Recently in my circle of colleagues and friends there was much talk about guilt.  Specifically the guilt that moms who work feel.  It was sparked first by this article which is way too preachy for me:  The Effects of Time-Starved Parents, 25 Years From Now.  Now you know I’m all for workplace flexibility….but please don’t tell me why I’m for workplace flexibility.  It is not about parents, even if I am one.  It’s about basic common and business sense.

And then followed up by this article which I’m not sure I agree with either, although that last paragraph is right on! : Working Mom Guilt is a Political Issue.

And finally there is this…which gets closer to what I feel the societal issue is but still isn’t quite there for me:  I Am Mad as Hell

Here’s my take on the whole thing, parents work, they do their best, they focus on what they can and they adjust as needed.   And let’s be honest here…much of parenting is not fun.  There I said it.  Let’s hear the collective gasp.

And I think that may be the one thing I see missing from all of the above articles.  The first article tells us what we must do but doesn’t talk about the realities of how hard it is to do it and how on some days I don’t want to do it.  The second article talks about how we must think.  But doesn’t take into account that there are days when I want to think and act solely selfishly, for a change.  At least the last article points out the difficulty in trying to be part of a group when you are an individual…but it also doesn’t talk about how isolating it is to be home with kids and how you feel like anything but a leader during that time – so promoting that to the world is not exactly top of mind.

Bottom line there is no right or wrong way to do any of this.  And there is no perfect politician to pick here, sadly they all have many pluses and just as many minuses.  But the wrong way to do this is to tell people what is the right and wrong way.  No subject is as simple as the first article indicates, no one group is as easy to understand and sway as the second article suggests, and I’m not sure I always want the leadership role the 3rd one suggests society should allow me.  Life is much more complicated than any of these.  The one thing in this whole argument that I do find to be simple is what Eleanor Roosevelt said…and that is

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

I think you could easily substitute “guilty” for “inferior.”  So I’m going to continue to stick to my guns…on how I parent, on how I vote, and on whether I want to be a leader.  I will read the research & issues, and decide for myself…and not let someone else tell me how to think or feel or parent or vote.   They don’t have the power to do that…unless you and I give it to them.

Or at least I hope to be.  And honestly I’m afraid I won’t be.

As happens in life, there has been a lot going on in my world.  And something’s gotta give.  One of the reasons I abhor the term work-life balance is that I have never felt and don’t believe I ever will feel balanced.  I might feel happy, calm, stress free…but not balanced.  Because we do only have 24 hours in a day and I am loathe to give up my beauty sleep so something must go.

Last summer what went by the wayside was exercising on a regular basis.  We were trying to sell our home (failed), we were renovating the new home (still in process), I had helped my full-time nanny get another part-time gig so we wouldn’t lose her entirely when my little one started school full-time so I was mom a lot more than I had been, I had some consulting work, I was helping bring a conference to Boston – mostly because I wanted to go and my schedule doesn’t allow travel.  So I was busy.  And while I live in one of the most beautiful places to walk, run, bike, rollerblade – it just wasn’t happening.  I started counting my walks to and from the grocery store as exercise…and it’s only a few blocks away.  My Stairmaster was packed up for the move and I was mostly sedentary.

As anyone in their 40’s knows…that’s not good.  You lose fitness much faster now and it takes a lot of work to get it back.  And I’m not really a fan of hard work.  But….

I have good friends, and they are fun, and they are a little bit crazy.  My friend Chris Hoyt signed up for a Tough Mudder event and asked any and all comers to sign on as well.  What is the Tough Mudder series?  Well as far as I can tell it involves running (good, I can do that), crawling through mud (well I’m not a girly, girl so I’ll be okay there), carrying logs (hmmm now it’s getting harder), running through fire (what!?!?) and other insane obstacles.   Also I’m a sucker for doing athletic events that raise money for a worthy cause.  And I need some fear in my day to get me off the couch and back out on the Charles River Esplanade to move my body.

So of course, I signed on.

