Rebalance: How Women Lead, Parent, Partner, and Thrive
Monica Brand Engel, Lisa Neuberger Fernandez & Wendy Jagerson Teleki
180 pages, Changemakers Books, 2022
We wrote Rebalance: How Women Lead, Parent, Partner, and Thrive in the depths of the pandemic, at a time of massive change and deep reflection. We wanted to explore what it takes to thrive full-circle in all aspects of our lives: as purpose-driven leaders, parents, partners, and citizens. In Rebalance, we draw on a decade of no-holds barred, often hilarious conversations with an ambitious group of women we call “Thrive.” In our Thrive group that’s been meeting on the first Friday of the month for over a decade, we each strive to lead in social impact jobs, raise good kids, be healthy, and build strong relationships. Rebalance reflects the wisdom of our crowd as we seek to answer the perennial question of working moms (and dads) everywhere: “Is it possible to do it all well, or does something have to give?”
Rebalance takes an unflinching look at the trade-offs, conflicts, and juggling acts inherent in our busy lives and illuminates what it takes not just to survive, but to thrive. We share hard-earned lessons on balancing—and constantly rebalancing—amid an onslaught of ever-changing demands and priorities. A favorite tool we use to visualize our constantly evolving lives is the “wheel,” which we illustrate in the book. The wheel is a circle that anyone can draw where the slices represent the most important parts of life at that moment. Each slice gets shaded from the center out to indicate how close we are to reaching our own goals, represented by the outer edge of the circle. The wheel is an ever-changing roadmap of what requires attention now. More importantly, it can suggest when to pull back, set clearer boundaries, or settle for imperfection.
Rebalance, like our wheel, is organized around work, family, health, and community. While we all work in social impact careers, there is still so much to be done in our communities to create the world we want our children to inherit. “Being the Change We Want to See” looks at how we can go beyond our “day jobs” and collaborate to be part of the solutions to the deepening challenges we see. By being authentic role models and catalysts, and by leveraging our networks and experience, we can influence and help improve things. If we reflect on our tendencies to perform, perfect, and please—and re-examine how and where our efforts are spent—we can be smarter about how we show up and thrive at work, at home, and in our communities.—Monica Brand Engel, Lisa Neuberger Fernandez & Wendy Jagerson Teleki
* * *
When Lisa and her husband started to think about having kids, something that kept her up at night was figuring out how to remove toxins from their life. Not knowing where to start, she asked a friend who ran an SF-based global NGO for advice. In addition to some basic tips on swapping out cleaning products, she invited Lisa and her company to join a three-month competition to see how far volunteer teams could move their company’s environmental agenda forward. Intrigued, Lisa reached out to colleagues and was inspired to see a rapid response in just a few hours. The next thing she knew, the group had mobilized over seventy-five volunteers, secured sponsors, and had a plan to measure and reduce the company’s environmental impact in the US. When the team won first prize in the competition, she started to field inbound inquiries from other companies about how to apply their lessons learned. She translated the interest into a new job building a sales pipeline for sustainability projects and creating a green team. This is one of many examples of Thrive women taking a personal interest in tackling a societal challenge and finding a way to turn it into a professional pursuit.
The urge to “repair the world”
In our work and in our lives, we have agency not just to design a life that we love, but to pay it forward and make a better world for others. Something that all Thrive members share, by design, is that there is a strong social impact component to our work. While not a particularly distinguishing factor for professional women in DC, it is an important part of our identity as a group and as individuals. Our day jobs are to help make the world a better place, find solutions that will improve lives, and advocate for change.
Much of what we see that needs to change, whether at work or in our communities, is beyond our formal job descriptions. But this rarely stops us. We see corporate cultures that keep women and minorities from thriving. We see systematic inequalities that thwart the potential of individuals, communities, and economies. We see a civic culture that is increasingly tribal and polarized. We see a world that is ecologically out of balance. 2020 in particular drove home the extent of our nation’s fault lines, in health care, income, and racial inequality, political divides, the climate crisis, and mental health.
