In this week’s In-Ear Insights podcast episode, Katie and Chris talk about one of the secrets of the C-Suite, based on a recent LinkedIn article. What does one set of executives do to be more productive that others don’t, and what lessons we can learn from it? Tune in to find out!

[podcastsponsor]

Watch the video here:

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, it is a new day, a new year, and perhaps a new view. Who knows? And as part of that, Katie, you wanted to talk about a piece of content you saw on LinkedIn called ‘Dirty Secrets of C-Suite Women’. The summary being that two-thirds of people who identify as women at the manager level or above use assistance of some kind – house cleaners, nannies, etc., even if they don’t want to admit it. So, A, what makes this a dirty secret? And B, it seems like there’s more than one angle of discussion on this topic in general?

Katie Robbert: Yeah, I saw this article last week and I had strong reactions to it. My first thought was ‘why should we have to do it all?’, why am I the one who’s responsible for doing every single one of those things, by myself, with a smile on my face, without complaining? And the answer is no, I can’t do all of that. There are not enough hours in the day. And so, people often say things like ‘you have the same 24 hours as Beyonce has, for example.’ Well, Beyonce also has a team of people around her doing things like grocery shopping, cleaning her house, nannying her children, driving her around, and keeping her schedule. She is the epitome of what we’re talking about, she is able to focus on the thing she does best – entertaining. So the same should be true of any human, but in this case, women in a C-Suite position. Why can’t we hire help to clear our time so we can focus on what we should be focusing on?

So I started to think about it in the context of ‘okay, if we really break it down, it’s just like outsourcing anything else?’ If I don’t have time to make coffee, I go to the coffee shop, should I be shamed for having a barista make me a coffee? No, millions of people do it every single day, regardless of what role they are in. If the guy who cleans my gutters stops at Dunkin Donuts to get coffee on his way to my house, is he being shamed for not being able to make his own coffee? Absolutely not. He’s just getting coffee. If I have someone walk my dog while I’m out of town, am I being shamed for not being in two places at once? Yes, it’s a total double standard.

So, Chris, my first question to you is, have you ever been asked questions along those lines as a man? How do you balance it all – a family, a career, everything?

Christopher Penn: Not w