Thankfully, the renovation is winding down, school has started and we’ve given up on selling our old house (temporarily) so now I have time for this.  In no way am I balanced now…but exercise is no longer the something that is going to give.  Or else I won’t be one Tough Mudder.

I was lucky enough to see Recruitfest live in Boston last week.  I say lucky because

1. It was in Boston and I don’t get out of Boston much these days

2. There were far fewer of us watching the action live than watched on TV and I still think there is no substitute for in-person connecting.

3.  My village rescued me from an unexpected childcare dilemma

And here are my takeaways:

HR/recruiters are still not listening to their audience or thinking like business people.  They are obediently following orders but not challenging them enough or thinking on how to improve upon them.  Otherwise why would these lines/concepts have been so groundbreaking?

“It’s not what you do here, it’s why you’re here.” – when talking about how to understand employee engagement and real corporate culture<<I agree, stop reading your corporate handbook and what your company decides it’s corporate culture is and actually find it out!  And why haven’t you up until now?

Let in-house recruiters customize marketing materials to their specific recruiting market<<Once again a concept that seemed so forward thinking to those in the room & on the video feed.  TV and Marketing has been doing this all of my 20-year career.  The fact that this isn’t already being done in this industry is fascinating to me

“All candidates are not created equal” and the thought was you don’t really have to treat those who are bad candidates, well<<< REALLY?!?!  What if you treated your customers this way? How long would they be your customers?  Oh, and by the way, your candidates are your customers.  I’m not saying everyone one of them gets the Cadillac treatment…but you also can’t treat them as if they don’t exist.  Unless of course you’ve never learned that each candidate that has a good experience tells 1 person.  Those who have a bad experience tell 10.  Think that one through for a bit.

Another person commented that a speaker actually suggested polling ALL your candidates to rate candidate experience and felt that concept was crazy. They also felt it was impossible to do<<Well I worked in a 3 person marketing team.  We had a survey for our customers that got sent out everytime we did a webinar (and our webinars were regualarly attended by upwards of 1,000 customers!)  We sent it to everyone.  It was automated, it was easy, it wasn’t rocket science.  I couldn’t make sure everyone responded…but sending it out was not a problem and did not require dedicated resources.

I think I would sum up the problem in HR/recruiting departments these days with a Recruitfest quote from @TheRecruiterGuy:  “It’s not a question of horsepower, it’s a question of willpower.” And I think that could be said of all the “but we can’t do THAT’s” that I heard throughout the day.

As for the “game changing” format of Recruitfest.  It was interesting.  Again, I feel it’s only game-changing in this space.  Companies & conferences have been doing this format of live & over-the-air for a while.  Marketers do it for launches, companies do it for meetings and trainings.  It’s not new.  What was new was

1) They hired TV professionals to do the production who understand how, have worked many a live call-in TV talk show & understand internet streaming…not internet people who are trying to learn how TV production works.

2) They cared about their audience – the viewing one, the live one and the telphone one and they had the resources dedicated to take care of each

3) Let’s face it – they were innovative because they needed to be.  It’s a recession.  Boston is expensive.  They were proud of their product and wanted to be sure it reached a mass audience.  And they figured out how to do it.  How very un-HR of them.

I’m not concerned about monetizing this model as China Gorman mentioned in the end.  I’ve monetized many a TV-program in my career and if you have the audience stats that Recruitfest achieved you will be able to do it.  What I am concerned about is getting more actual practitioners in the room live.  Because while I love being around all my friends and fellow vendors…it is the practitioners that we want to talk to and network with.  And great conversations between people with problems and people who can solve them is still what the conference model is about.

Oh, and if you’d like to monetize your TV conference – let me know – I’m available for consulting on that…and I know the number for the production guys!

For more on Recruitfest check out the twitter conversation, and great articles by Bill Borman, China Gorman,  and the recruitfest team.

