Review by ELAINE DONG

(www.angelolli.com)

MOM-IN-CHIEF
How Wisdom From the Workplace Can Save Your Family From Chaos
By Jamie Woolf
Publisher: Jossey-Bass

What a simple idea – take the skills you acquire in the office and apply them at home! It’s so simple it’s fantastic! Jamie Woolf is a columnist and executive consultant of Working Mother magazine (in the United States), and she writes succinctly about transplanting career skills to the home base.

The contents page of this book reads like any career how-to book – setting big-picture goals, discovering your leadership style, managing conflict, creating a family culture, leading through crisis, managing the growing pains and balancing priorities. When you think about it, these really are the skills one needs to equip oneself with to navigate the precarious journey of motherhood.

The book is written with many real-life examples of how the author and other women dealt with their children and family with the skills they acquired at work. It tackles such issues as when to push kids and when to pull back, how to manage big and small conflicts and my personal favourite - how to find the purpose behind the busy schedules.

It drills home the fact that mothers perform acts of leadership every day, and therefore need to tap into the mindset of a leader in order to be more effective and maintain sanity. Each story usually starts with the woman’s experience in a particular workplace scenario, and subsequently realising the solution she came up with could apply to something similar at home.

In one instance, the author even documented a conversation between her daughter and a friend with whom she had a conflict. In it, she walked the two teenagers through to the solution, much like how a counsellor would resolve conflict between two parties.

There are also a handful of tests and assessments peppered throughout the book to assess various aspects of your life – leadership style, family culture, priorities and the like.

There is a useful chapter on helping a child deal with illness, death or divorce (Leading through crisis). Another gold nugget is the chapter on dealing with difficult adolescents, which every mother should read for extra ammunition. The chapter helps mothers understand better the mindset of a teenager and the trials and angst they suffer as a result of many different factors. Hormones and peer pressure play big roles and it doesn’t help that they’re at the crossroads of their young life, trying to make sense of their changing bodies and view of the world.

Working mothers will appreciate the chapter on balancing priorities. Apart from the author’s various sage advice and examples, there is a quiz in this chapter that every guilt-ridden and harassed mother should take. Trust me, even if you’re not completely assuaged of your guilt, you will gain a degree of sanity just from doing the quiz alone.

Whether you’re a working mother or a stay-at-home mum, this book is relevant. It brings home the fact that just being a mum is a full-time job in itself, and we need to equip ourselves with the necessary skills to get through the difficult days, so we can better enjoy the good days.