We’ve been running Real World Role Models sessions at MyCollective for over two years now, and it’s one of my favourite formats – modelled on our Get Inspired podcast series, but featuring speakers who may still be less well known, but are closer to our participants in terms of where their lives are at the moment.

Our podcast guests tend to be board members, professors, book authors – experts who speak eloquently on our core topics, most of whom had children themselves 10, 15, sometimes 20 years ago. But the world was different then; we’ve seen a real shift happen in the past few years, with COVID and the quota and the lack of skilled labour all changing perceptions both of what’s possible and what’s necessary. That has resulted in a power shift in the labour market which means that if you’re coming back from parental leave now, you’re coming back to a different situation than previous generations.

That’s why Real World Role Models is so important to me. Usually we don’t publish these sessions, but the speakers at our most recent session – Dagmar Schaefer, Maria Ostrowski and Nele Pollmann – very graciously allowed us to record the first part our conversation, so that we can share some of their wisdom. Their advice broadly fell into three categories –
👉 for people about to go on parental leave: prepare your next career step before you go. For example, you could find someone to replace your current role permanently, with a view to taking a higher position when you come back (armed with all those parental skills which are of course also leadership skills!) Instead of creating more work for your manager, create a solution – and then make it happen.
👉 for people in the process of returning from parental leave: set up the space and time that you need to be able to breastfeed / parent in your workplace, so that it becomes manageable and not a constant source of stress.
👉 for people back at work properly: you’re in the efficiency zone! You will notice that you are more effective at work than you’ve ever been, but the hack here is to make time to network and to keep that connection to your group and peers. Working parents tend to be very efficient at home too – but here it’s important to delegate, and to share the entire responsibility package with co-caregivers, not just individual tasks.

#realworldrolemodels #impulsesessions #getinspired #mycollective #parentalleave #elternzeit #workingparents

Is equal care an issue that only women care about? (I really wish it wasn’t, but why didn’t a single man show up to this discussion?)

If I work part-time, should my partner be participating in care work too? (I say, hell yeah!) 

Are tandems for both genders actually the solution that ticks all the boxes? (I think they might just be…)

These are the kind of questions that we discussed with some superstars in the German diversity scene –Johanna Fink, founder @teilzeitalente, Johanna Mühlbeyer, founder @equalate, @Christina Wildenrother, social media lead @superheldin and @Nina Gillmann, founder @twise – who all advocate for equality not just in their own lives but professionally too. We also had a really fantastic, interactive group of women who joined the conversation and contributed a lot of additional ideas and insight.

We decided to record it and publish it as a podcast, so that you can hear it too – it’s well worth a listen!

And in honour of Equal Care Day – the invisible day (29th February) for the invisible work – let’s keep this conversation going here too.

Tell us how you manage the division of care work in your life (or don’t, as the case may be ) and what needs to happen to make it easier for all of us!

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #carework #invisiblelabour #jobsharing #leadership #parenthood #diversity #equality #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

Why should I care about equal care?

Well, it’s a tricky topic which at some point will crop up in every relationship. It’s hard for all of us to navigate; none of us have hit on the perfect solution or the perfect balance – but that’s exactly why we need to talk about it, and why we need to find better ways to share the care!

That’s also why Equal Care Day is so important to me. Our guest in this week’s podcast – writer, journalist and speaker Almut Schnerring – founded Equal Care Day with her partner Sascha Verlan in 2016, and the idea was always that it should fall on the 29th of February, “the day we don’t see,” as she explains. “Most of the time we oversee it, and that’s what happens to care work.”

In the run up to this year’s Equal Care Day, she explained why the care gap is at the source of all the other injustices talked about more frequently – the pay gap, the pension gap, etc. “The lifetime earning gap is the biggest,” she says. In households with children, „women spend an average of 5 hours and 18 minutes a day on care work, while men only spend 2.5 hours.”

It made me wonder whether there’s a way to shift the rhetoric around care work from the current negative stereotypes (an unpaid career bummer) to something more positive – sharing care work more fairly doesn’t just improve your relationship with your partner and your kids, it also means that both parents benefit from the leadership skills that active parenting teaches us. How can we all do that? Well, I would suggest that –

👉 women give men a chance (so stop trying to do it all yourselves);
👉 male employees be braver about asking for parental leave;
👉 employers actively encourage their male team members to go on parental leave so that it becomes normalised.

