Believing in Your Bigness: How High-Achieving Mothers Step Into Their Power with Kat Francis

So many experienced, high-achieving women return from parental leave only to find themselves treated less like a strategic asset and more like a workplace liability. Faced with rigid expectations and zero room for growth, it’s easy to slip into survival mode, take a demotion, or quietly settle for roles that no longer challenge or inspire.

In this episode, Emma welcomes Melbourne-based, Kiwi-born leadership and ambition coach Kat Francis. With two decades of experience in senior agency leadership across Australia and New Zealand, Kat shares her personal journey of quitting a top agency career to rebuild a lifestyle where work and life align.

She and Emma explore why high-performing mothers struggle to admit what they actually want, how to transition from simply surviving to actively choosing your next step, and why the personal growth gained through motherhood is actually an unrecognised leadership bonus.

Kat also shares practical tactics for managing household dynamics with a partner, letting go of the rigid 50/50 split, and walking into career negotiations with unshakeable confidence.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• The "Refined Ambition" Shift: Why experienced, senior women often fall out of love with their careers post-kids and how to step back to figure out what you actually want.
• The Motherhood Bonus: Reframing the experience of raising children as a massive leadership development upgrade that builds boundaries, focus, and drive.
• Moving Beyond Survival Mode: Recognising that while survival mode is a necessary phase for young families, you cannot set up camp there permanently.
• The Directorship Approach to Home Life: Why Kat prefers allocating domain "directorships" (like Director of Holidays or Director of Maintenance) over tracking every minor household task.
• "With or Without You" Negotiation Energy: How stepping into your value and dropping the fear of rejection makes you unbeatable in career transitions.
• Believing in Your Bigness: Giving yourself permission to stop settling for crappy or stagnant roles just because you're a mother.

Connect with Emma

This podcast was funded and created by Emma Mclean, the founder of Works for Everyone. Emma Mclean is a mum of three and founder of Works for Everyone, a professional development business that partners with NZ's leading corporates to help them retain and grow their working parent talent. She does this through innovative leadership programmes, executive coaching and keynote speaking. She founded her business in 2019 following a 20-year career in corporate strategy where she experienced first-hand how hard it was to have a career and a family. As an impatient optimist when it comes to system change, she launched her successful podcast "How to Smash the Motherhood Penalty" in 2023 where she talks to humans who are actively working to change the system that creates financial penalties that only mothers pay. And in 2024 she launched the first NZ Part Time Power List, to shine a light on those senior roles in NZ that are career building, not side stepping.

To work with Emma or enquire about speaking: emma@worksforeveryone.co.nz

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