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We don’t often talk about love at work, but we should. I do not mean romantic love. A mentor of mine, Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a pediatrician and one of the nation’s leading experts on positive youth development, describes this kind of love as loving kindness—human respect for each other and the desire to lift each other up. If we could practice this with each other at work, the world would be a different place. Loving someone means seeing who they truly are and celebrating who they are.
And the only way we can do this effectively is if we love ourselves first. It’s a cliche to say you can’t truly love others until you love yourself, and it’s still true. But many super successful people I’ve worked with are actually their own worst enemies; even worse, they think that being an enemy is motivating and helps them succeed! It may do that for a while, but eventually it stops working. You can’t understand or care for others in a sustainable way if you are your own worst enemy. And you can’t love yourself until you understand yourself. Self-understanding encompasses your wiring, your personality, your temperament, your formative experiences, the relationships that shaped you, and the patterns you’ve inherited and the ones you’ve built.
Self-understanding is a leadership superpower
Self-understanding is a superpower. It’s a gift you give yourself.
A leader with true self understanding is powerful. They are confident, because they know what they are good at and what they can offer the world. They don’t apologize for their vulnerabilities or for asking for what they need. Crucially, they can offer the same generosity and understanding to other people without sacrificing their own boundaries or wellbeing. When you love and honor yourself, you can give without burning out. You don’t need to turn yourself into a pretzel to meet other people’s needs anymore.
So devote the time you need to understand yourself. Understand your neurotype, your history, your mental and emotional health. Understand your incredible gifts and the questions you can’t stop asking and the problems you must solve. Understand what you need to do your best work. Then build a work life that lets you operate from those strengths instead of around them.
In the next few columns, I’m going to share some case studies of leaders who built self-understanding. But before we can start to understand ourselves, we need to do a little bit of unlearning. As my father used to say, “no one comes from a radish.” We don’t show up at work as blank slates. We bring our uniqueness, of course, but also our “stuff.” And for most of us, we bring a history of hiding pieces of who we are, habits we picked up over the years to survive, and shame.
It’s graduation season, and I’m thinking of my own. I graduated from Brown University feeling like a failure. I know how that sounds. But it’s true. During college, I battled depression and panic attacks, and did little to distinguish myself. I watched my peers seem to glide through the institution while I dragged myself through it. The message I had absorbed—and deeply internalized—was simple: I didn’t stand out. Maybe I didn’t belong with all those smart and accomplished people. Something was wrong with me.
It took years of actual work, out in the world, to discover that I was not broken. I was just in the wrong container. Once I was out of school and working, something clicked. I could think. I could connect. I could contribute in ways that mattered. But by then, I had already spent years carrying a story about myself that wasn’t true, and that story was hard to put down.
Consider the context of leadership. Specifically, the strange fact that so many of us arrive in leadership roles dragging behind us a set of beliefs about our own capabilities that were formed under tough conditions—when we were young, when we were being measured against standards that may not have fit us, when we had very little power to rewrite the narrative. We learned who we were in environments that often got it wrong. And then we built careers on top of those mislearnings, often without noticing. When we’re ready to change, we gain self-understanding and slowly shift our old stories and patterns. I call this the Great Unlearning. And I think it’s one of the most important—and least discussed—aspects of becoming a genuinely effective leader.
What do we need to unlearn?
I study leaders with different brains, who are neurodivergent or have mental illness, and this pattern is especially true for us (although based on my experience, everyone has weak spots and “shame traps.”) In 2025, writer and education expert Paul Tough reported on a study that followed adults in their mid-20s who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children. Researchers focused on their work and educational settings, and a striking pattern emerged. Many participants described their ADHD symptoms as context-dependent. In some environments, they struggled to focus and felt overwhelmed. In others, they functioned well—sometimes exceptionally. Traits framed as deficits at school, like high energy or rapid shifts in attention, turned out to be strengths in work environments they had chosen for themselves. Some even reported that their ADHD symptoms had essentially disappeared. A few were questioning whether they’d ever had ADHD at all—or whether they’d simply been in the wrong environment as children. That’s self-understanding.
