Vertical Development and Parenting: How Raising Kids Raises Us

In this episode, we explore how raising children can be a catalyst for vertical development and how our kids end up, in a very real sense, raising us, just as we are raising them. My dialogue partner is a dear friend, senior leader and a mother who has walked the talk of personal transformation in the act of raising her (now adult) children and has then taken those lessons back into her leadership.

Genevieve Hawkins is General Manager Transformation and Supply Chain at Coles Liquor Group and the author of the book "Mentally at Work" - a powerful and practical guide for creating workplaces where humans can thrive.

From the start of her career as an occupational therapist, Genevieve has had a passion for understanding and influencing the psychology of how people not just cope but thrive under pressure. This passion led her to further study and exploration of how leaders, teams and cultures perform and has seen Genevieve move from the health system to insurance, to risk management consulting, to the corporate world. 

Genevieve is now a senior executive with extensive experience in leading major change programs in large organisations and is cognisant of seeing things from a different perspective given her mix of experiences and qualifications which includes parenting two, now adult children, of which one is transgender. It is this different perspective that led Genevieve to write Mentally at Work to help current and future leaders, lead in a way that makes a difference to individuals, teams and organisational performance. And it resulted in her becoming the sponsor for Pride at Coles.

She believes in the value of simplicity, pragmatism, finding the right way to talk about the elephants in the room, embracing clunky conversations and the importance of sticking to your ‘true north’ in order to get the right long-term outcome for a business and its people and herself.

Enjoy our vulnerable conversation about motherhood, dying and birthing identities, leadership and growing up the hard way.