When Sophie Vandebroek was seven, growing up in Belgium, her family took her to her grandmother’s house, where there was a television. They woke her in the middle of the night to watch men gambol across the black-and-white screen on the lunar landscape. “I saw Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and that was it. I was going to be an astronaut for years.” Ten years later, as she was finishing high school, she realized a few things. First, there wasn’t really a curriculum at the university. “And secondly,” she said, “I thought I wanted a family at some point, and as a girl growing up in a traditional family, my mom stopped working when she got married. And all around me, the mothers are always home, and clearly Mom shouldn’t just fly to the moon and leave her kids and husband home alone. And so I became an engineer and focused in microelectronics, and then life went on from there.”
At engineering school in Belgium, then-Sophie Verdonckt had started dating Bart Vandebroek, the man who would become her husband. They married before leaving for the United States. They both attended Cornell University—he for an MBA, she for a PhD in microelectronics, working on chip and processor design.
Then, suddenly, Bart had a fatal asthma attack while the family was camping. Vandebroek was left with three young children, no family in the United States, few friends, and not much money. Bart, who was just 34, had no life insurance, and the family had to get by on one year’s salary from his company.[1]
Faced with this kind of scenario, no one would have blamed her for slowing her career, returning to Belgium, or both. Instead she rose to become the current chief technology officer at Xerox, overseeing hundreds of researchers. She works on innovation around the globe, not only in printing but also in health care, transportation, customer care, education, finance, and more. When her husband died, Vandebroek said, “I was a second line manager at the time, a research lab manager it’s called. So I was already leading a team of about thirty people. The first thing my boss said, trying to be respectful and nice: ‘Sophie, please, just work for me. Somebody else can manage your team. You don’t need to worry about that.’ And I said, ‘But, Joe—my work, that’s where I can forget about all the mess at home. I love my work. Don’t take that away from me; it’s kind of like my anchor, it’s my stability.’” She realized most of her friends from home had stopped working and become stay-at-home mothers. They were living such different lives than she was then as a single parent and sole breadwinner. Vandebroek downsized her household expenses and took stock of what else she needed to do to cope.
From the devastating experience, Sophie relearned how to invest deeply in a career that was important and ramped up her self-care, including taking time to exercise. She also delegated tasks that others could do. “For twelve years, I raised my kids alone, and my priorities were time with my kids and then doing a good job at work. But everything else—cleaning, grocery shopping—I delegated.” People think she can afford to do that because she now has a high-paying top tech job. But Vandebroek said she delegated from her first job, hiring students to pick her children up from school, do laundry, do grocery shopping, and get dinner done. In some ways, the work that Vandbroek hired someone to do indicates just how much work-outside-of-work employed mothers and fathers have to take on. She also urges, in general, resisting the cultural drive to buy a house bigger than you need or expensive items that aren’t really going to make you happy. “Really simplify,” she said. “And if you can simplify, that will create more money to also delegate.”
Vandebroek has been remarried for five years. For her, scientific pursuits and other life challenges are part of a healthy, happy approach to life. “Fun is maybe the wrong word, but it’s important that you are happy and that you feel good. And that’s a combination of both work and life. That unless you’re happy at home, you won’t be happy at work, and unless you’re happy at work, you won’t be happy at home. At home, you have to make sure that you have a best friend, often your partner or your spouse, because otherwise life gets way too lonely.”
[1] “Making It Work By Not Doing It All,” Businessweek, March 19, 2006.