Another common unlearning centers around how we behave on teams, much of which has roots in our own families of origin. You may have followed the funny but heartbreaking memes about being the “Eldest child of a single mother,” the highly competent person who takes on too much, too young, and who is also consumed with anxiety and worry that things will fall apart if she lets up, just for a second. This shows up at work in what’s called “overfunctioning,” and we’ve all worked for an overfunctioner. They need control of everything. Nothing gets done without their advice or assistance (aka meddling.) And, many of their colleagues slip into a similar learned role, called underfunctioning. These two strategies are what we learned from our family of origin, and they represent the quickest means we have of calming ourselves and everyone else down when anxiety strikes. They’re both autopilot reactions rather than thoughtful responses. Both reduce anxiety, though through very different means. The overfunctioner takes over and directs, while the underfunctioner distances themselves and avoids. Taking over means you swoop in and problem-solve, which makes the anxiety go away. Distancing means you back off and avoid the anxiety-provoking situation altogether. Neither is a great leadership quality.
If this is you, give yourself some kudos for developing strategies that have helped you manage through life. And, consider if these patterns are still serving you, or if it’s time to change.
I recently interviewed David Flink, Founder and CEO of the Neurodiversity Alliance and one of the most thoughtful people I know on the subject of self-understanding and leadership. David is dyslexic and has ADHD, and he has spent decades helping others reframe what they believe about their own minds, because he had to do it himself.
He described recently standing at his mother’s gravesite, a rabbi handing him a piece of paper and asking if he’d like to read a passage aloud. In front of the people who loved him most, in probably the safest moment of his life, he said no. Not because he couldn’t do it—he could have, slowly. But because reading aloud is challenging, and a tiny spark of old shame was still there. And so David said he’d rather not read aloud.
“You take a little withdrawal from your self-esteem piggy bank,” he told me. “But luckily, people put deposits in all day long.”
What struck me wasn’t the vulnerability of the moment. It was that David—a CNN hero, a GQ Man of the Year, a professional speaker who commands rooms for a living — still had to make a conscious calculation and choose an unpopular answer. He still had to weigh the shame against the reality, because like most of us, he was taught that something only has value if it is hard. That’s how durable these early learnings are. That’s how much work the unlearning takes. And it’s also a superpower.
What do you want to unlearn?
Can you think of a message, an assumption or even a habit that you have about how you perform or what you’re good at or what you’re not good at that has been with you as long as you can remember? What do you need to unlearn?
David puts it this way: great leaders don’t spend their energy trying to look like everyone else. They spend it figuring out where their brain lights up and running toward it. They learn to say no. We get so good at covering for our weak spots—through conscientiousness, anxiety, sheer will—that we mistake that performance for who we are. And then we build leadership identities on top of it, wonder why we’re exhausted, and conclude that leadership is just supposed to feel this hard.
It doesn’t have to.
Try this: Think of one belief you hold about what you’re not good at at work. Maybe it’s public speaking, or managing up, or strategic thinking, or just “the numbers.” Now ask yourself: how old is that belief? Did some one teach it to you, or reinforce it—a teacher, a boss, a parent, a grade? Is there actual evidence it’s still true today, or have you simply been carrying it forward, unexamined, as fact?
Most of us have at least one of these. It’s a story about our own limitations handed to us when we had very little power to push back. Try not to judge yourself as you uncover the belief, but instead as: is this still serving me, or can I let this go?
There’s a concept in user experience design called designing for the extreme user. The idea is simple: if you build a product that works for the most demanding, most constrained user, it will work well for everyone else too. Curb cuts, designed for wheelchair users, turned out to benefit cyclists, parents with strollers, delivery workers, and elderly pedestrians. Closed captions, designed for deaf viewers, became indispensable in gyms, airports, and open offices.
Companies spend millions optimizing for their “average” employee. But who is that person, exactly? In most cases, the mental default is someone without significant caregiving constraints, implicitly or explicitly a person who can stay late, travel on short notice, be always-on, and structure their entire life around work. That default is becoming a liability. One question exposes it faster than any engagement survey or culture audit: could a single mother thrive here?
If the answer is no, the problem isn’t the single mothers.
A talent pool that is too large to do without
There are approximately 7.5 million single mothers raising children under 18 in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of all single-parent families are headed by women. These aren’t marginal workers: 75.4% of single mothers are employed. They are already in your workforce.
What’s extraordinary is the structural penalty they absorb while doing so. The median income for families led by a single mother in 2024 was about $41,305, compared to $132,959 for married couples, and the official poverty rate for single-mother families was 31.3%—nearly six times the rate for married-couple families. In 2024, single working mothers earned $45,604 on average, while single working fathers in the same category earned $55,588—a 22% gap.
