Home >Book of the Month > Corporate Chutes & Ladders
Corporate Chutes & Ladders
Do you remember the time when your career was the most important thing in your life?
You happily worked 18 hour days, took on every project that was thrown in your direction, jumped at the chance to take on more responsibility and went on any and every business trip everyone else in your office just couldn’t be bothered with. You were the “go-to” girl. The up and comer with all the answers and boundless energy.
After years of proving yourself, pulling off the impossible and fighting off every idea-stealing leech in the office, you finally clawed your way up the corporate ladder. Congratulations. So, here you are, at the top of your game.
Enter baby. Now what do you do?
Welcome to the world of Corporate Chutes and Ladders.
It’s the game that challenges working moms to keep a firm grasp on, and if they’re really brave, continue climbing. But now, with briefcase and baby on board, the rules have changed and things are trickier than ever.
In this game, the ladder is now greased with diaper ointment and SPF 45 sunblock. There are no “get out of jail free” cards to call on when your teething baby decides to pull an all-nighter the night before your big presentation. You’re still playing against the leeches, but now they’re even hungrier than before.
They’re pissed off they were passed over for that last promotion, they’re out for your job and they can smell maternal conflict a mile away.
The goal of this game is to make it through the working mother maze. You must master the art of multitasking - survive sneak attacks and sabotage attempts by the leeches, find a way to make an appearance at “Preschool Teacher Appreciation Day,” get to work on time, pull off your presentation flawlessly and still make it home before your children are already asleep.
There are a million ways to play this game. Some women just keep on climbing higher and higher up that ladder, never missing a beat and barely even pausing long enough to give birth.
Others take some time off, step off the ladder and decide they want to trade in their M.B.A. for midday “Mommy and Me Yoga” classes.
Then, there are the rest of us, the majority of working moms who struggle with Corporate Chutes and Ladders every single day of our lives. Sometimes we take a few steps forward. After all, we’re still the same brilliant women we were before babies came into our lives. But let’s face it, every now and then we slip a bit…our babysitters show up late and our carefully structured house of cards comes crumbling down.
One word of warning: Don’t believe everything you read. As tough as it may be sometimes to balance it all, we’re not conflicted.
Contrary to all those condescending headlines and magazine articles, there is no debate for us. We have jobs and we have children. We want them both to grow and thrive.
We want to run the company, but we also want to be the ones our kids run to when they need a hug. We want to read about ourselves in the company newsletter, but we also want to read our kids bedtime stories at the end of the day. We want to follow our hearts and do what we love, but we know that ultimately our hearts will always lead us home to the people we love.
Having children didn’t quench our desire to race up that damn ladder and break through that glass ceiling. For some of us, all it did was alter our course a bit…some chutes, some ladders, but we’ll still get there. The only difference…having children changed the timeline a little bit.
Climbing the Ladder with the Goddess of “Good Morning America”…Yvette’s Story I have always idolized Diane Sawyer. To me, this beautiful, smart, and elegant woman embodies everything I’ve always aspired to be.
She can grill President Bush with the greatest of ease and then, without missing a beat or a page of her script, move effortlessly on to an interview with a scandal-plagued scarlet. Always while injecting personality and humor and oozing elegance and intelligence with every word. Not to mention that halo of perfectly coiffed blonde hair, strategically placed just so over her eye.
The woman is quite simply a television news goddess.
While I was working as a freelance television producer, I was offered a job at “Good Morning America.” My daughter, Christiana was about seven months old at the time and while I knew the job would mean long hours away from my little munchkin, I jumped at the chance to work with my idol.
Professionally, I was in heaven. Working for “Good Morning America” was the proverbial dream come true. Writing for Diane, Charlie Gibson and Robin Roberts was truly the most rewarding time of my career. I was scared to death I would screw it up. Every time I walked in through the security desk in the morning, coffee in hand, I would flash my ID card and wait for the day that someone would catch on, call me a hoax and have me escorted from the building.
I had stress knots in my stomach every time I handed in a script.
Would they hate it, finally figure out I don’t know how to write, or maybe, if my script is even worse than I think, would they think I’m a ringer sent in by the other morning shows to mess with the competition?
But, lucky for me, they never caught on.
Instead, I stayed. Me, in a big windowed office at ABC News. Are you kidding me??
I was overjoyed to hear my words, my carefully chosen double entendres and my oh-so-eloquent alliteration coming out of Diane, Charlie and Robin’s mouths. I was living the dream…or so it seemed.
There I was in my network news office, doing what I loved for people I respected and admired. Why was I so miserable?
I missed my baby.
There were so many late nights spent writing, rewriting, editing and re-editing. Holidays, weekends…all hours of the day and night.
At work, I was progressing up the ladder. At home, I felt Christiana’s infancy was slipping away and I was missing it.
I looked around me at all these amazing women that I was working with. How did they do it? What was their secret? I quickly realized there is no secret. There are choices.
There were women who chose to hire around the clock help.
They had their day nanny, night nanny and a weekend nanny on call in case they were called out of town on breaking news. There were women whose husbands stayed home or had jobs that allowed them the flexibility to spend more time at home taking care of the kids.
There were women whose children were a bit older. They could be picked up from school and hang out in mom’s office doing homework while she finished up for the day. Then, there was me.
