Skills Working Mothers Return to Work With (That Are Often Not Recognised)

There’s a saying I’ve always found revealing: If you want something done, give it to someone busy.

It’s usually delivered with a smile, as a throwaway compliment. But when you stop to think about it, it tells us something important about how we perceive competence. We instinctively trust people who are already carrying a lot because we assume they’ve learned how to prioritise, how to move quickly, and how to get to the point.

Working mothers often embody exactly that.

Not because they are naturally better at juggling or because they have some superhuman resilience, but because they have had to become highly skilled at operating within constraint. Time becomes measured differently when you have children. Energy becomes precious. Attention becomes deliberate. When women return to work after maternity leave, they often return with sharpened instincts about what matters and what simply doesn’t.

The challenge is that these instincts are not always recognised as professional capability. They are frequently misinterpreted as personality changes, limitations, or reduced commitment. And that misreading means organisations risk overlooking some of the most valuable leadership skills in the room.

Here’s the top skills I see time and again at MATRI, but which aren’t recognised or owned by women...

A changed relationship with politics

One of the first shifts I notice in women returning to work is a lower tolerance for unnecessary politics. When your mornings involve locating missing school shoes, managing emotions before 8am, and still arriving at work prepared and present, your appetite for circular meetings diminishes quickly. Time stops feeling abstract. It becomes tangible and finite.

I remember a senior client saying to me, “I just don’t have the patience for meetings that don’t go anywhere anymore.” She wasn’t disengaged. She wasn’t frustrated with her role. She was simply clearer. She had recalibrated her relationship with time.

So many working mothers return to work asking more focused questions. What are we actually trying to achieve? What is the outcome here? Who owns this? What is the timeline? These questions are not abrupt; they are efficient. They reflect someone who understands that attention is a limited resource and that clarity accelerates progress.

Organisations often say they want agility and speed. Yet when that directness shows up embodied in a working mother, it can sometimes be misread as bluntness. What it actually represents is refined prioritisation.

Stronger, clearer boundaries

Another common shift is around boundaries. Before maternity leave, many women are highly accommodating. They stay late, absorb additional work, and flex repeatedly to demonstrate commitment. After becoming a parent, the equation changes. There are fixed points in the day that cannot be negotiated away. School collection times do not move because a meeting overran. Bedtime routines cannot be rescheduled indefinitely.

What develops in response is not reduced ambition, but clearer capacity management. Women return able to say, “I can absolutely do that, but not by tomorrow,” or “If this is now the priority, what would you like me to deprioritise?” These are not defensive statements; they are strategic ones. They make trade-offs visible.

When people communicate boundaries clearly, delivery tends to improve. Expectations are aligned earlier. Burnout reduces. Teams function more sustainably. I have seen entire team cultures shift because one person modelled what honest capacity conversations look like.

Let’s be careful not to confuse constant availability with professional dedication. Sustainable performance is built on clarity, not endless elasticity.

Delegation without martyrdom

At home, trying to do everything yourself quickly becomes unsustainable. There are too many moving parts and too few hours. Systems emerge not because someone read a leadership book, but because the household would otherwise collapse into chaos. Tasks are distributed. Roles are clarified. Expectations are set.

This often translates back into the workplace as stronger delegation skills. Many working mothers return more comfortable distributing responsibility and trusting others to deliver. They are clearer about ownership and less attached to personally carrying every detail.

Yet there can still be a cultural double standard. When men delegate, it is often described as strategic leadership. When women do the same, it can be labelled as stepping back or not being hands-on enough. We need to question that narrative.

Delegation is not disengagement. It is the ability to deliver outcomes through collective effort rather than individual overextension. It reflects someone who understands leverage, sustainability and long-term performance.

Faster, more confident decision-making

Parenthood also builds decisiveness. Each day involves a series of rapid judgments about what matters most, what can wait, and what is simply “good enough.” Rarely are those decisions made with complete information or perfect conditions. Momentum matters more than perfection.

I have worked with women who, before maternity leave, would analyse decisions extensively and seek multiple layers of reassurance. After returning, many describe feeling more comfortable making calls and moving forward. They have learned that not every decision requires exhaustive debate.

In organisations where slow decision-making is one of the biggest drains on energy and productivity, this shift is significant. A bias toward progress can be transformational. And yet, instead of being recognised as decisive, women are sometimes described as less flexible or less open to discussion.

It is worth asking whether what is being perceived as inflexibility is, in fact, clarity.

Seeing the skills properly

What I see consistently is that the capabilities developed during maternity leave are interpreted as personality traits rather than leadership growth. Directness becomes “sharpness.” Boundaries become “lack of commitment.” Delegation becomes “distance.” Speed becomes “impatience.”

But if we step back and look at the pattern, something else becomes visible. Working mothers often return with heightened prioritisation, stronger communication, clearer capacity management and sharper decision-making. These are not soft attributes. They are core performance skills.

Constraint teaches efficiency. Responsibility teaches focus. Pressure refines judgment.

When organisations recognise these shifts properly, they stop viewing maternity leave as an interruption to leadership development and start seeing it as a different kind of leadership accelerator.

A final reflection

Working mothers should not have to prove that they are still ambitious or still capable when they return. In many cases, they are bringing back enhanced clarity about how they want to work and what truly drives impact.

Let’s move away from the assumption that availability equals value. Let’s recognise that efficiency, decisiveness and boundary-setting are signs of maturity, not withdrawal. And let’s be honest about this: if you genuinely want a project delivered with focus and follow-through, the person who understands constraint deeply is often the safest pair of hands.

The busy person gets it done not because she is endlessly elastic, but because she knows exactly where to place her effort. And that is a skill worth recognising.