BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

The Toughest CEO Position In The World

This article is more than 8 years old.

I was a CEO of a high-growth technology company for many years and so believe me when I say that I don’t make this next statement lightly: There is no tougher CEO position in the world than that of the CEO of a home.

As CEO of a home you are not just the Chief Executive Officer, you are the Chief Everything Officer. You are responsible for the finances and budgeting; the facilities cleaning, repairs, and maintenance; the laundry; the transport; the scheduling and project management; the cooking; all human resource responsibilities such as rewarding and discipline along with ensuring safety and protection of each person in your care; counseling as needed on any number of subjects; spiritual advising; educating on science, technology, math, art, history, etc, as well as teaching all values and life skills; decision-making (noting that some decisions are literally life and death for the team); and doing all of this on a 24 hour a day x 7 days a week basis without any sick days and without vacation time.

As the CEO of a big company I was able to receive validation for the work I did in the form of awards and accolades as well as thanks from clients and employees. But as the CEO of a home you carry all the responsibility but typically receive very little external validation for the work performed. There are very few awards and accolades given to CEOs of a home, and while you hope for thanks from the team, you have to accept the fact that a vast majority of the work you do will go unnoticed and unappreciated. Let's face it, no one thinks to thank you for making sure there is milk in the fridge and toilet paper in the bathrooms. I still recall a humorous conversation I had with a woman who had left a high powered corporate job to become a stay home mom to her little children. She was expressing just how desperate she was feeling to receive any validation at all in this new job. She shared that every time her husband walked in the door from work she literally wanted to grab his face and say “Did you see that the dishtowels are all clean and folded perfectly in the drawer and the cans are all lined up nicely in our food pantry?? …Aren’t you so proud of me?!” No doubt there is an unfortunate lack of validation, either private or public, for the CEOs of the home.

Salary.com recently did an analysis of how much salary an employer would have to pay a Mother to cover the cost of each of the responsibilities she carries in her 40 hours along with the 56.4 hours of overtime each week. They calculated that an employer would have to pay a Mother $122,732 a year. I would suggest that is getting off cheap! They even offer a calculator for you to personalize your own Mother’s salary at mom.salary.com. My own Mother gave birth to ten children within a twenty year span, so their calculator decided she should make $171,891 per year, but the reality is that there isn’t a dollar amount that would have fairly compensated her for the amount of work she actually did.

It’s important to note that many CEOs of the home are also working second jobs outside of the home, yet their burden of responsibility at the home remains the same. Having been the CEO of a company while being a single-mother CEO of a home I learned some valuable lessons. The greatest of which was the importance of outsourcing and prioritizing. The best advice I can give anyone who is both the CEO of their home and is also working a second job outside of the home is this: Outsource everything and anything you can afford to that isn’t an absolute necessity to do yourself. That was the only way I survived. I also had realize which of my home tasks just didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. For example, I realized I could still be a successful CEO of the home even if I bought my bread at a store rather than baking it myself. Sure homemade bread tastes better, but it’s the perfect example of one of those things that just doesn’t matter. Whereas, the most important thing a CEO of the home can do is to focus their time on teaching their children good core values and preparing them to become contributing members of society. There is no more important task than that.

I literally cringe when I hear women respond to the question of what they do for a living and they say, “I am just a stay home Mom”. I want to scream “NOOOO (imagine scream in slow motion)...you’re not! You are the CEO of a home and that is the toughest CEO Position in the world!” One should never minimize the role of CEOs of homes. Whether it’s working mothers, stay home mothers, or stay home fathers, all deserve incredible thanks and validation for the amazing work they do. Thank heavens for Mother’s Day and the reminder it serves that we should all take a moment out to thank the CEOs of the homes that have benefited our lives. Let this article serve as my own way of saying thank you. You all make the world a better place.

~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blog at www.amyreesanderson.com/blog )