation, then we're going to be in a much better place.
My own journey in recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder was the first time I lost my identity. And motherhood, was the second time I lost my identity and I am so grateful that I had a previous experience with that loss because I had within me the knowledge that I could recover myself and I could use some of the tools and practices that I'd learned in my recovery from PTSD to re-find myself in the wake of motherhood.
I launched Tend Lab to bring a voice and recognition to this extreme transformation that occurs with parenthood and the resources and support that are needed to navigate through it with success.
There's an understanding that when you sit in the center of your wound and make peace with it and get to know it, that you increase your potency, that you discover a deeper sense of who you are and what matters to you and what makes it worthwhile to be here.
One of the things I talk about is how a diamond under pressure, it cracks along the fault lines and that parenthood in our working culture in America is extremely difficult. And it's not a matter of if you crack, it's a matter of when you crack and where you crack is an opportunity to discover where you are already weakened the need of tending what places within you were not fully healed or not fully developed, or that needed to be acknowledged. And so while the wound or the pain or the challenge, or the, messed up behavior that surfaces in you, it may not actually even be related to parenthood. Parenthood just triggers it and sets it off and makes it visible and available to you in a way that possibly nothing else could. And then you get to look at it and you get to make peace with it and you get to heal it.
She realized she'd been climbing the wrong ladder and that motherhood forced her to fall off the ladder. And then to really look at what will make me want to get up and climb again. And where will I climb? I think it's important to really look at that question. What ladder am I climbing? And does it feel like it's in deep alignment with who I am?
What I have seen most companies do is they want to throw a bunch of money at benefits, but they don't really want to spend any money addressing the culture of the company and how to make it more modern, how to make it more relevant, how to actually create a community within the company that meaningfully supports, acknowledges, validates and allows their caregivers to thrive.
Companies need to start tracking the caregiving status of their employees, and specifically they need to be tracking how it impacts hiring retention, promotion, and compensation. There's a huge discrepancy between what employers think and the reality of their employees. And it's time for that discrepancy to be bridged.
At a broader cultural level, not just within companies, we need to transform the way we think about parenting and caregiving more broadly and its impact on work performance. I am one of the first people that's come forward through this research and book with Tend Lab to say that parenting, neurologically and otherwise, unlock skills that are critical for success in the modern workplace: courage, efficiency, and productivity, emotional intelligence, enhanced purpose, and specifically the capacity to collaborate. Most work today is team-based and an individual's ability to work well in a team is dependent on their ability to collaborate.
It's not about caregivers against people who are not currently caregivers, but are likely to become caregivers at some point. It's about looking at the overall systems and policies and practices in place. Do they care for everyone? Because if you're taking care of your caregivers at the expense of your other employees, that is not a sustainable solution.
Companies don't want to be accountable or don't know how to be accountable, to solving for what they discover if they track caregiver status and they are afraid of the negative backlash they would get. Also the tracking systems that companies use to assess things like caregiver status, they're not yet equipped to even track this data. So we're looking at how can we push for legislation to make caregiving status something that we track so that we can have some visibility into it.
Women of color are disproportionately impacted by caregiving responsibilities. And so you actually can't look at gender, race, or even LGBTQ status without also looking at the intersection with caregiving. And that if you want to meaningfully support the folks who are already the most marginalized in the workplace, you need to be also looking at caregiver status and you need to be looking at the way it impacts the ability of folks from these groups to equally participate in the workplace. African-American are likely to spend up to a third of their income covering their caregiving responsibilities at a critical phase in their working life. Which impacts their ability to take risks or to really be pioneers in their work.
I think it is critically important to find a community of peers, however you identify that, who are striving to really heal and grow through the challenges they're facing, who are capable of being honest, bitching is critically important, but also who are looking to drive towards solutions. So find a group of peers who are also trying to become better versions of themselves and not in a sort of a false positive thinking leads to change kind of way. But in a way that is really honest and heartfelt and deeply supportive. That for me has been a lifesaver.
The three things I would say to any person who's listening to this podcast is find a group of peers who allow you to feel seen and heard. Find a way to take some agency on your own. And then find a way to recognize that you have something to contribute to a greater purpose than just yourself.
Bio
Amy Henderson is one of our nation’s leading voices on the critical role of parenting and caregiving in developing the future of work. Amy has three kids and is the founding CEO of TendLab, where she has been working with companies and their parents’ groups at places like Salesforce, Accenture, Cloudflare, Airbnb, Lululemon, and many others to optimize the workplace for parents. As cited in Forbes for her "truly collaborative nature," Amy also started and co-leads the Fam Tech Founders Collaborative, a network of over 180 founders who are solving for the needs of caregivers.
A regular speaker and author advocating on behalf of the power of parenthood at work, Amy has been featured in and written for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, Slate, InStyle, and more. Her book, 'Tending: Parenthood and the Future of Work," was published by Nationbuilder Books in May 2021.
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