Yesterday I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize.  I was at a business lunch and normally I would have let it go to voice mail, but for some reason I picked it up.  “This is Ann from school.  [Your little one] just got sick in class and you need to come pick her up.”  Now fortunately I was nearby, I had no appointments the rest of the day and my lunch was wrapping up so absolutely not a problem.  My husband and I had decided that with our current work schedules it made the most sense for me to be the parent that takes care of these things.  He’s often a plane-ride away from school pick up and his job is much-less forgiving than mine.  So it makes sense that I got the call.

The bummer was that she got sick at school.  And there’s that 24-hour rule.  You know no fever or throwing up for 24 hours before you return to school.  Now let’s face it, many parents fudge this rule.  They get docked pay if they stay home with their sick child, they have an important meeting that they’ve been preparing for for days, they’ve got a deadline they just can’t miss.  And I’m no different this time.  Recruitfest, a forward-thinking conference is happening in Boston.  My company is sponsoring it, I’ve helped put parts of it together, I know lots of great people speaking, attending, working at the event that I haven’t seen in far too long and I want to connect with them – as much as possible.

And my kid threw up in school!  So there’s no fudging the 24-hour rule. Crap!

Now so you don’t think I’m heartless and the worst mom in the world – she’s fine – she’s got a bug for sure – but when she’s not throwing up she’s dancing around the living room and yelling at Scooby-Doo to look behind him and see the big bad monster lurking there and she slept through the night with no issues.  In other words if she didn’t throw up her breakfast today I would probably have sent her to school a bit late had the school not been in the loop.

So crap!

And seriously she could have thrown up any day in the last 5 months or the next 4 except this week on Wednesday or Thursday.

Crap! Crap! Crap!

I spent much of yesterday working the phones to set up childcare that I usually don’t need during the school day, tempering expectations at the conference on when I may arrive and being frustrated and disappointed that months worth of work and expectation and anticipation are slipping through my fingers.  And honestly a little bummed that today is a day of checking in and checking on everyone instead of being the carefree day I envisioned.

Or in other words another day in the life of  the “go-to” parent in a dual-career family.  Which is why I can’t be tied to a cube or an office for the standard 9-5 hours.  After all throw up happens and I’m the go-to parent.

I remember being very little and my grandparents retired to New Hampshire.  Of course I didn’t know what that meant.  I knew it meant they lived far away (3 1/2 hours by car back then), I knew it meant that anytime I was there they had lots of time with me, I grew to learn that my grandfather who had been a photographer most of his working life, was now a ski lift operator at Cannon Mountain.  That’s what I thought retirement meant.

Until 7 years later when the massive amounts of snow got to them and they re-retired to Florida and my free ski house disappeared.

Apparently my grandfather was way ahead of his time.  In the late 1960′s and in his 60′s he decided there was no way he wanted to sit around in retirement.  He got a “retirement job.”  A term that started around 2005 as the Baby Boomers began to reach retirement age.  What is a retirement job?  It’s one that is often fewer hours and most definitely less hassles & less political than that one you had previously.  Often you get to do the stuff you like and not the stuff you don’t like.  And should it get to be a hassle…you can walk away.  Because believe it or not…most who are working retirement jobs, do not need the money.  They like the cushion, but they are working for the social aspects and the boost it gives their self esteem.  A new report just out by the Families and Work Institute in conjunction with the Boston College Sloan Center on Aging and Work highlights this trend.

Just look at the numbers:

• 20% of those 50+ have retirement jobs

• 75% expect they will have a retirement job in the future

• 31% say they are working to stave off boredom and 18% want to feel productive and useful

• Only 18% said they were working because income from other sources was not enough

This is just one more example of how the workforce is changing and why the way work works need to change with it.  We are no longer a society who works just to pay the bills.  We are a society that gets satisfaction and enjoyment from work.  And when those two factors intersect you get a workforce who chooses their employer and walks away from those employers that do not fit them.  Which probably explains why we also hear so much about employer brand and employers of choice these days.