The French Fondation des Femmes recently published a detailed cost analysis of single motherhood in France that quantifies the structural squeeze in striking terms: single-parent families have roughly 83% of the financial needs of two-parent families, but only 53% of the income. The math is in all likelihood similar in the US and it doesn’t work. It isn’t supposed to because the entire system was designed for a different family structure.
This isn’t just a social problem. It’s also a talent problem.
The Great Exit—accelerated
For a few years after the pandemic, workplace flexibility created a fragile equilibrium. Remote and hybrid work allowed millions of mothers—including single mothers — to stay attached to careers they would otherwise have had to abandon. Then companies started pulling that flexibility back.
A 2025 KPMG report titled “The Great Exit” found that labor force participation among mothers with children under five dropped nearly three percentage points between January and June 2025, coinciding with a near doubling of full-time office mandates among Fortune 500 companies. Surprisingly the steepest declines were among college-educated mothers of very young children.
42% of women who voluntarily left the workforce in 2025 cited caregiving responsibilities, including the cost of childcare, as the primary driver. Childcare now costs an average of $13,128 per year in the US—and for a typical single parent, childcare alone consumed 35% of their household budget in 2024.
For single mothers, return-to-office mandates are a forced exit. There is no partner to pick up school drop-off. There is no one to stay home when a child is sick. There is no backup. The structural vulnerability has a name: “temporal precarity”—i.e. being permanently at full capacity, with zero slack. It plays out at every inflection point of the workday.
Political decisions are making it worse
The social infrastructure that helps single mothers remain employed has never been robust in the US. Under the current administration, it is being actively dismantled. The Republican megabill signed in 2025 made dramatic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, programs that a disproportionate share of single-mother families depend on. New SNAP rules changed work requirement exemptions, previously applying to parents with children under 18, to apply only to parents with children under 14—a change policy experts say will primarily affect single mothers. Meanwhile, the Trump administration froze childcare funding to multiple states, and experts warned that the disruption would accelerate childcare worker attrition, reducing the supply of care precisely when demand is highest.
Less childcare availability means higher costs and more pressure on single mothers’ jobs. The workforce implications are not abstract. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that the childcare gap could cost the U.S. economy up to $329 billion over the next decade. Single mothers, who have no redundancy in their systems, exit first when the structure fails.
The design opportunity everyone should consider
Every constraint that makes work impossible for single mothers is also a constraint that makes work worse for everyone else. It just shows up less visibly and less urgently for workers with more support systems. The presenteeism culture that burns out single mothers also burns out everyone eventually. The always-on expectations that force single mothers out drive up attrition across the board. The lack of schedule flexibility that is unsurvivable for a single parent is deeply uncomfortable for dual-income couples with children, for workers managing elder care, for employees dealing with chronic illness, for anyone whose life doesn’t fit neatly around a 9-to-5 plus overtime.
Therefore, designing for the single mother means designing for resilience. In concrete terms, this could look like:
- a workload genuinely manageable within standard hours, not one that assumes 55 hours of availability;
- a shift from synchronous presenteeism to results-based accountability, so that someone who leaves at 3 p.m. to look after a child is not marked as less committed than someone who stays until late performing visibility;
- childcare benefits or backup care programs that actually acknowledge solo parents’ lack of a second adult;
- meeting schedules that don’t require someone to be online at 7 a.m. or 8 p.m.;
- and advancement processes that don’t unconsciously penalize the career patterns—lateral moves, reduced hours, geographic immobility—that caregiving demands tend to create.
Most of it is what employees across demographics say they want. The innovation in framing it around single mothers is that it removes the wiggle room. When you design a system for someone who has no backup, no flexibility, and no safety net, you are forced to confront every assumption baked into the default.
The talent argument
Companies that dismiss this as a niche HR concern are misreading the scale of the problem. There are 7.5 million single mothers in the American workforce—more than the entire population of Los Angeles and Chicago combined. They are disproportionately represented in healthcare, education, retail, and hospitality—sectors where workforce shortages are already acute. Among mothers who had children under age 3, the unemployment rate for those with other marital statuses was more than three times higher than that for married mothers. That gap represents women exiting or being pushed to the margins of the labor market during the years when they most need income and when employers most need workers.
The companies that figure out how to retain and advance single mothers will not just be doing the right thing. They will be accessing a supply of motivated, experienced, resilient workers that their competitors are structurally filtering out. They will have built organizations flexible enough to accommodate the full spectrum of human constraints—which, as the workforce ages and caregiving needs multiply across the life course, is increasingly the whole workforce.
