Jo Stoner, SVP of HR at Informatica Corp., shares how sometimes, accepting the little victories as success.
As a busy executive, wife and mother of two young children, success looks different depending on the day. Sometimes, it’s a work achievement you didn’t think you could pull off, another day it is seeing your older child forgive his younger sister for destroying his Lego construction (even if it was a deliberate act of sabotage) and – sometimes it is just about survival.
Working parents live with a lot of guilt – there are only a fixed number of hours in the day and when children come along, the number of hours we can dedicate to our career or our hobbies or having dinner with friends suddenly shrinks. Rather than berate ourselves for not doing anything as well as we used to, we need to focus on making time count and congratulating ourselves for what we did manage to pull off.
Success may be about striving for Superwoman but accepting that some days, the costume is still in the laundry basket.
It’s about teaching my children good values, spending proper (smartphone free) time with them and then not feeling guilty when I head out of the country for a week. It’s about delegating well at work, giving my team room to grow and setting myself some challenging goals – and it is definitely about celebrating the ones I pulled off and forgiving myself for the ones I didn’t. It is about being Ok with the fact that my son wore the same shirt two days in a row or that tonight I am working on a presentation rather than giving them a bath. It is about being comfortable saying no and giving 100% to the things you said yes to.
As an HR leader, my role is about ensuring the amazing talent we have around the world is engaged, inspired and appreciated and about building HR strategies to make that happen. As a mother, my goals are much the same. Some days I move forward in leaps and bounds, other days my super powers may fail me but either way, I can still build a pretty cool Lego tower.
Jo Stoner is the SVP of HR at Informatica Corp. She was featured in Issue 6 of Forefront Magazine, you can read her story here.