As much as I wanted network news success, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice Christiana’s infancy in exchange.
After a few months of living out my dream, I decided it was time to go back home to my baby and my life as a freelancer. I would be free to pick and choose my projects and control exactly how much time I spent away from home. Some may see my decision to leave “Good Morning America” and go back to freelancing as slipping a few rungs down the corporate ladder. I don’t. I see it as a way to stay on the ladder while watching my baby grow.
Today, I’m back at work full time as a producer for an entertainment news show. I’m still doing what I love only this time, I’m covering celebrities and getting home mostly every night to put my kids to bed.
Every now and then I get to revisit my idols at “Good Morning America.” Only now, I’m on the other side of Diane’s microphone. I head over to the GMA studio to interview Diane about her latest A list “get” or the huge news story of the day. Every time I walk through those doors and on to the GMA set, I have a twinge of “what if”? What if I would have stayed? I might have been the producer traveling to Africa with Diane to meet Brad Pitt. I might have been the one sitting down in the White House with President Bush to drill him on the New Orleans catastrophe or the crisis in the Middle East…what if I had stayed on course and followed my dream of a network news career? What if? What if?
Finally, for the first time in my life I feel the answers outweigh the questions. The most rewarding and precious moments in my life haven’t been spent in a newsroom, in a studio, out in the field or even up on stage accepting my Emmy award. They were spent in my bathtub splashing with and in my bed cuddling with my children.
Maybe one day I’ll reclaim my network career, my big windowed office at ABC News and the permanent stress knot that seemed to accompany it. But for now, I’m happy to stay right where I am.
Feet planted firmly on the ladder and my arms planted firmly around my children.
Staying in the Game…Beth’s Story
I became a career gal with the theme song to “Working Girl” blaring in my head. My “never give up” attitude has always been a part of my genetic make-up, so when I became pregnant with my daughter, I knew that I would go back to work full-time. Sure I took a few months off, but it wasn’t my style to jump off the ladder and take a chance on the hope that someone would still hire me on a part-time basis. “Slow and steady, stay with what you know,” that was my mantra. And what I knew at the time was that I had some forward-thinking bosses who might just go for the scenario I was concocting in my head while my baby was growing in my belly.
Would they ever consider allowing me to telecommute two days a week so that I could see my infant take her first steps or babble her first words during the am hours and not after a long day in the office? Sure, I’d still be working, but at least I’d be nearby if anything exciting or catastrophic happened that day in my bustling home.
As luck would have it, they gave me a six-week tryout and telecommuting worked like a charm. So much so, that after six years and the birth of my son, I’ve become the telecommuting pioneer for other working moms in my department who’ve been given the chance to work from home so they can get a slice of the quality of life pie too.
While this wonderful opportunity has been a blessing, it has also played a role in making my climb up the ladder more like the long and winding road. I enviously watched as my peers with five-day-a-week work schedules moved up quickly, rung by rung, in the express lane, while I was reduced to taking the slower carpool route.
Throughout my career, I have always been the go-getter. If there were a choice assignment, I’d be first in line to ask for it. I’ve launched more television series than I care to recount - spending countless hours freezing and famished outside of an actor’s trailer waiting for them to grant an interview. I’ve raced across Nashville, nabbing exclusive interviews with chart-topping music stars and have nibbled on the veggie and cookie platters in every green room from Regis to Letterman to Oprah. I’ve somehow managed to convince some eager and agreeable actors to participate in pizza tastings, drag races, salacious celebrity roasts, and even forced one actor of a failing sitcom to pose in the window of a Bed, Bath & Beyond store so that I could get Yvette to send a camera crew to cover it.
But despite loving the glitz, glamour and outrageous stunts, the stress of those early mornings where I’d frantically wait by front door for my babysitter to arrive so I could catch the 7:02 am train, was making me a nervous wreck. Add to that the pressure of spending 12-hour days on the set of a sitcom whose ratings were in the dumper and the time an irrational actress screamed at me at a photo shoot while I was nine months pregnant, and I had finally reached my boiling point.
Three days later, when the demands of my job sent me into premature labor and I was busy firing off emails between my contractions so my assistant could take care of all the loose ends I thought I could manage before my due date, it was at that moment I decided it was time for a change.
While I loved my job and didn’t want to quit, I knew it was time for a career adjustment so I could truly accommodate the work/life balance I had set in motion when my daughter was born. I crafted another proposal to my boss, this time devising a position where I could finally move out of the trenches and into the land of the corporate big picture. Lucky for me, he was impressed by the pitch.
After playing several rounds of the waiting game, I’ve finally made it to the top of my ladder. While I thought I’d find all the answers once I broke through the glass ceiling, I’ve realized I won’t be content to just sit here picking shrapnel off my suit.
That’s the funny thing about the corporate ladder. Once you finally reach the top, you either want to keep climbing higher or jump off completely to tackle something new.
ROLE MOMMY REALITY CHECK:
Contrary to popular belief, having it all is not some unattainable urban legend or a mommy myth. It really is possible. The key is realizing that having it all means different things at different stages in your life. When it comes to your career, there’s nothing wrong with taking a baby-induced detour or staying on the train and moving full steam ahead. Sometimes the smartest business advice is to simply trust your instincts and follow your passion. In the end, the choices you make along your journey will ultimately guide you to exactly where you want to be.
