Motherhood is no walk in the park. For all its challenges, becoming a mother has also taught Zita Falk the art of prioritization.
“Unquestionably, I now have to make choices – on where to spend my time, for example – and decide how much time I should spend at home or at work. Motherhood sharpens the edges around you because there is someone else for whom you are responsible,” she said.
“Suddenly there is an anchor which makes it very easy for me to make decisions and I can quickly say yes or no. In a way, it creates a more sustainable way of deploying my knowledge and energy.”
Family has always been the number one priority for Falk, and at one point, was even above her personal development. “I’m not an advocate for ‘you can have it all’. You make choices, trade-offs, and sacrifices,” she said.
“I was 22 and had just completed my university education but I never got to receive my degree as I could not defend my thesis due to family obligations. I found a job as soon as I could as I had to provide for my family. And because I was successful in that job, it led to the next one and the next promotion, and I just kept going.”
Falk started her first job as a human resources assistant at Microsoft at its Budapest office in Hungary. Several years later, she packed her bags for London after landing a job as an organization design consultant at a British consulting firm. A desire to prove that she was as “good” and “experienced” as anyone else in Western Europe fueled her drive to succeed and she went on to score jobs at Burberry and KPMG where she developed and implemented critical change initiatives for businesses.
“My work involved looking at how to bring together 50,000 people to work in the most efficient ways possible by thinking about questions like, how do you ensure that companies transform their organization in a way that fits their business strategies?” she said. “At the same time, it’s not so straightforward. We’ve also got to understand that the people working in these organizations are human beings and we can’t treat them like cogs in a wheel,” she said.
For Falk, organizational redesign is not just about shaping an organization for greater efficiency and faster growth. “The workplace is a space where one finds their purpose and contribution to something bigger than themselves. It’s about being part of a community and a place where we belong. We don’t realize that we spend so much time in the workplace and that it would be much better to make the most of your time there constructively, which is also partly why I became drawn to the idea of organizational design,” she said. “Work doesn’t have to be a bad thing that we all hate on Monday mornings.”
In 2019, Falk landed the role of Associate Director, Transformation Lead at Swiss biopharmaceutical company Ferring Pharmaceuticals and moved to Switzerland. She was soon promoted to Director, Chief of Staff, Reproductive Medicine & Maternal Health. After a year in the role, Falk left the multinational to set up her own consulting firm. She then contemplated going back to school to make up for lost time.
“My parents did not have access to education, but they recognized the importance of education as a means of social mobility, and I still believe it’s a vehicle to better myself,” she said. “I also thought the EMBA would help me move up to the next level, not just as a professional but also to think like an entrepreneur.”
At that time, it was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Falk was also dealing with the psychological fallout of the social distancing measures in Switzerland. “For two years, the lockdowns had significantly impacted how we work and connect with people, which made me want to grow my professional network and find more meaningful connections.”
Juggling motherhood, career, and EMBA
Falk enrolled in IMD’s Executive MBA program, which commenced in January 2022. But things didn’t go as planned. “I had finished the foundational segment of the EMBA, Foundations for Business Leadership, and was getting ready to move on to the next phase of the program when I learned that I was pregnant,” she said.
Falk then sat down with the EMBA program team and faculty to discuss her options. “Together, we decided that the best solution was to postpone my EMBA. The reason was that it wouldn’t make sense to move on to the Advanced Management Concepts stage if I couldn’t be part of the cohort community from beginning to end. On top of that, there were certain travel requirements for overseas trips such as the one to Silicon Valley, which I wouldn’t be able to do when I was heavily pregnant.”
Falk put the rest of her EMBA on hold and at the end of 2022, she gave birth to her daughter. She was a full-time caregiver at first but gradually resumed work when she was more settled in motherhood. “I was juggling a handful of projects on the side, which were relatively small in scale,” she said.
Earlier this year, Falk challenged herself to return to the program and embarked on the Mastery stage, a 12-month blended learning module. In March, she went on her first ‘discovery expedition’, the overseas component of the EMBA program, which gave her new insights into entrepreneurial innovation.
“We went to Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley, where we got to witness first-hand ‘systemic innovation’ and how different layers of society create an environment of productive tension where there’s continuous trial and error and people are constantly trying out new things, despite many of which fail. This is unlike in the West where we often try to come up with one best answer or solution that we believe differentiates us from our competitors. Many of us here still operate in a system that views failure as a bad thing,” she said.
“By contrast, in China’s system of innovation, things are moving much faster because there are relatively fewer penalties for failure. Their entrepreneurs continue to receive access to capital even when they’ve failed. They learn something from it, and then they have a go at it again.”
A collaborative approach
Currently halfway through her EMBA, Falk acknowledged that balancing motherhood, career, and studying is a lot tougher than it looks. She added that her recent immersive trip to China would not have been possible without the support she had received from IMD.
“My daughter’s at a stage where she has separation anxiety and it’s difficult for her to be away from me and my husband. But during my discovery expedition to Shenzhen, they were both able to tag along. The EMBA team was able to facilitate our travels in a way that my daughter and husband could join me in the evenings. This meant the world to me. The fact that they could come along on this overseas trip meant that I did not have to sacrifice my time with family,” she said.
Falk, who aims to complete her EMBA journey in 2025, added: “For me, what mattered most in terms of motherhood support was not about the provision of physical facilities such as nursing rooms on-campus, which are no doubt important. It’s that I could have open discussions with the program directors and faculty on finding a win-win solution to the unique challenges I face as a mother which would also impact my learning experience. I’m talking about flexibility at IMD. If I raise my hand and say I need to skip one session in the program because I need to be with my baby, I can do that.”
She encourages career women who intend to further their higher education while juggling motherhood to take on their naysayers. “It boils down to understanding what’s most important for them when it comes to balancing family, work, and study. This means having frank discussions with the program administrators on the support they need,” she said. “In motherhood, everyone faces different hurdles, which calls for different kinds of support.”