UX designers have a phrase for this: inclusive design. The idea that building for the hardest case is good engineering. The same logic applies to HR. So ask the question. Could a single mother thrive at your company? If the answer is yes, you’ve probably built something worth working at. If the answer is no, you know exactly where to start.
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The MBA is often considered the cornerstone degree for business leaders who aspire to reach the corner office. In fact, roughly 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or some other graduate degree. The chief executives of Apple, Microsoft, Blackrock, and JPMorgan all hold MBA degrees, among countless other leaders who have risen to the top after graduating from business school or pursuing further education later in their career. As a business school professor, I see the ambition in the eyes of MBA students who aspire to be counted among tomorrow’s change makers. Although some enter the program looking for a job with higher pay or perhaps even a two-year vacation from the real world, a common trope depicted on TikTok and Instagram about the perceived unseriousness of B-school, the elite among the crop are looking for something far greater: an opportunity to lead.
To these students, I offer the sincerest advice I can muster at the start of every semester I teach: “The most important thing I can give you in this course is perspective—a way to see the world beyond your own vantage point.” Primarily because the world is filled with a plethora of meanings and possibilities, leading requires first understanding that there are many permutations of reality. Of which, leaders must decide which pathway is most advantageous. So, we invited Andrew Sliwinski, the head of product experience at Lego Education, onto the latest episode of the From The Culture podcast to explore how a company that has built its entire offering on the possibilities of multiple outcomes—brick-by-brick—applies this approach to learning.
Lego Education is the part of the Lego Group that translates the company’s commitment to play to an educational pedagogy that has been introduced into school systems from Detroit to Seoul to Copenhagen. Before Lego, Sliwinski codirected Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, the free programming tool hundreds of millions of children use to figure out the difference between typing the right answer in and figuring out what the right answer might even look like. He has spent his career building products with a single conviction at their center: The goal of any real learning experience is not convergence on one outcome but the orderly production of many. This sits at the heart of what an MBA should provide, not just skills for navigating strategy or an acumen for forecasting cash flows, but an understanding of different realities that lead to different possibilities.
Lego has a metric that operationalizes this, and it’s the one I’d recommend any leader steal immediately. They call it solution diversity. Say during a learning experience the children are broken into groups and assigned a project to build an undefined structure. If every group of kids made the same thing, Lego would send the design teams back to redesign because, in the company’s view, the same outcome means there was a single path through, and everyone took it. That’s because the point of a real learning experience, Sliwinski declares, is that 10 groups enter a room and 10 different things come out.
Think about this for a moment. In a typical MBA course, these students would be rewarded for providing the “right answer.” While that may be so in a fixed environment like a test, for instance, it’s not so indicative of the real world where there are many possibilities and the meanings the market attaches to your category are not singular. And they certainly aren’t fixed. Consider the AI category. There are many permutations of meanings in the minds of the public regarding this breakthrough technology, and they are constantly being renegotiated and reconstructed. The heterogeneity of these meanings impacts not only product adoption but also infrastructure possibilities, i.e., policies surrounding the construction of data centers. A leader who has trained their organization to converge fast on a single reading of one reality has essentially built a blind spot at scale.
So, what’s the remedy? In most classroom contexts, Sliwinski notes, the play patterns that produce the most divergent thinking—the social, the imaginative, the emotionally messy ones—are often the ones that get crowded out. They are seen as a distraction, so they are dismissed or even ignored. The same instinct shows up in the adult workplace, too. The brainstorm where someone goes “off topic” is redirected to the “task at hand.” But perhaps these detours are really reframes in disguise. What if these side conversations actually unlock a path that the team hadn’t yet considered? What if they are a means of corporate playfulness that get the organization to more diverse solutions like the Lego brick constructions built by the kid design team?
Make no mistake, I am a strong advocate for the MBA program as an accelerant for a successful career in business management, but I, like Sliwinski, believe that there is an increasing need for greater understanding of the human condition, which requires understanding the many variations the social phenomenal world presents to us. This truth should encourage business schools across the globe, and learning and development designers across the global workforce alike, to rethink their upskilling efforts to include perspective-widening endeavors to their programming. That way, leaders can learn to see the world in its kaleidoscope of possibilities and properly apply their business savvy to a world that actually exists—not one curated by their own myopia.
Check out our full conversation with Andrew Sliwinski on the latest episode of From The Culture here.
