management team means no boss

Although in partnership with her husband before their business and marriage went bust, Ivy was essentially a stay at home mom. Returning to work as a paid employee was thus a shock to her system over and above the usual return to work adjustments of a single mother but nothing prepared her for the 'management team'.

"I have two small children at home," explains Ivy, "and balancing my life between the kids and work is a constant worry I didn't have before. If that wasn't bad enough, when I last had a job at the age of 21 I remember workplaces as having one person in charge, and everybody knew exactly who the boss was. He was 'the man' and if nothing else you gave him respect."

Ivy's return to work job is with a large corporation and she has discovered that the 'boss' consists of a management team.

"Rather than one person giving orders," laughs Ivy, "I have to deal with three guys bossing me around and because each manager has his or her own personal agenda I'm having nightmares prioritizing the work I do for them. I hate being bossed around like a kid!"

Ivy is learning that 'teamwork' is responsible for so many bosses around workplaces these days.

Unfortunately, most of the factors relevant to how teamwork became adopted by management gurus as the perfect way to run a commercial organization apply not only to staff, but management, too.

"The theory behind teamwork - that nobody is indispensable, that we are all replaceable cogs in a machine and are unlikely to be given an area of work over which we have total control - is relaxed a fair bit when it is applied to management," says Ivy.

"Managers very clearly do have an area over which they have control - managing staff," says Ivy, "but they are also required to act in cohort with other managers - as well as reporting to their superiors - and this is where I often find myself between a rock and a hard place."

"I understand the business side of this, " says Ivy. "Basically, the shareholders in any publicly listed company determine a great deal of what goes on in the coalface. Profits must be maximized and losses minimized. The company directors are the slaves of the shareholders, the management team is the slave of the company directors, and staff members like me are the slaves of the management team."

It is a very clear pecking order and Ivy is at the bottom of it.

"Because the lowlife slaves like me are considered to be dispensable and not likely to be in a job for long," says Ivy, "there is very little camaraderie between managers and staff and the company directors are all but invisible people."

"I hate the 'them and us divide' in the company, "says Ivy. "When my ex-husband and I ran a small business we were on very good terms with our employees. I would never dream of putting myself above someone who worked for me. That's abominable. But I put up with it every day where I work."

"While the 'management team' arrangement has an advantage in that you are not stuck with one person whom you may not like," says Ivy, "it has far more disadvantages."

"As with all teams there are personality clashes," says Ivy, "and I've discovered that management teams are likely to have far bigger personality clashes than staff teams because their egos are bigger."

"Each manager will have his or her own personal agenda, so getting to know how each member of the management team ticks takes a lot more time and energy than applying this exercise to one person."

"Working for a management team," sighs Ivy, "is a real nightmare because I have to prioritize and decide who is more important. If I please X and do his work first, Y and Z are going to dislike me - and so it goes on."

Ivy has been told that managers are not as pleasant to work for as their superiors - the directors - but being a return to work mother made her ineligible for a job higher up in the pecking order.

"It's a bit like the division between generations," says Ivy. "My kids tend to get on a lot better with their grandparents than they do with my ex-husband and I, and that's just as well because my mom looks after them for me before and after school."

Ivy has had a job offer from a couple she once knew while running her own business.

"The pay would be much more than I'm getting now, and I know that this family business treats staff as part of the family rather than as a 'servant'," says Ivy. "But, I also know that the couple are having marital problems and while the business is likely to last the marriage won't and I don't really want to get involved. Been there, done that!"

"Also," adds Ivy, "I've heard from one of their employees that the couple tend to keep staff back working late until they are ready to keep some fancy restaurant appointment, and this is a bit gross because I need to get home, cook dinner for my kids and get them to bed."

Having too many people bossing you around at work is really not a good scene but Ivy thinks it is probably better than working for a family business.

"In a big organization," says Ivy, "there’s a grievance system in place to sort out any problem with the management team. In a small business, there is nobody 'higher up' to complain to. I guess I just have to knuckle down and do my time until I can move up into an executive position where I'll have one boss - not a team of them!"

keeping things together

Like all women, Hope has come a long way since the 1960s but she, being a single mom, knows from personal experience that having it all is an unrealistic expectation and that the most a single working mom can do is keep things together at home and survive as best you can at work.

"I know that some moms - single and married - manage to beat the odds," says Hope, "but most of us are forced to make huge career sacrifices for the sake of the children and take on some pretty nasty humilation, too. But you do it to survive!"

When her children were young, Hope believed it was far more important for her to keep it all together at home than to strive for power and glory in the workplace for the simple reason that she represented home to her children. There was nobody else but her to keep things together at home, and if she lost the love and trust of her children then she would lose everything.

"A lot of working moms just don’t realize that their children play a far more important role in their lives than the women think they do," says Hope, "Children keep us grounded far more than a job does."

"I saw it as my duty to give my children the very best start in life and the best start has very little to do with money," says Hope. "Instead, it has everything to do with the time and care I gave them and most of all the blessing of a loving, stress-free home environment."

"To achieve that aim I took on the least stressful job I could find," says Hope, "and no matter that I was being paid half as much as I was worth I hung on to that job for dear life because it was giving me what I wanted. I jumped through a hundred hoops a day to keep my boss happy because as long as he was happy he wouldn't fire me and upset my homelife."

"I believe that the first seven years of a child's life are vital to his or her future development," says Hope, "and I have no regrets about the enormous personal sacrifices I made for my children. I was aware right from the start that no amount of remorse will ever undo the damage done to kids by a mother who neglected them in order to further her career, or to chase a guy."

To her credit, Hope’s three children have grown up into happy, well-adjusted teenagers and while life is much easier for her there are still significant responsibilities with teenagers living at home.

"I'm still in the same job," laughs Hope, "and I'm still keeping it together at home.

"Support is something I never really got in large enough measures to improve my circumstances," says Hope. "Being a father and a mother to young children was relatively easy, but its hard being both a mom and dad for older children. They still depend upon me to provide a safe, stable and happy home, and because I don't want to rock their boats I'm still jumping through hoops for my boss."

"The demands of my job no longer conflict much with my mothering duties," says Hope, "so life is easier in that respect, but my boss never lets me forget how much time off he gave me when I had to put my little children's needs first."

"When a conflict between work and home arose, I always stuck to my guns about never letting work interfere with my home life," says Hope, "and my boss was pretty good about giving me time off to keep things together at home. And so he should have been for paying me half as much as I was worth!"

"The belief that I can have it all when the kids were older kept me sane during those early years," says Hope, "but I'm discovering that I probably won't be able to achieve that goal until my kids are working themselves."

"Until then, I guess I'm still stuck in this low paid job," sighs Hope. "I'm surviving, sure, but I'd like to be thriving!"

"I can't understand mothers -- married or not -- who put their kids into nurseries after birth in order to pursue their careers," says Hope. "Maybe I'm missing something but why bother having children if you’re not prepared to look after them?"