Delivered by
Maternity Returners
Background
Val had recently returned to her role as Marketing Director after taking one year’s maternity leave with her first child. During our coaching sessions she raised a number of issues, including a lack of confidence in her own capabilities, a perceived inability to cope with a long hours culture with back to back calls that risked compromising her 4 day working week, how to manage expectations of others and how to stay committed to her professional career whilst trying to balance her dual role.
Solution
Three key topics, work, relationships and culture, emerged during our sessions, which were fundamental to Val’s re-engagement and career development
Work: There was a fear that returning on reduced hours for a period of time would significantly impact the quality and level of work that she would be allocated, and that this would limit her future career options. Val was also experiencing a conflict between the need to have challenging and rewarding work and having the capacity to deliver this within a 4 day working week.
Relationships: Val was concerned about how others would perceive her value and contribution given her 4 day working week. She needed support on how to manage the expectations of others, including her manager, peers and herself
Culture. Val described her return to work as chaotic and found it difficult to maintain her energy levels amongst the relentless demand for her time, calls that were booked in outside her 4 day week. She struggled to find the courage to push back and find her voice
Her re-engagement coaching sessions allowed Val to surface and discuss all these concerns, and to understand that her experience was typical of that experienced by returning mothers, which helped her to realise she was not alone. A key benefit of the coaching was to provide a safe framework to challenge Val’s assumptions and perceptions, helping her to create boundaries between work and home, enabling her to prioritise her workload, to delegate, to prepare and practice conversations with her manager and peers regarding their expectations. The coaching experience for Val provided valuable time and space for critical reflection, creating clarity of goals, facilitating choices that enabled her to be more comfortable about the decisions and compromises she was making regarding her working pattern, project work and not having too many expectations of herself. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on her values, what was important and how this shifted her perceptions regarding her future career.
Result
Maternity coaching for Val helped her feel supported throughout the transition challenges, helped her to feel valued and demonstrated that the organisation was making an effort to integrate her back into the team.
Participant feedback
‘What I found most valuable about the coaching was the opportunity to have the time and space for thinking and reflection, a practice I’ve now started to share with my team and we really started to open up…we were all experiencing difficulty in maintaining a healthy work-life balance, so we started to help each other..’