Bettina Karsch

The call came the way these things usually do. A manager slipped into her office and asked for five minutes, framed as a bit of brainstorming. Bettina Karsch was based in Madrid. Her three adolescent children were in school in Madrid. The offer on the table was Germany, Monday to Thursday, every week. 

She said she would think about it, left the office, got into her car and sat there without starting the engine.

"How in the world am I going to do this?"

She knew immediately what the offer actually was. Not a relocation. A hinge point. It was a career-defining moment. What she felt, sitting in that car, was the collision between that certainty and everything else she valued: her husband, her children, the life she had built in Madrid. 

She didn't try to solve it on the spot. She didn't map logistics or run numbers on commuting schedules. She decided to simply enter the process and let the answer arrive on its own terms. "Things will gradually evolve to a yes, I can, or no, I can't," she says. She went to Germany. It was, as she'd suspected, career-defining. What she hadn't anticipated was the identity she would build to survive it, or rather, the one she would have to hide. 

The version she left in the parking lot

For years, Karsch ran a version of herself at the office that was deliberately incomplete. No photographs of her children on her desk. No mention of school pickups, sick days or the logistics of raising three kids from another country. She looked at the leadership model around her, predominantly male, apparently independent, visibly unencumbered, and replicated it. "I thought, 'Why would I tell the world that I have three children? I'm proud of them, but why would they have to be in the office?"

It worked. She moved up. She sat in the rooms where decisions get made, and she belonged there. The shift, when it came, arrived gradually rather than all at once: a slow recognition that the capacity she relied on at work, holding multiple priorities at once, staying present under pressure, keeping things moving while everything is in the air, was the same capacity she'd built at home. "In the office, you have so many balls in the air," she says. "But... doesn't every mother?" 

The quality she had spent years concealing turned out to be the quality that made her exceptional. 

"As I realized it was a strength and not a weakness, I became more present in the office. My family became more present in my life." 

The room doesn't need another person calling out risk 

That same capacity now shows up in rooms with considerably higher stakes. Karsch is currently Chief Human and Organizational Officer at Moeve. She sits inside one of the most complicated ownership structures in European energy: Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, as majority owner, and Carlyle, the US private equity firm, as minority holder. On top of that, the geopolitical friction between the two nations presents a live variable in every decision that crosses her desk. 

Due diligence, by design, is a risk-calling exercise. Lawyers flag exposure. Finance teams model downside. Every red flag in every data room gets surfaced and re-surfaced, and left unmanaged, the aggregate effect is a spiral. 

"We have so many partners who would call out risks. Every red flag of your due diligence could probably make everyone go into a very negative spiral." 

Her role in those rooms is deliberate. Not a cheerleader, not someone who waves away risk, but someone who can hold the weight of what's on the table and still move the group forward. In transactions of this size, that skill is as commercially valuable as any model. 

Her 360 feedback returns the same result year after year: brutally transparent, disregarding pay grade. She builds context for whoever is affected by a decision, not just the people whose title says they need to know, on the calculation that a person who understands why they're doing something performs at a different level than one simply following an instruction. She's clear-eyed that this approach has a cost. Information, once shared, can be misused. She's watched it happen. She still bets on context. 

Competing agendas, not failed ones 

Ask Karsch about guilt and she doesn't reach for reassurance. She reaches for her mother, who never held a job outside the home, raised four daughters across three continents and still felt guilty when she couldn't make school pickup because another child needed her. 

"Guilt, I think it goes with our hormones." 

She has asked retired female executives, women decades past the boardroom, whether the guilt ever lifted. It hadn't. One told her she now feels guilty for not walking her dog, for not offering to take her grandchild for the day. The job was never the source. The guilt was always going to find something to attach to, because it comes from loving more than one person and never being able to give all of them everything at once. "You will always have competing agendas," she says. "You will always have competing love." 

Her reframe isn't a wellness mantra. It's closer to an accounting correction: stop treating guilt as evidence you've failed someone, and start treating it as evidence you've built something worth the friction. "Just accept guilt," she says, "and say thank you that you actually have competing things." 

For years, Karsch organized her professional identity around independence: the grades, the master's degree, the promotions that proved she was building something on her own terms. Then she looked up and realized the independence she'd been chasing at work had actually been assembled at home. Her two sons and daughter had organized themselves, supported each other's homework, built their own circle without her engineering it. "The shift came when I suddenly realized that the independence actually came from home." 

Her husband, her family's health, her own health: the system that held everything together while she sat in M&A negotiations and executive committees. That system wasn't incidental to her career. It was the foundation underneath it. 

Karsch's advice to the next generation isn't to wait for permission or for the culture to fully catch up. 

"Careers are decided in a room where you're not present." 

Build the context. Make sure someone in that room believes in what you bring. Then say yes, and work out the details after.