At MyCollective, we’re experts at converting parenting skills into leadership skills, but every now and then, we all need a gentle nudge to flip the script. We were delighted to receive that reminder from Louisa Plasberg, Co-Founder of Equaly, who wisely advises: “Professionalize your private life!”

For the past six years, MyCollective has been dedicated to helping parents balance career and family by guiding them through our Golden Triangle—the integration of the Care Model, Working Model, and Mental Load. Louisa and her co-founder, Ronja Hoffacker, developed their app, Equaly, to tackle two of these critical dimensions—Mental Load and Care Work—offering a game-changing tool to conquer the often invisible and overwhelming burdens of family life.

In our recent session, Louisa shared insights that resonated perfectly with our mission:

💡 Key Takeaways on Mastering Mental Load:

1. Mind the “Manager and Executor” Dynamic

   Whoever takes on a task should be prepared to see it through from start to finish. For example, laundry isn’t done when it’s washed—it’s only complete when it’s dried, folded, and put away. If you’re delegating but still mentally tracking the task, you’re still carrying the mental load.

2. It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game!

   A rigid 50/50 split doesn’t always work. Flexibility and the willingness to play to each other’s strengths lead to a more harmonious home life. It’s not about strict equality but about balance and mutual understanding.

3. Routine ≠ One-Time Chores

   Routine tasks like cooking or packing lunchboxes can feel more mentally exhausting than occasional ones, like repairing a bike or filing taxes. Understanding this helps in distributing tasks more fairly.

🔥 Louisa’s Tips for Reducing Mental Load:

✨ Shine a Light on Care Work: Care work is real work. Make sure it’s recognized and valued.

✨ Own the Whole Process: Commit to seeing a task through, whether it’s doing the laundry or organizing activities for the kids.

✨ Keep the Communication Flowing: Open, ongoing communication is essential, especially as family responsibilities evolve. Regular check-ins and clear agreements help maintain a smoother rhythm.

🔥 Bonus Insights:

❤️‍🔥 Men who take on more care work are often perceived as more attractive!

❤️‍🔥 Couples who share tasks more evenly report higher satisfaction in their relationship—yes, even in the bedroom.

As a special gift, Louisa offered all our participants and podcast listeners a free one-month trial of the Equaly app! Use the promo code MYCOLLECTIVE2024 to experience how the app can help you balance your own Golden Triangle. 🎉

🎧 Don’t miss out: Catch the full podcast episode for even more valuable insights!

Getting married is wonderful. So is having kids. But too often, women pull the short straw – Petra von Strombeck, CEO at New Work SE, has seen this happen time and time again.

“Young women often make these decisions without thinking about the long-term impact on their career and their financial independence,” she says in our latest podcast. The Ministry of Labour’s statistics speak for themselves: 80% of part-time workers are women. “Obviously it’s because they still do most of the care work,” she says. 

The consequence? “38% of women in Germany are heading for a pension of less than €1000. You’re in a long-term relationship, everything looks fine, but if you look at the divorce rates, there’s a 50-50 chance that it will break up. How do you get back to a job where you earn a decent living, and compensate financially for what you lacked in the last years?”

She offers up plenty of solutions, which I’ve broken down into three main hacks that I want to share with you here:

Protect your financial independence. Work out how much parental leave, going part-time, passing up that promotion will cost you long-term, bearing in mind that every missed career step or reduction in hours will also reduce your savings and pension further down the line. Then take steps to minimise that cost, starting with making clear choices when you’re starting out as a family. Talk to your partner, “and negotiate in a contract how you will handle a divorce or separation. It’s not romantic, but it’s a bare necessity. A marriage is a contract, and has a lot of financial consequences. And you are all business women, you negotiate contracts every day!”

Be creative about solving the care work issue. It’s about more than just innovative fluid work models (tandem, part-time etc) – it’s about sharing the work at home too. “Is there a solution where both partners work 75% rather than one 50% and one 100%?” asks Petra. Team up with neighbours, get relatives involved, hire a nanny – put solutions in place that don’t leave the mental load and associated work on your shoulders.

Have the courage to ask for that promotion – especially if you’re about to go on parental leave. It could be a win-win for everyone, because your replacement can then stay in that job even after you come back, because you’ll be moving up. AND it means that you don’t have to shelve that dream of moving your career up a notch every time you have a baby. 

“Parenting actually increases your skill-set,” Petra says. “So whatever your qualification was, parenting will increase your skill set to make you even more capable of then having that next job.”

