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Speaking Up
Pregnancy is probably the most visible personal life need anyone can have in the workplace. There is a big pregnant belly in front of you, and people acknowledge it. However, everyone has a personal life. Everyone has something that may not be as visible that also needs tending to and sometimes, by solving things for new parents because it’s the most in our face sort of challenge in the workplace, we solve them for everyone. And so it’s important for new parents to realize that when they ask for what I hate to call accommodations, but when they ask for a work plan to change or some, just to present a plan to make this new life and new form of career doable, that they’re ultimately helping every single person that they work with. They may even be helping their company become more competitive in its sphere or helping their industry more globally.
And then beyond that, helping our larger national culture acknowledge parenthood as something that is not a disability, but is something that is simply a part of life as a new parent, particularly if you are someone who has previously burned the midnight oil, been really ambitious, moved up quickly, been someone everyone could depend on at every moment. Well, guess what? You have a new someone who’s depending on you, and it’s your baby. Suddenly, you have a hard stop to your day that you may not have had before. And so what can help? A lot of women who I interviewed told me is really sort of, it sounds cheesy, but rebranding yourself. So you are no longer the person who contributes in a major way by being available all the time. You are the person who is the idea producer in meetings. You’re the person who is open about parenthood in a way that fosters that same feeling of warmth among everyone else you work with. You become more nurturing. It sounds a little sexist, but you probably become more nurturing, and I would venture that dads do too.
There are a lot of ways to sort of spin it to help you wrap your mind around these new needs that you may have. Many, many, many of them are just simply based on scheduling. When you look at the school day, for instance, this is not something that ends in infancy. So baby’s naps change. Preschool, if your child goes to preschool, may start at 9:30 when your work day started at 9. The typical school day ends around 3 for school-aged kids. Well, the workday doesn’t. So these are all problems that are going to need to be solved at each stage of parenthood and learning to get comfortable having these conversations and asking for what you need, these are muscles that you can train very early on. Chances are, people want to help. They just don’t know how. But if they don’t know that there’s a problem that needs to be tended to, they can’t read your mind. They might have the best intentions in the world, but if they don’t know that a 4:30 or 4:45 meeting at the end of the day that’s going to last an hour is a problem for you, you can’t blame them for not doing anything about it. You have be vocal about it.
When it comes to asking for something that is about a physical need that is something that might feel somewhat embarrassing because it’s about a part of your body, say you need to fit pumping breast milk into your day three times a day, it’s really helpful to remember that it is only awkward for the other person if you feel awkward about it. And it’s only awkward the first time you ask. So if you say in a really straightforward way, “This is what I’m going to need to do, and here’s how I imagine we can still get my job done in the meantime, and here’s how it’s going to work, it frees that other person up to just be, “Great, fantastic,” and not have to have a big overblown reaction.
Negotiating Schedule and Duties
When it comes to negotiating, there are some really basic rules that, for a lot of new parents, feel like they fly out the window. These are the kinds of negotiations that you’ve perhaps had before. But now that it has to do with your personal life, now that it has to do with this tiny baby who is at home, it feels a lot more fraught, and you can kind of forget some of the logic that you have learned in your career thus far.
So there’s two really basic rules. One of them is ask for things as early on as you possibly can, and that might mean, even during pregnancy or if you’re adopting when you know that you’re expecting a child at some point, to have those conversations that help lay the groundwork for envisioning how you might want your job duties to change. It becomes much less of a sloughing off of duties when you come back and you say, “Oh gosh, I actually don’t really want to travel four times a month right now.” Have that conversation earlier, help the people around you grow into maybe doing some of those things that you aren’t able or wanting to do in that moment, and then free yourself up to take on other things. It’s not like you’re just letting stuff go. You’re going to maybe do some bigger picture thinking instead. The other primary rule for negotiating is, of course, manage up. So in this case, what that means is when you go into your boss requesting flex time, you should come with a plan that includes research that you’ve done about what precedent has been set in your company directly, but also, in other competing companies even because that can help your argument. You should have a sense of what this plan could look like in maybe three different ways. It should not be a five-page long, single-spaced list that somebody showed me one time that did not get them what they wanted. It should be clear and simple. It should be a few bullet points of, “How am I still going to get my job done?”
You need a job description in your mind of what it is you’re responsible for and how you are still going to be able to perform the duties of your job, given what you’re asking for. A lot of managers have a hard time granting something that they’re afraid every other domino, every other person’s going to ask for, two, and they’re going to be left with nobody in the office.
So tend to that by saying, “Can we try this? Can we try this for two months or three months?” And what that does is it keeps your manager from feeling like he or she is signing in blood, that this is going to happen forever. And also, what you can know in the back of your mind is that if you’ve ever had a baby or if you have a baby, babies’ needs and schedules change by the month, if not by the week. So the truth is is when you revisit that conversation in two months or three months during which you’ve proven your plan to work, you may have a totally different need that’s actually more important to you in that time.
And that’s fine to sort of renege on what you did before and ask for something new because what it does is it just establishes a pattern of being able to have these conversations. There are no longer huge negotiations. It’s just how people who are managed and managing talk to each other all day long about how life and jobs are evolving. And that will happen for years as your needs change.
Negotiating a Raise
I love the question of, “How do you ask for a raise after coming back from maternity leave” because here’s the extremely simple answer. You ask for it no differently than you ever would have asked for it before. A raise is about a monetary reward for the work that you are doing. It’s compensation for your work. It actually has nothing to do with your personal life.
So you need to have context in mind. Yes, your needs in terms of what’s in your bank account may have changed in the last several months. However, if your company has a set time of year when they assess performance and compensation, you knew that, and you need to have that in mind, and you could present your boss with a plan for what you would need to do between now and then to get that raise. But it should really be entirely a conversation about duties and performance and not about your personal life.