Tanja Dr. Prinzessin zu Waldeck turned her sitting room into an office just after she had her first baby – she used the space for her brand new startup, @NetMoms.
Since then, she’s been a living role model for a variety of new & innovative working models, between working remotely and choosing flexible working hours, as she had three more children and built a career that took her from NetMoms to Tomorrow Focus News and now to COO at @Burda Forward.
This experience means that she embraces that flexibility as a leader too. “I think COVID showed us that you can run a company completely out of 800 home offices,” she tells me in this week’s podcast. “We don’t want to go back to 100% in the office, nobody wants that and I think it’s not useful anyhow. But we do expect people to invest 20% of their time in networking and team time.”
From my perspective at MyCollective I thought this was really interesting to hear from an executive level manager like Tanja – because this is something that we encourage new parents to do too, in the knowledge that networking (much like maintaining friendships outside of work) is one of those things that’s first to fall by the wayside when you have a baby. So whether it’s part of your corporate culture or not, I think aiming to invest 20% of your time into face time with colleagues or networking in general is a pretty good goal. It could be vital to your career at some point – as we say, “build the network when you don’t need it, so that you have it when you need it!”
Speaker: Tanja Dr. Prinzessin zu Waldeck, COO @Burda Forward
Interviewer: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective
Music: sponsored by @Michaelkadelbach
Picture: Tanja zu Waldeck / Burda Forward
Graphic & Production: MyCollective
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