Having it all. Whose responsibility is it anyway?

As I write this, it’s 14 days since our April HR leadership panel event when guests and I were joined by our brilliant guest panellists, Martin Glover (MFMac), Tracy Black (The CBI) and Nikki Slowey (Flexibility Works). With Heather Offord facilitating our conversation and making sure we didn’t go off on tangents, we explored some of the spikier questions of parental leave and working parenthood.

I wish I had the skill of a theatre reviewer to give you all the highlights, but it would never convey the richness of the conversation or of each contribution.

So instead, here are my thoughts on the title topic ‘Having It All, Whose Responsibility Is It Anyway?’

The Myth & Cycle of Having it all

Having-it-all is a made-up concept spouted by someone living a very particular, very privileged life who thought she was being super feminist but was just creating an illusion that regular earning people could never attain. Having read Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams recently, I’m not even sure the person herself ever attained it either.

Regardless, it has now become an oft-repeated impossible standard and it implies there’s one universal definition of ‘all’. In reality, what fulfilment, success, and balance look like is deeply personal and always moving. So, let’s get that straight. The idea of ‘having it all’ is an unhelpful piece of nothing that has become so engrained in our subconscious that even though we know it’s made up, we use it as a stick to beat ourselves with anyway, personally, and professionally.

That’s conditioning, which comes from a magnitude of other sources too, and which leads us to my next point.

We’re set up to feel estranged

Not only have we all (employers and talent alike) been told that to maintain our careers, we should want, and be capable of, ‘having it all’ as well as nailing it personally and professionally, we’ve also been told we’ll need to fight tooth and nail for it. We’ve been trained into seeing parental leave as a massive risk and working parenthood as a thankless and exhausting endeavour.

And what do all humans do in the face of risk? We either freeze, retreat from it, or we pick up our weapons. Companies rely on enhanced policies, compliance, legislation, processes and cross their fingers. Managers become scared to say the wrong thing and make vague offers of support that don’t feel meaningful. Individuals are wary of how they will be perceived, of losing their credibility and clam up or warrior up.

Confidence and engagement don’t just suddenly disappear because of a life transition. It erodes in the silence, the assumptions, the moments where someone didn’t feel visible or valued.

Then there’s what happens on-leave

I wish I could say the UK Government understand the role of leave experiences and the neurological growth of the transition and the resulting impact on female labour force participation and as a result, they give the NHS exactly what it needs to nurture your people on leave physically, practically, psychologically. They don’t.

And so instead of being up levelled by this incredibly rich period of physical transformation and neurological re-wiring, we see parents wondering what’s just happened and how to navigate the next part of their professional lives. Even admitting that they’d like any kind of practical or emotional support feels like admitting defeat - that we’re not as strong as we or anybody else thought.

So, the masking and trying to make sense of it continues.

And then the return date reminder drops

And we feel so far removed from who we were pre-leave, and so discombobulated by all the experiences that have shaped us that it feels like a reckoning from our past selves - time to choose. Who are you going to be now? And what does that say about you?

And because of all that good old conditioning and how we’re hardwired to belong, we look outside of ourselves to work out the rules and the options and to feel safe in a sea of wtf. If the parent at the local baby groups don’t turn us off our career entirely, we re-enter a dance of policy, compliance, process, and transactional conversations. And the only words we can find to explain the discomfort is ‘I’ve changed’ or ‘I have new responsibilities’ or ‘I’m great at multi-tasking on little sleep’.

Of course, it’s more nuanced than that but the point I’m making is that the silence continues, the pretending, masking, and hoping that it will just become the new normal and get more comfortable.

And it never feels comfortable again

Because although we know having it all is a croc of s*it, nobody has taught us how to free ourselves of all the junk holding us stuck in pursuit of it.

Companies who have enhanced policies, offered phased returns, and did their best with flex shrug their shoulders in helplessness not knowing what else they can do.

Good managers are saying ‘tell me how I can support you’ but are met with requests that just don’t work for the business or with silence because by this point, we maybe feel like we’re the problem, or that the wider world is just not built for family life.

So, we might pause our career progression, feeling like it’s out of our hands and feel like we’ve somehow let the side down. Or go into full on hustle and proving mode trying to beat the discomfort into submission with the perfect schedule and Olympic level organisation resulting in overwhelm and disillusion with the lives we’ve chosen.

Either way neither employer nor individuals win.

And it continues.

The Art of the Possible

I’ve always said that the only way that we can harness the huge commercial and talent growth, retention and progression opportunities of parental leave are when everyone feels safe enough to communicate more meaningfully, and earlier.

That means;

• Redefining parental leave as an organic opportunity for a professional re-set. What got you here won’t get you there, and that’s ok. Let’s collaborate on that.

• Looking at how policies, processes, managers, and touchpoints can all reinforce that message and nudge next steps in ways that feel on-brand, intuitive and easy.

• Supporting talent in the identity and psychological shifts of parental leave and return, in ways that empower their growth, self-awareness and communication with a positive ripple effect for communication across a whole team or business.

And whose responsibility should that be?

Maybe the question should be, whose opportunity is that?

Because the companies that choose to disrupt the pattern are the ones that will win the lucrative talent war in the long term.

When to act?

It doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing programme that changes things overnight.

I have space in late July & August to run a handful of Lunch & Learn sessions and small pilot workshops with companies who want parental leave to offer a better ROI for everyone.

If you’d like to sense-check what’s possible or simply open the conversation internally, drop me a line at lynn@talentonleave.co.uk