Speaker: Petra von Strombeck – CEO @New Work SE

Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: New Work SE   

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At Sanofi, everyone gets parental leave: all parents of all genders, irrespective of which country they’re in. “People feel like it’s part of our culture,” Sanofi-Aventis Germany’s CFO Marcus Lueger tells me in this week’s podcast. “We’re recognised, and it pays off,” he says. “I don’t have to offer anybody any kind of retention bonus or above-average pay increase so that they stay. They know what our values are, and that pays back.”

 In an unexpectedly open and warm-hearted discussion, Marcus explains why he shares MyCollective’s convictions around diversity, and explains some of the ways in which Sanofi support both genders in their parenting/career goals:

👉 14 weeks minimum paid parental leave for everyone globally;

👉 giving parental leavers the option to stay in touch and keep receiving news that’s relevant to their team / position / re-entry;

👉 flexible work models, including tandems and hybrid 50-50 office and working from home solutions.

It was really inspiring for us to see what can be done within big companies – and how much can shift as a result. “One thing that definitely changes, is when you recruit someone to a position where in the past people said, ‘She’s 30 she’s probably going to get pregnant, I’m gonna take the guy!'“ says Marcus. „Well, guess what – the guy is also going to go on 14 week parental leave, so that takes one key argument away!”

As we always say – we’ll know that we’ve arrived when men and women of childbearing age are treated the same way, so it’s fantastic to see that in this company, that’s already happening!

Speaker: Marcus Lueger – CFO GSA & Managing Director Finance @Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland

Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Marcus Lueger   

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For all of us who are on Linkedin and other social media, the idea of personal branding feels – let’s be honest – a little bit narcissistic. 

But – as Dr. Irène Kilubi puts it – it’s also an incredible opportunity. An industrial engineer who in another life worked for BMW, Irène now helps individuals and companies with community building and corporate influencer strategies, putting her focus on two main topics: joint generations and brandfluencing. She’s a published author, has founded a start-up, has won numerous awards and is a sought-after public speaker, so we were very lucky to have her on our podcast for this week’s episode. 

She explains why developing your own brand on social media is so important: 

⭐️ For you: being clear about what you stand for and what your topics are allows you to actively drive your career into the area where you want it to go, connecting to people who share your interests and who could influence the direction of your career; 

⭐️ For your company: if you advocate for positive change, that can help your company position itself too – and they may well pick up on it to promote diversity and community themselves; 

⭐️ For everyone: even though there is an impact gap between online influence and society large, there is a trickle-down effect even outside the Linkedin bubble. Your advocacy could change the world for the better! 

Always hands-on, she also shared some important do’s and don’ts for anyone who wants to get started right away: 

DO 

👉 be mindful about choosing your topic and what you stand for; maybe link it to your personal family story or career path; 

👉 think about the target group – is it inside or outside of your company? Who do you want to reach and why? 

👉 be clear about your mission and your Why. 

DON’T: 

👉 overshare from your private life (be personal, but private) 

👉 be too sales-y. Be yourself! 

👉 post, post, post. It should be a conversation – take time to see what other people are doing too, comment on their posts and respond to people who reach out to you. 

Speaker: Dr. Irène Kilubi – Founder @Joint Generation / Corporate Influencer, Marketing & Strategy 

Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Thomas Dashuber

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Parenting skills are leadership skills – this has long been a mantra of ours at MyCollective.

So it was fantastic to meet someone as like-minded as Anette Lippert when she spoke to me in preparation for her new book, “Leading Mothers.” It’s a brilliant read which reminds us why it’s so important to not just recognise the management skillset that we learn as we parent our children – but also verbalise it in a business context.

„The importance for me was to see how you can transfer the things that you’ve learned at home into the environment of business,“ she explains in our latest podcast. “If you want to find out that someone can do crisis management because it’s necessary for the job, you ask them for examples. Now why not use an example from motherhood? You have to put it into business language, but you know that language from your business experience.“

There are plenty of examples of how to do this; Anette describes how breaking up an argument between toddlers in a sandpit trained her to resolve conflicts in meetings – how her family calendar taught her to plan projects better – and how talking to her child improved her communication at work, because “your child is an ever-changing target group, with different skillsets and different interests, so you learn to listen, to adapt and to appreciate diversity at work and in your teams.”

One way to verbalise those skills is to put them on your CV. “When I was on parental leave, I put that in as Senior Leadership Role at Home, and then listed the skills I learned underneath,” she says.

Time to brush up our CVs, I think!

Anettes book is out now!

Speaker: Annette Lippert – Author and Speaker
Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder MyCollective

Photo: Annette Lippert

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