I became a mother long before I became a CEO.
In fact, if you had met me in my early twenties and told me that one day I’d be responsible for multiple businesses, hundreds of employees and teams spread across different countries, I probably would have laughed.
At the time, I was far more concerned with figuring out how to get through the next week than thinking about leadership.
That’s one of the reasons I find it amusing when people ask where I learned to manage people. The truth is, I learned many of those lessons long before I ever had a job title attached to them.
Recently, I was looking at an old photo of the kids. They were tiny. The kind of tiny that makes you wonder where the years went. I remember taking that photo. I remember the house we were living in. I remember how exhausted I felt.
What I don’t remember is feeling particularly wise.
Looking back now, though, I can see that those years quietly taught me more about people than any management course ever could.
Motherhood has a way of forcing you to accept something that many leaders spend years resisting: you cannot control people into becoming their best selves.
You can support them. You can guide them. You can encourage them. You can create an environment where growth is possible. But eventually, they have to make their own decisions.
Children teach you that. Employees teach you that too.
I think many leaders struggle because they confuse responsibility with control. They care deeply about the outcome, so they try to manage every variable. Every decision. Every process. Every conversation. I understand the instinct. I’ve felt it myself.
But some of the best leaders I’ve worked with seem to understand something different. They know that trust is often more powerful than control. The goal isn’t to create dependence. The goal is to create capability.
When I think about the people I’ve been most proud of leading over the years, it’s rarely because they followed instructions perfectly. It’s because they grew into people who no longer needed those instructions.
And perhaps that’s why leadership and parenting feel surprisingly similar to me.
Neither is really about authority.
Both are about helping someone become more confident without making them dependent on you.
The funny thing is, I didn’t realise any of this while it was happening. At the time, I was simply raising children and trying to do the best job I could.
Looking back now, I can see that some of the lessons that shaped the way I lead today were being taught to me around the dinner table long before they ever appeared in a boardroom.