Mentor for Life

At the Shackleton workshop, we were asked to tell the group about our favorite leader, someone we knew personally and who served as our role model of leadership. After a dozen stories about past bosses and heroes, I was compelled to say that my mentor is my mother.  I can hear her laughing now, but the more I have thought about it this week, the more I know it is true.

Even in prosaic roles, as a manager doing performance reviews or organizing a project or speaking up at work when something needs to be said, it's my mother who has shaped my behavior, not B-school.  Her mother lived by the golden rule, and it still seems like the right standard for business and life. 

Fortunately, I had the good sense to write my mother a letter at the end of my first semester in college and tell her how just much of what she had been trying to impart to me for 18 years actually stuck.  Faced with a series of choices those first few months away from home, my test was to bounce it against the admonition I heard every morning when I set out the door:  Make your mother proud of you and be careful crossing the street.  That made most choices pretty simple.

And, it was 18 years after that when the letter was returned to me that I discovered just how important it is to tell people not just that you love them, but how they change your life.  My mother died in an automobile accident, and the letter was in her purse when she died.  Her friends told me later that she would take the letter out and show people what I had written years earlier.

My mother was funny, generous and kind.  She was no fool, but never made you feel like one.  She had a hard life, but never complained or regretted her choices.  She worked hard, laughed a lot, and had dozens and dozens of friends she maintained over many years. She was my cousins' favorite aunt and her bosses' most reliable colleague.  She worked full time and raised three children. She believed in buying quality shoes for growing feet, and always found the money for a book one couldn't live without.  But more than that, she believed in you.   She just knew you were doing your best, and that was more than enough.

So, yes, my model for leadership is my mother, and I think she would be proud of me--well, most of the time, anyway.  (And come to think of it, her example of who to be led me to my husband, who is like her in all the ways that matter--and it's no coincidence that he has a great mother, too.)

Like Sir Ernest, my mother could turn her back on the past and step into the future. She stepped up to deal directly with adversity, and stepped back to let others do their part.  Like Shackleton, she was a realistic optimist and a leader.

Comments

[Gregory Fine]

Ann,

WOW. Great post. Once again you inspire me. Thank you!

Greg

[Amadie]

What a fantastic post. I feel much the same way about my mother, and took the opportunity to share that (and your post) with her. Thank you for reminding me how important it is to stop and let the people we love and admire know just how much they inspire us every day.