What My Time as a Management Consultant Taught Me About Parenting
By: Dr. Tonya Crombie
Tags: Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Personal Development, Parenting

What My Time as a Management Consultant Taught Me About Parenting

Somehow the “balls to the wall” culture made me a better mom.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

When I finally graduated from my doctoral program, I was living the dream. Well, maybe not the dream you’re thinking of. I didn’t have much money. But I was living the dream I embraced as a young impressionable kid watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was a single girl living in a teeny tiny one-bedroom apartment, making my way in the big city.

And I was ready to make my mark.

My first job out of grad school was as an associate consultant in a large international management consulting firm. My job was probably exactly like you’d imagine. Lots of smart, driven, competitive people traveling a lot, working hard and playing hard. At the end of each month, all of the consultants were rank-ordered in terms of billable hours. And the list was posted in the break room. True story. It was an intense culture.

I used the term “balls to the wall” in the title of this piece. I didn’t even know that phrase until I took this job. But I quickly figured out what it meant and how to live that motto even without the requisite balls.

I’ve often joked that years spent working in management consulting are like dog years. It felt like I got 7 years of experience in that very first year. I did some really cool projects and have some great “in the trenches” stories from those days. Like the time I arrived in Mexico City without a single peso. But anyway… Let’s just say, I learned a ton of things.

However, I wouldn’t say I learned many things that prepared me to be a mother. Quite the contrary, I might say that I learned a lot of things that had the potential to make me a very very bad mother. For example, I learned to push through even when I was exhausted. When I was a young fresh-faced associate consultant, that was fine. But given how short my patience tends to be when I’m tired, it probably wouldn’t be my best strategy for parenting.

As a consultant, I also learned how to manage projects like a boss. Kids are not projects, however. And they really don’t take kindly to being treated as such. There was no spreadsheet in the world that was going to get my toddlers potty trained any faster. Or make my first grader a better reader. Or make my anxious child adjust to a new school more easily. Or raise those scores on their college entrance exams.

Sadly, when I became a mom, I realized that some of my hard-won consulting skills needed to go. I worked really really hard at unlearning some of those very same skills I had been so proud of back in my crazy management consulting days.

I learned to stop looking at everything as a deliverable. I stopped seeing time as money. I learned to slow down and just enjoy the moment. Not perfectly… by any stretch, because some of those things weren’t really skills, but personality traits. Or just my temperament. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m pretty controlling and type-A by nature.

Traits and temperaments tend to be difficult to change. But little by little I’ve gotten better. My kids are teenagers now and I’m still unlearning some of those skills, traits, and lessons from my consulting days.

However, there is actually one skill from those days that has continued to serve me well as a mother.

Back when I started my career, corporate America was in the heyday of the vision statement. Do you remember the vision statement? Lots and lots of organizations hired people like me to help them craft the perfect set of words. Every single one of my clients assured me that their vision statement would not simply be something that they hung on the wall and printed in their annual reports.

However, that’s exactly what most vision statements ended up being.

It would have been easy to become disillusioned with the entire idea of a vision statement after seeing the fate of almost everyone I helped create. I definitely started to doubt that they mattered or that they affected corporate performance in any way. After a while, I started to feel a little like a snake oil salesman when I worked on yet another vision statement project.

However, deep down I still believe in the power of the vision statement. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I believe in the power of a clear vision.

Day-to-day of parenting isn’t particularly glamorous. On those days when you feel like you can’t look at another sticker chart, or listen to your burgeoning reader read another book, or play one more game of chutes and ladders, or even cook one more stinking dinner for people who would prefer a happy meal from McDonald’s anyway, a clear vision can really help you pull through.

A clear vision is also a great aid when making the 700 billion decisions and choices parents make for their kids or regarding their kids. Visions help us know what things to care about, what issues to take seriously, and which ones really aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of your vision. (And spoiler alert, it turns out most problems fall into the latter category.)

My vision as a parent is that I hope to raise nice, self-sufficient humans who have a pretty good idea of who they are, how they work, and how to be a good members of society. Now there are lots of details that fall under that big vision. But in a broad sense, that vision has been my touchstone for many years.

When the birthday party invitation didn’t arrive or the teacher assignment wasn’t what I had hoped, I asked myself, “will this prevent my kids from becoming nice humans?” “will they be unable to become self-sufficient adults?” Usually, the answer was no.

Of course, there have been times I’ve lost sight of the vision. I found myself twisted in knots over something that my vision would have said wasn’t worth getting so worked up about. Those are the times I am grateful that my wise friends would remind me to lighten up, or to sleep on it, or just asked me if I would still care about whatever I was driving myself crazy thinking about in a year or two.

And occasionally, there have been issues, problems, or setbacks that felt as if they might postpone the vision. But as I said, I stopped thinking about time in terms of billable hours quite some time ago. When it comes to parenting, time really isn’t money. Time is a gift. I tend to think of setbacks just as things unfolding on a different schedule now.

No one is more surprised than I am to realize that I actually learned something as a management consultant that has been so core to my life as a parent. It’s even more surprising when I consider the fate of most vision statements out there in the world.

Perhaps that’s the way life goes. Sometimes the things we least expect to have value actually stick with us for years. Sometimes the people we least expect to teach us things are the ones who impart the biggest lessons. And sometimes the things we thought might be a complete waste of time (or our client’s money), actually turn out to be valuable.

I’ll always be grateful for those “dog years” I spent as a management consultant. And perhaps I’m most grateful for what I learned about creating a clear vision.

And sticking with it.

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I help parents of anxious kids and teenagers relax and enjoy parenting again while helping their children create the bright future they deserve. If you’re struggling to parent a perfect but anxious child, I’d love to give you a free downloadable copy of my book, Stop Worrying About Your Anxious Child.