These are monumental challenges that require all of us to do our part. As professionals who have been able to effect change, we know we have skills, resources, and accrued privileges that we can put to good use for the causes we care about. We are not satisfied with the status quo. And yet, it is not always clear how to have a real, lasting impact on such complex and intransigent challenges. We wonder if it is our place to get involved in issues that we don’t fully understand. We see that making a dent requires conviction and courage to confront entrenched views. We recognize that our privilege may get in the way. It can be tempting just to do the job we are paid to do, do it well, and leave it at that.
When we overcome our misgivings and recognize that we can’t do it all, we can find ways to make a difference. Of course, we can contribute our time, our energy, our knowledge and money to the causes we care about. But, the most powerful tool we often have is our voice and our example.
One ripple starts a wave
Often, we can have the biggest impact with simple words and actions that provide alternative paths, disrupting patterns and cultures that can marginalize or contaminate. As role models, influencers, advocates and allies we can contribute to meaningful change.
Monica didn’t know what to think when a young rising star in her team took her aside and told her, almost in tears, that she was pregnant. Though it should have been a joyful moment, the anxiety in her colleague’s voice was unmistakable. After congratulating her on the news, Monica gently inquired why she sounded so shaky. The colleague explained that she wasn’t sure how she would be able to manage in an organizational culture and industry that demanded speed, agility, and dedication, sometimes at the expense of all else. The admission triggered a flood of familiar thoughts and feelings for Monica – many years of difficult decisions and missed moments of her own, and hours of panel discussions unpacking why a fast-paced industry like venture capital was so unforgiving for women and what could be done about it.
Though the experience and emotions were familiar, Monica had to admit that there was neither a playbook nor easy answers. She wasn’t even sure if she could claim to be a great role model. She always struggled with following her own advice: focusing on doing a few things extraordinarily, letting other things go, communicating and collaborating, prioritizing refueling. What she could say to her colleague with confidence, was that she and her partners were committed to building an inclusive organization. And so began a process of data gathering and authentic conversation to craft a parental leave policy to accommodate the rising stars in their ranks.
Monica and her partners wanted their staff—mothers and fathers alike—to grow professionally, thrive personally and find parenting paradigms they felt good about. They knew there would be trade-offs. The year before, they had cataloged the creative ways their fund and its portfolio companies were fostering inclusive work environments that enabled people with diverse backgrounds and needs to thrive. By examining and sharing these approaches, they hoped to raise awareness and spur actions that would enable colleagues to balance personal needs with that of a demanding workplace—lest their fund, their investees, and the industry lose out on a phenomenal pool of talent.
Being the change we want to see means using our assets – both positional power and soft influence, to go beyond. We all know women who lead by example but do nothing to make it easier—or at least less treacherous—for others to follow. By virtue of her position, many consider Monica a role model for women in the venture capital and fintech industries. But it is her effort to tackle diversity and inclusion issues within her industry where she goes beyond. She spent professional capital having difficult conversations with colleagues who did not see the need to create special policies to accommodate women or minorities. She was transparent about her family obligations in order to destigmatize that conversation at work. She worked with her colleagues to set up different work arrangements that made spending quality family time easier. She convened working groups and consulted industry peers to get ideas on how colleagues accommodated parents with newborns in their return to work. She was a proactive ally of those team members that were trying to find greater balance, even if there was a risk that they would not succeed. And – as importantly – she stepped back and let her male colleagues take the lead on experimenting and advocating for new leave policies.
Though still very much a work in progress, she has helped promote progressive parental leave policies, generating awareness among colleagues, seeding new ideas with her fund and its portfolio companies, influencing the dialogue in her industry, and giving hope to young investment associates.
Wake-up call
Supporting women at work has long been an important cause for each of us, but the COVID-19 crisis compelled us to look more broadly at the inequalities in our communities, especially when it came to healthcare, income, and education. Our relatively comfortable quarantine arrangements were so starkly different from the experience of so many others, leading many of us to search for ways that we could make a difference.
For Lisa, the realization hit the morning after the government shuttered schools where she lived. She woke up before dawn wondering how going virtual would affect public school kids. So many depend on schools, community centers and libraries for breakfast and lunch, access to computers and printers, and before and after-school care. She had an idea. What if she could mobilize a network of experts on digital connectivity and learning to help local leaders close the digital divide for those students unable to get online? In a matter of days, a team was assembled and rolling up sleeves. She was motivated to work faster seeing how hard it was for her own daughter to transition to virtual school even with all the access to technology she needed and parents at home who could support. The experience reinforced an important lesson about the power of unlocking the unbeatable combination of human creativity and drive coupled with networks and resources to tackle problems bigger than any one of us.
When we look at challenges so much bigger than ourselves, we have found we can often do more by leveraging whatever assets we can get our hands on. It may be the organizations that we work in. It may be the neighbors on our community listserv. Or it may be our skills that make the difference.
Another Thrive woman found herself overcome by stories of children at the border being separated from their parents and felt compelled to help. She sent donations and asked others to do the same. But it didn’t feel like it was enough. As a lawyer, she realized she could give more than money, and that with her skills she could be a voice to advocate for them. So, she took time off work, signed up as a volunteer, and traveled to Texas to defend the rights of immigrants that had been questionably detained and separated from their children. The work was emotionally draining but also invigorating. Coming home, she found she could not imagine setting it aside, and parlayed her passion and her skill set into a new job focused on protecting the rights and wellbeing of immigrants.
Waste not, want not
2020 was a terrible year by any account: half a million deaths from the pandemic, historic economic and jobs losses, democracy under fire, a racial reckoning. On top of all of these metaphorical fires burning, there were also record-setting fires that engulfed California and Australia, locusts that swarmed India and Africa, and huge damage done by cyclones, hurricanes and other natural disasters around the globe.
For those of us who are not experts in carbon tax, electric car batteries, or reforestation, the climate challenges seem so big, and our ability to make a difference so small. When Wendy looked at her own carbon footprint, she felt more helpless than empowered. Her job required her to travel, their house and cars were not due for upgrades, and with a family of five the volume of waste they created was impressive. One day, her daughter showed her a TED Talk touting a zero-waste lifestyle. The talk convincingly argued that incremental measures were not enough. It suggested a more intentional approach to reducing, reusing and recycling, with the goal of zero household waste. It gave practical ideas about how to redesign purchasing and consumption habits that seemed do-able. The two decided to make a project of it and focus on the kitchen. Over the course of a year, they revamped their purchasing and food storage habits, expanded their composting and ramped up recycling, significantly reducing what their family wasted and sent to landfills.
The work came naturally to Wendy. For the most part, she did the grocery shopping, managed the leftovers and compost, and policed the recycling. What took it beyond, was seeing the small ripple effects that her efforts were having. Her daughter was becoming a passionate advocate of waste reduction and gave a presentation at school. Fellow shoppers noticed the reusable produce bags and lack of plastics in her shopping basket and got curious. Grocers and restaurants got comfortable putting deli meats or take-out foods into the reusable tins she brought with her. It wasn’t always easy, and it could be awkward; but she felt like she was changing minds in her own small way.
Perhaps most consequentially, over lunch one day, Wendy shared her zero-waste journey with a friend who was passionate about the concept herself and went on to write a book on the topic advocating for change. The two of them compared notes and sparked interest among friends with the goal of having a ripple effect that could lead to systemic change. And so it goes. The ripples are getting larger, totally beyond the initial spark.
We all have opportunities like this, to inform and inspire others to make changes that will have ripple effects beyond ourselves and our families. Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot of effort, but it may trigger meaningful change. Over time, these ripple effects can help create the change we want to see on a much greater scale.