Listen up employers…from the top to the bottom your workforce is becoming choosy.  And we are working longer and on our terms, and we are thinking more about how work fits in with the rest of our lives.  My grandfather was way ahead of his time with his retirement job.  But honestly I don’t see myself ever retiring, although I’m not sure I see myself ever again working full-tilt, full-time, with all the stress that goes with that.  Perhaps, I’ve already found my “retirement job” – in my 40′s.

Full disclosure  – I was hired as a consultant to help get the word out about the study to other bloggers in a press call by Families & Work Institute & Boston College and as this report is important to my audience decided to write about it here, myself.

For more coverage check out this morning’s Morning Edition on NPR

That title is taken from the show Two and Half Men – mostly because it was what ran through my head most as I noodled on this blog post.  Which does not help with the writers’ block at all

Here’s why I think this song kept running through my head.  Because it seems to me women do and men promote what they’ve done, they promote themselves, their good deeds, their hard work, everything and anything.  And for some reason women just do it….and then move on and do something else.  Gross generalizations I realize but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Boston College Center for Work and Families 20th anniversary celebration last week.  And really liked the way the morning’s content was presented.  The title was Next Generation Work-Life: Celebrating our history, envisioning our future

The talk all morning was about how juggling work & family and being more available for your family is a leadership skill.  Not just at home, but also in the world of work.  And I wonder if the focus hadn’t been on men this time, if that would have held true.

The thought process is if  you are happy at home you will be more productive at work.  If you feel productive and valued at work, you won’t suffer from “kick the dog” syndrome and come home and well…kick the dog.  So it turns out work/life isn’t about feeling balanced, or easing stress or getting 28 hours of tasks done in a 24 hour day.  It’s about leadership.

This is the first time I’ve heard the work/life debate in this context, although it seems clear Steven Poelmans has been saying this for far longer than I’ve been listening clearly.

That session was followed by a panel of working fathers…yes, working fathers.  Whose spouses are working mothers and everyone needs to pitch in at home to make it all work.  At least that’s what all of these men realized as they navigated their way through dating, proposal, marriage and family planning.  I’m pretty sure not one of them would have come to this on their own.  But they have smart wives who communicate clearly and they communicated clearly…clearly.

Kudos to Boston College for putting on an agenda that focused on something other than work/life being a mommy, female, women’s issue.  We’ve come pretty far since the time when child rearing was clearly in the realm of the mom.

Many thanks to Dan Mulhern for heading the panel.  It was wonderful to hear his tales of how he first learned he may play a supporting role in the family (in pre-cana class) to anecdotes of how far men have come.  He talked about how he used to be the only man at the playground and wasn’t really sure where to stand or what to say when he first started taking on the “go-to-parent” role in the family.  Fast forward to today when he is far from the only Dad at the playground where men make playdates for their kids to head to the playground with other Dads whose company they enjoy.

It’s great to hear the remember whens but I also think the evidence that Dads have an increasing role in our work/life are everywhere:

More Dads at school drop off & pick up (less for regular schedule pick up – but plenty at afterschool programs)

More Dads actively involved in school on PTAs & parents committees

More Dads at the playground

More Dads at the Pediatrician’s and Dentist’s offices

More Dads making playdates with me & my little one

The other exciting part of this celebration was not just men taking time out from their career to discuss this.  The number of companies who sent HR people who focus on work/life issues to this conference.  To listen, to learn and to share with each other.  Interestingly, during the men’s panel most of the questions were not HR focused…but personally focused.  So for those of you who don’t believe it…HR people are real people too, with the same struggles & juggles as the rest of us.

The day showed what great progress has been made even in the past two years, since I’ve started this site.  But yes, we still do have a long ways to go.  And we can learn much from each other.  Women – promote yourself & your skills more.  Still keep getting it done – but then tell someone you got it done and communicate clearly with your spouse.  You are a leader both at work and at home!  And men – let’s not kid ourselves…you’ve come a long way, but you’re no where near 50-50 in the parenting, housework, home organization realm.  While you deserve a pat on the back…don’t let it go to your head…get back and just do it.  Because there’s always more to do.