We’ll be talking about all this and more this Thursday at Equal Care Day (I’ll be on a live panel  with Sandra Westermann, Johanna Fink, Dr. Nina Gillmann and Johanna Mühlbeyer which you can find out more about here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/equalcare-whyshouldicare7163890428738547713/comments/)

More information on Instagram @equalcareday or equalcareday.de online.

Speaker: Almut Schnerring – Author, Journalist, Speaker, Equalcareday founder
Interviewer: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder MyCollective

Photo: Larissa Neubauer

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #equalcare #carework #caregap #paygap #equalpay #womenleaders #leadership #parenthood #diversity #changemakers #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

“Everyone is talking about AI and where to use AI,” says Christina Sontheim-Leven in our newest podcast – and as CHRO and board member of @CEWE , she’s fully aware of the importance of encouraging people within her organisation to “broaden their minds to use AI as a co-pilot.” 

But even as we’re increasingly able to automate work tasks, the skills that people bring to the table remain important. Especially if they’re parents: “If you ever have a kid and you need to get their shoes on their feet within a really short time, you really hard-core learn about the power of incentivisation,” laughs Christina, adding that “you can’t force them or put pressure on them.” Those soft skills are vital to “help leaders to develop strong relationships with their team members, motivating them and providing them the support that they need.”

In her podcast, she discussed how she is driving diversity and inclusion in her role at CEWE, but also had some useful advice for anyone in any position who wants to see more diversity and access more opportunities: “Be brave.” To be more specific – 

👉ignore the naysayers. “When you have kids people tell you what won’t work out, and sometimes you just have to close your ears,” she says. You decide what’s possible.

👉“dare to have career ambitions” and talk to your employer about what you need to make that happen.

👉Look for alliances, other people in your organisation who have been down that road. 

👉Find mentors, “male or female, within or outside your company.”  

👉Network, even if that just means finding someone else to eat your lunch with in the canteen, or broaching subjects beyond babies in your baby-group. “You will be surprised how much you can take with you as inspiration and also as support, because there will be others facing the difficult situations that you have to cope with. They might even have a specialised life hack for that situation.” 

Let us know what you think! 

Speaker: @Christina Sontheim-Leven – CHRO and Board Member @CEWE

Interviewer: Dr. @Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Christina Sontheim-Leven / CEWE 

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #womenleaders #AI #futurework #newwork #peopleskills #leadership #parenthood #diversity #changemakers #getinspired #podcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

Tandem solutions may not be mainstream yet, but at @MyCollective we’re hearing more and more people talking about them – and our community are parents who work in a really diverse range of industries. Some of them have even formed a group for tandems, so it was exciting for us to have @Nina Gillmann return to our podcast. Nina is co-founder and CEO of @TWISE, a company that creates tandem solutions and that has worked with many of our participants.

The perspective that our work gives us on parents returning to their careers post-baby has shown us that tandems are a really important piece of the solution. They represent an innovative and fluid working model that makes being a hands-on parent while accelerating your career actually possible. “For parents with really small children, working 25-30 hours per week is realistic and that doesn’t fit with the expectations for a leadership position, which is more like 50-70 hours per week,” Nina explains. But if there are two of you, 50-70 hours becomes realistic – AND you still have time for family.

For companies, there are lots of advantages:

👉 two people = more skills, more ideas, more experience.
👉 everything has already been vetted by two people, meaning less work for their immediate manager and fewer mistakes.
👉 managers and team leaders become drivers for diversity, making them a real talent magnet.

Nina lists some interesting pluses for individuals in a tandem too:
🙌 it broadens your skillset because “you have an expert at your side who has it in his or her own best interest to teach you and to transfer everything they know.”
🙌  Pitching ideas as “we” instead of “I” is “a beautifully subtle way for women to gain more visibility, more credibility and more power.”
🙌  When you can’t be at work, you know that the person backfilling for you fully wants you to succeed – it’s their job as well as yours!

Speaker: @Nina Gillmann – Co-founder and CEO, @TWISE

Interviewer: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Nina Gillmann

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #tandem #jobsharing #leadership #motherhood #parenthood #diversity #equality #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit