Fix Work for Moms, Fix Work for Everyone: Leslie Forde

About four years ago, Leslie Forde was having one of those conversations working parents sometimes have—the kind where you swap stories about the realness of the juggle—when the idea for her business came to her.

“Why are moms so stressed?” her colleague, a dad, asked.

“Well,” she replied. “There’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and then there’s mom’s hierarchy of needs.”

Forde’s response sparked something. “I felt it in my body,” she said.

Leslie Forde created Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs to help working moms prioritize investments in themselves. Image courtesy of Leslie Forde/Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Her idea was this: Working moms are stressed and tired because they never have enough time for self-care. In the seven levels of Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs—which Forde first sketched on scrap paper and later turned into website to help moms prioritize their needs—self-care is at the tippy top of the pyramid, something that’s done after everyone else’s needs are met: Children, housework, work-work, and family relationships come first. For most moms, it’s the opposite of the airline principle, which asks parents to put their oxygen masks on first.

Forde’s idea was to help moms give themselves permission to invest in what she calls the “aspirational” parts of the pyramid: the self-care practices like sleep, health, and stress management that restore us, and the personal interests like fun, hobbies, and learning new skills that feed us and help us grow.

Fast forward to 2020, and Forde has transformed Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs into a new business helping employers fix work for working parents. But first, she had to fix her own relationship with work.

‘Ambition Girl’ crashed and burned

At the beginning, Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs was a passion project that had personal meaning for Forde.

As a first-generation child of parents who immigrated to the United States from Barbados, Forde has always had a strong work ethic. “I was Ambition Girl,” she said. “I wanted to be excellent in my work, I wanted to be excellent as a mom. I was raised by people who are from a culture of ‘Do your best work. Work your hardest.’ And as someone who is a Black woman, and from an underrepresented group—it’s like, you are going to have to work harder than everybody else to survive and thrive.”

“I was Ambition GirI. I wanted to be excellent in my work, I wanted to be excellent as a mom. I was raised by people who are from a culture of ‘Do your best work. Work your hardest.’ And as someone who is a Black woman, and from an underrepresented group—it’s like, you are going to have to work harder than everybody else to survive and thrive.”

In her 20s and 30s, that work ethic served Forde well. Her career, which started in market research and expanded into business development, strategy, and corporate leadership roles, grew because she could outwork most of her colleagues. When her son was born in 2010, she continued this pace, including international travel with her baby in tow. “I went to extraordinary lengths to do that because I wasn’t willing to leave my son for weeks at a time,” she said. “But I also couldn’t see myself giving up the career that I had worked so hard for, or losing all the identity that I built up in my competency and years of investing in this work.”

With one child, that was manageable. Then, in 2014, her daughter was born. Forde had just gotten a promotion that required her to manage a larger team, and she was nervous about taking on her new professional responsibilities while parenting two young kids. When she returned to work after maternity leave, the conditions changed: Several of her team members were on family leave, the most senior person on her team had switched departments, and the company had failed to backfill those roles. Meanwhile, her company was stretching into new growth areas. “It was a time when my career was calling on me to be my most creative and my most present, and physically, emotionally, I wasn’t there,” Forde recalled.

She started to operate on auto-pilot, and it worried her. She would drive to work and forget how she got there, or she’d leave her breast pump at home and have to drive back to get it. “There were so many clues and signs that I was crashing, but I wanted to ignore everything that my body was telling me,” she said. “I wanted to ignore the fatigue and push past it because I had personal pride in being excellent.”

Ultimately, Forde said, she “crashed and burned.” She decided to hit reset. She left her company and took a new job, along with a huge pay cut, and she also shifted to a four-day work week. “I restructured my work life in a way that allowed me to breathe again,” she said.

That breathing room allowed Forde to recognize her lightbulb moment about Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. After sketching out the idea, she applied her market research skills and surveyed 150 moms to refine the hierarchy. The visual depiction she created gave her the “ruthless clarity” to carve out space for professional and personal development in her own life. “I wouldn’t have done it had I not visualized it,” she said. “That changed my life.”

In June of 2016, Forde launched her website with resources, profiles, and tips to help working moms with everything from meal-planning, to personal and professional growth, to self-care. “I’ve been trying to effect change at the mom level—at the individual level,” she said. “I know there’s a lot of really complicated reasons this is so hard, but what can I do today, tomorrow, next week so that I can breathe again and feel better?”

Starting a new business in the middle of a pandemic

This past February, when the new decade was young and the pandemic was, too, Forde lost her job. As someone who grew up experiencing financial instability, getting laid off was terrifying. “I was freaking out,” she said.

Although she had set up Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs as a business with an LLC last year, she never planned to make a living from her passion project. She thought it might be a nice third income to complement what she and her husband were already earning. Her plan was to continue her role as a corporate employee. “It was drilled into my head, right from the moment I could stand up: ‘Get a good job, work for a company. Working for yourself is risky,’” she said. “I was groomed to want to work in a corporate structure. I wanted a life of health, comfort, and safety, and the ticket to that—or what I believed was the ticket to that—was a stable ‘corporate career.’”

Forde had two options: Look for another job or start her own business. She took a month to think things over. During that time, she did a lot of writing and a little job outreach, and as the pandemic worsened, she couldn’t bear the idea of “launching into a joyless, 12-hour-a-day job search” in the middle of the pandemic. She was sure she would find a job, but it wasn’t where she wanted to put her energy.

She chose entrepreneurship. “It was the thing I was most scared of, never wanted—and yet because of that, it was what I needed to do,” she said. She described the idea of working for herself as “the scary bear outside the door,” but she reclaimed the power from that bear by engaging in her fears in a very hands-on way—by choosing entrepreneurship and applying the business skills she owned from years working for others.

“Right now, we don’t have a work culture in most organizations that supports caregivers—not just mothers—to succeed and flourish and grow and achieve leadership in their careers. Work as a whole—the system of work, the way it’s executed, and the history of it—doesn’t provide a framework that allows that for most people.”

Even though she wouldn’t have wished to start her business during a pandemic, it motivated her. “I had this hypothesis that I would just be my best self and calmer and happier building the business if I weren’t relying on it for income,” Forde said, recalling her original plan to run Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs as a side business. “And maybe that was true, but it also meant that I didn’t have any real urgency starting the business. I was very gradual about putting it together. Now I feel real urgency, and I feel excitement. I think I had to do it this way. It may not have happened if I weren’t in this position in this unique time right now.”

To start her new business, Forde again drew on her market research background, conducting several waves of surveys that have reached more than a thousand working parents. She’s analyzing that data to help employers understand and respond to the needs of their employees. Whereas Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs works at the individual level to help working moms, Allies @ Work, her business-to-business offering, aims to make systems change, and this time it’s not just about moms. Forde wants to help employers make work better for working caregivers across the United States, where more than half of the estimated 43.5 million Americans who provide unpaid care to family and loved ones also work full time.

“Right now, we don’t have a work culture in most organizations that supports caregivers—not just mothers—to succeed and flourish and grow and achieve leadership in their careers,” she said. “Work as a whole—the system of work, the way it’s executed, and the history of it—doesn’t provide a framework that allows that for most people.”

She is making a dent in that problem by using data from her quantitative research to provide recommendations on policies, benefits, and work culture that employers can change to help caregivers thrive—during the pandemic and beyond. “I can provide measurement around what have been traditionally these fuzzy or some may say soft issues,” she said. “And because they’ve been fuzzy and soft, they’ve often been diminished and marginalized, but they underpin a lot of important factors in how we work. And how we work underpins the larger economy.”

It's not lost on Forde that her work is about fixing work for parents, and she is launching her own business, at home, in the middle of a pandemic, which means her two primary school-age kids are also at home. As an entrepreneur, her schedule is intense, but Forde said it’s not the same as it was during her corporate career. “I have set some rules for myself that allow me to get much greater creative time and preserve my creative energy,” she said. She avoids scheduling calls in the morning, which is her best time for thoughtful work, and she’s taking longer runs than she did in her prior life. When it comes to family time, it’s less simple to carve out boundaries because everyone is home all the time. It used to be that she’d return home from work and put her electronics away until after her kids were asleep. “I dedicated that time after work for being very present for my kids,” she said. Now she’s much more intentional about explaining to them what is work time and what is not.

Coronavirus may be ‘killing the working mother,’ but this could fix work for everyone

Forde has a theory: If we can fix work for moms, it will fix work for all people. Forde borrowed the concept from a framework in education that says if you make school work for the most vulnerable students—those with the greatest achievement gap—you’ll improve school for everyone.

In America, 23.5 million working women have kids under 18, and these moms are some of the most marginalized employees in the country: They earn less; are more likely to take time off, reduce their work, or quit after having kids; they face discrimination and bias in the workplace; they’re less likely to advance as people without children, even as they are held to a higher performance standard; and they shoulder the larger burden of caregiving and household responsibilities.

“If the audience with the least amount of discretionary time can thrive and succeed in work, then it makes work more flexible, more joyful, more inclusive of life for everybody.”

COVID-19 has made the plight of working moms worse, which has been well-documented in articles with headlines like “Coronavirus is killing the working mother.” Forde’s own research backs this up. The vast majority of people who have responded to her survey have been moms. One told her: “I work for a company of under 50 employees and when I sought to take a parental leave, due to school closure and increased work for me from remote learning and childcare, it was not approved.”

With a failure of government to support caregivers, particularly during the pandemic, and working parents now struggling to piece together plans so they can get work done while running remote school at home for their kids, Forde believes employers have a chance to rethink work for working parents, and that doing so will make work better for all employees. She points out that, pre-pandemic, workplaces valued things that squeezed out working moms—face time, the ability to arrive in the office first and leave last, and the flexibility to drop everything to attend networking events or go on last-minute travel. But if employers improve work for working moms, it benefits everyone. “If the audience with the least amount of discretionary time can thrive and succeed in work, then it makes work more flexible, more joyful, more inclusive of life for everybody,” she said.

But it’s about far more than work-life balance. One of the common themes in Forde’s survey has been about the lack of psychological safety at work. Moms don’t feel safe expressing their needs, and this is contributing to anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, and poor work performance. “It’s affecting their quality of life, but it’s like the permission isn’t there to talk about it,” she said.

Some of the people Forde has polled are concerned about losing their jobs because they don’t have personal wealth and savings to fall back on. The country’s history of inequality and systemic racism means that people’s experiences riding out the pandemic vary widely. “Wealth is distributed pretty unevenly here, and if you look at people of color or anyone who doesn’t have an established history, such as people who are from an immigrant background—these people are trading off their physical and mental health every day in the work that they choose for economic stability and security,” she said. “So all of these factors contribute to why people are not going to raise their hands right now and say, ‘I’m having trouble at home.’”

Forde believes that if employers start thinking of these people first—the people who are most marginalized by workplace practices and policies, the people who are most affected by cultures of racism and discrimination, the people who don’t have inherited wealth—work can be better for all.

A work/life transformation

For Forde, stepping off the corporate track was ultimately a gift that transformed her life. “It has unshackled me from a lot of the constraints that I felt in how I expressed myself, in how I wrote, in the positions I took because I felt like my corporate identity—protecting that identity and protecting my corporate income—came first, and it came at the expense of everything else,” she said. 

In a recent post on her website, she called for a “work/life transformation.” I asked her what that would look like.

“It’s this utopia where work fits into life versus the other way around,” she explained. “We’ve been fitting our lives around the construct of work because work is the safety net. Work is the vehicle to health and well-being and happiness, at least in the United States, because work is the vehicle to health and well-being. So you have to squeeze and stretch and twist and bend your life to fit the confines of it.

“We’ve been fitting our lives around the construct of work because work is the safety net. Work is the vehicle to health and well-being and happiness, at least in the United States, because work is the vehicle to health and well-being. So you have to squeeze and stretch and twist and bend your life to fit the confines of it.”

“But what if it were the other way around? What if you were forced, as an employer, to permit people to have caregiving responsibilities? To permit people to be able to get up and make meals and feed their families and do all the human things we do. Permit people to have human frailties—to have illness, to have family members have illness, to grieve.”

Forde is hearing all about these human frailties from the working parents she has surveyed, and she’s sharing what she learns with employers. “All of these really human things, which we had to hide before, are coming into the open now,” she said. “And that’s a positive thing.”

It’s helping employers recognize that just as life needs to allow work to happen, work needs to allow life to happen.

“Work doesn’t need to be so restrictive, to prevent humanity and prevent caregiving, which is actually a big part of the economy,” Forde said. “As a matter of fact—dare I say that—it actually does feed the economy. So it’s inconsistent for work culture not to support it.”

Have you been able to express your needs at work? How are you viewing your hierarchy of needs? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co. Share your thoughts through Leslie Forde’s survey.