The Skills You Built at Home Are the Ones Your Team Needs

I consider myself the CEO of my household.

I say that without irony, and I say it because there is so much that we do as moms, as head of household, that never gets counted as work by anyone, including us.

One of the things we talk about in the book is women going back to work after a perceived gap, and not really recognizing all of the work behind them. The transferable skills that one has running a household.

I am the project manager. I am the project coordinator. I am the conflict mediator. I am the listener.

All of these things that we do, the empathy, these are all things that make exceptional leaders, because they come down to being able to understand where people are at.

The skill nobody puts on a resume

My daughter is a preteen right now, so she is all over the place. Everything is a big deal.

Being able to diffuse some of those situations means getting to what is actually happening here.

Is there something that needs to be done? Or is this: I need to vent, I need to share, and we need to move on.

That is the whole thing. That single distinction, made quickly and without making the other person feel small for needing one rather than the other.

Anyone who has managed people knows how much of the job that is. Someone comes to you with a problem, and half the time they are not asking you to solve it. They are asking you to hear it. Getting that read wrong in either direction costs you trust, and it costs it fast.

I did not learn that in a leadership program. I learned it at my kitchen counter, from a preteen, on a Tuesday.

All of that is transferable into corporate.

Why the gap is not a gap

Here is what makes this more than a nice reframe.

The perceived gap is one of the biggest reasons capable women hesitate before going back. Not because the skills went anywhere, but because there is no vocabulary for them and no line on the resume where they fit.

So the years get described as time away rather than as time spent running an operation with no budget, no staff, and no option to miss a deadline.

And then they walk into an interview and apologize for it.

I would like to see that stop. Not because it is unfair, though it is, but because it is inaccurate. The person across the table is being handed a leader and is being told to read it as a gap.

The other half of this

All of these things that we do that we do not give ourselves credit for as moms, as women in the household, running the house, are transferable.

But I want to be honest about the cost side too, because the transferable-skills story is often told as though it were free.

I heard a piece of advice early on, maybe when my daughter was less than one, and somebody said to me: it is the hardest job that you will ever have. It is the one where every night you go to bed thinking I could have done that better, I should have done that different, that could have been so much better.

I have got a lot of that.

Rumination can quickly become a real thing for me, so this is definitely one of the places where I have to give myself some grace, because this is somebody else's life that I am helping to shape and form.

I bring that up on purpose, because that same nightly replay shows up in leaders too. Anyone responsible for another person's growth ends up lying awake auditing the day.

The skill transfers. So does the weight of it.

What this means for the people leading teams

If you are a CEO or a COO, this is not a sentimental point about working mothers. It is a sourcing point and a retention point.

Most of the leadership teams we work with have midlife women on them, or those women are our clients. So to pretend this experience is off to the side and not coming into the workplace is ridiculous.

The person on your team who has been running a household for a decade has been practicing conflict mediation, prioritization, and reading a room every single day, under conditions where nobody was grading on a curve.

The person you are about to pass over because of a two-year gap has been doing the same.

You are not doing them a favor by hiring them. You are correcting a mispricing.

Give yourself the grace, then take the credit

We pride ourselves on being open to learn and figuring it out as we go, and having some grace with ourselves, because we have made mistakes and we will make mistakes and we are learning from them.

That applies to parenting. It applies to writing a book neither of us knew how to write. It applies to leading.

But grace is only half of it. The other half is giving yourself credit, and that is the part women skip.

So if you are the one going back after a gap, do not walk in apologizing for the years. Walk in able to name what you did with them.

And if you are the one doing the hiring, stop reading the gap as absence. Read it as a résumé you were never handed.

The skills are already there. Somebody just has to say so out loud.

Rachael Gass and Andie Herbert wrote I'm Not Fine. Thanks for Asking. for women in their forties, fifties and sixties who are worn out by pretending everything is fine and want honest answers instead of platitudes. It covers the real terrain of this season, including perimenopause, caregiving, career reinvention, shifting identity, friendship and beauty standards, grounded in research and in the stories of six composite women drawn from a decade of coaching conversations. If any of this resonated, you can preorder it here: https://www.imnotfinethanksforasking.com/

What would you add as transferrable skills from home role to work role? I would like to hear it in the comments.