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Driving the Point Home

       Having a baby changes the brain! Pregnancy and the postpartum period are associated with physiological and neurological restructuring changes for moms¹⁴ and dads.¹⁵

      Your Manager

In an ideal world, your manager would act as a facilitator and lead communicator during your transition. Because most managers are not specifically trained or equipped to support parental leave, it is likely you will have to lead the conversations and “manage up” to ensure you get the support you'd like. Managers usually see their role as making sure your work gets done by someone in your absence. You can help your manager see that this is a time of opportunity for the whole team to improve communication and develop skill sets by taking on new roles and tasks. Being clear about the kind of support you want is mutually beneficial—everyone will know what to do and you will get what you need to come back strong, productive, and recommitted to your team.

      Your Human Resources Representative

      Ideally, your HR representative (or HR equivalent) would be helping you understand your organization's policies and practices on parental leave. A good HR representative can be a key partner in building your plan, providing a deeper understanding of how much time you may take off, how much pay you will receive while you are away (if any), and options for returning, such as a part-time or gradual return. Often, trying to make sense of convoluted federal, state, and local laws and company policies can be incredibly confusing. Even your HR department may be unclear. It is their job to aid your understanding, but I want you to be prepared to take the lead in case they don't provide adequate guidance.

Routines

      Becoming a working parent will also have practical implications. Your morning routines must be reworked and the end of the day will be about bath, bed, and feeding. As wonderful as the arrival of the new child will feel, it will be disorienting to be out of your regular routines and learning new responsibilities. When a new child arrives, a parent is born. Your new child is just beginning to learn about their environment. You, too, are getting to know the world again from a different perspective.

      Eventually, you will become less and less disoriented. You will return to work and reach a new normal where all things will start to fit into a more predictable pattern and routine. But finding a new normal takes time. Diving into the 10 touchpoints in these chapters will give you the tools (and help you recognize the ones you already have) to navigate this exciting time as it unfolds.

      Lead Your Leave

      Parental Leave Is Our Most Overlooked Leadership Development Opportunity

      There is one more role I want you to consider taking on—a leader. As you continue reading, you will see that leadership is a key theme throughout this book. I invite you to imagine that your transition to working parenthood is a leadership development and personal growth workshop or retreat that makes even the most prestigious leadership program offered to C-Suite executives pale in comparison. You have already paid for it and put it on your calendar (even if the dates aren't exactly fixed!).

I mean this quite literally. What you will learn as you become a working parent is beyond what is taught in leadership development courses around the world. I know this because I have been creating such courses for more than two decades. In the mid-1990s, I was hired as the only employee for a new executive development and leadership coaching company being started by three trailblazers of the fledgling field, Drs. David Dotlich, Peter Cairo, and Stephen Rhinesmith. These master teachers took me under their wing and generously taught me everything they knew about leadership and the humanity at the core of it. We worked to create the most innovative off-site executive development programs of the time. My mentors held what is now a widely shared view but was a unique perspective then—that ideal leadership does not come from top-down commanders; instead, a true leader is someone with keen emotional intelligence who understands themselves and is attuned to their environment. These teachers invited program participants to pay attention to their head, heart, and intuition to become whole-person leaders (see their excellent book Head, Heart, and Guts: How the World's Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders¹⁶ to learn more).

Decades later, everything we had created for tens of thousands of executives in those workshops and retreats was nothing compared to what I found myself learning as I became a mother and a working parent. I do not mean to minimize the profound impact a leadership development course can have, if it is done well. However, becoming a working parent was the most intense and rewarding experiential learning program I have gone through. It can be the same for you. Becoming a working parent is ultimately about the process of becoming—not just a parent, and not just a working parent, but a whole person more attuned to yourself, those around you, and the world. In other words, if you are open to it, this transition offers the possibility of becoming who you were born to be and what you were born to do. You started that process of evolving when you decided to become a parent; it is up to you how far you want to take it.

      You can lead your leave by deepening your self-awareness as you navigate this major life transition. The exercises and processes you will find in the touchpoints throughout this book outline what to do in pragmatic terms. They go beyond practical matters, however, in digging into how to identify what matters to you and connect with your core values to guide you toward a more fully realized version of yourself.

      You'll find a leadership box at the end of each touchpoint chapter to help you recognize and apply some of the whole-person leadership skills on offer during your transition to parenthood.

      Your leave will be uniquely yours and shaped by your personality, situation, and beliefs. No matter what, you will learn and grow through this process. To the extent that you prepare yourself (practically and emotionally) and engage in the transition with a willingness to learn and lead, you will come out the other side stronger, wiser, and more connected to your life—at work and at home.

Notes

      1 1. Pew Research Center. (2017). Modern parenthood: Roles of moms and dads converge as they balance work and family [Report]. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/

      2 2. S. Canilang, C. Duchan, K. Kreiss, et al. (2020). Report on the economic well-being of US households in 2019, featuring supplemental data from April 2020. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2019-report-economic-well-being-us-households-202005.pdf

      3 3. Canilang, Duchan, Kreiss, et al., Report on the economic well-being of US households in 2019.

      4 4. Pew Research Center. (2019). Despite challenges at home and work, most working moms and dads say being employed is what's best for them [Report]. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/12/despite-challenges-at-home-and-work-most-working-moms-and-dads-say-being-employed-is-whats-best-for-them/

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