Today she is based in Los Angeles as an international technology executive for the Disney organisation. She is aware that she has always been something of a workaholic and earlier in her career she had difficulty trusting others to do their jobs well.
She was used to working in male-oriented environments. It was with some fear and dread quite a few years ago that she told her boss she was pregnant with her first child. She was concerned about how she would balance everything and keep up her performance if she could not work eighteen hours a day, six days a week.
She was surprised with the reaction of her boss, which went something like, ‘This baby will be the making of your executive leadership, because you will just simply have to delegate. And you’ll learn for yourself that sheer hard work is not enough. You will have to work smarter, not harder, to keep advancing’.
Alisa notes that her boss was one hundred percent correct and that is when she began to focus more on building teams and networking based on meaningful connections and relationships. She wishes that she had learned earlier on that life is not a sprint but a marathon.
Alisa later came to realise that as her children got older they often needed their parents more—for spiritual guidance, academic support, discipline and emotional involvement.
These things can’t easily be outsourced but, with her demanding travel schedule, at least Facetime, WeChat or Skype allows a parent to have some form of regular presence, if not there in person.
Trade-offs need to be made at different stages
Having one parent take a career pause or a role that is less demanding in terms of constant availability has been common for women, but not as much for men.
It usually comes about from a good discussion on how to get things done, how to identify different priorities and what timely trade-offs need sacrificing.
Taking the ‘foot off the career pedal’ is the description that J.P. Morgan’s Lalitha Biddulph uses to describe how she and her husband Ross approached making choices when their children were under five years old.
They decided that Lalitha was experiencing considerable ‘career runway’ so Ross took three years out of the workforce and then returned to work part-time for the following five years. They believed this approach was important to ensure that their children had the values they believed would be important to them.
Glenys Beauchamp, Secretary/CEO of the Australian Department of Health, took nine years out when her three children were young and doesn’t regret this at all. At the time she had to resign rather than take leave. It meant that when she rejoined the paid workforce, she took a role considerably more junior than the one she had left nine years before, and also had to rebuild her personal confidence.
As her career re-ignited, she and her husband made choices that included his career then taking a back seat, so that one partner was always able to have more time with their three children.
Christine Kilpatrick, Chief Executive Officer at Melbourne Health, shared that, earlier in her career, she and her husband invested heavily in nannies so she could return to work within a couple of months. Her view is that if you stay out of the workforce for too long, it is too hard to get back in. She says it’s important to have a career that suits you and you never know what lies ahead.
That period of taking time out, for women and men, has a different impact depending on the nature of career and work.
For early or mid-career academics, a break can have a greater impact than many other areas.
Jane Den Hollander, the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University from 2012 to 2019, instituted a new program to address that issue.
While on maternity leave, staff at Deakin were allowed to have a research assistant in order to keep their work progressing. This meant that when they returned to full-time, academics were able to continue more easily, rather than from a dead stop. Their research had continued, and there were publications in the pipeline. This made a world of difference and kept gifted academics in the profession.
The right child-minding arrangements require persistence
Where there are babies and children involved, learn to embrace the ensuing chaos.
We took our first child each morning, from the age of about five months, to the home of a woman who turned out to be a children’s book author. It was a bit chaotic, but she loved kids, and I am sure fed his imagination wonderfully.
Returning to work four months after our second child was born was more problematic. Just as I thought it was not going to be possible, we came upon a wonderful Scottish woman, Dinah, and her husband, Bill.
Our kids went to her home for the next seven years. It did mean of course that when our second son, Andrew, started school and referred to his ‘wee little case’ that we were asked how long we had lived in Scotland.
When I had that interview for the Education Headquarters role mentioned earlier, the Division Head knew I was on maternity leave, so asked me a question that was along the lines of, ‘How will you manage coming back to work after the birth of your first baby?’ Returning from maternity leave, let alone taking on such a role, was not the norm in the late 1970s.
What he did not realise was that it would in fact be the fourth time I would be returning to work from maternity leave.
My response was something like, ‘Well the first week or two will be dreadful and I will wonder why on earth I am doing this, by the third or fourth week I might have sorted a few things out, and by about week eight I will start to get into a rhythm’.
He was a bit taken aback and I think almost withdrew the job offer. But I told him it was fine, and I was sure I could help him solve the curriculum information issue, if he could leave the family situation to Robert and me to work through.
Kathryn Fagg and her husband made the decision early on to enlist a full-time nanny. While this was something they could afford at the time, it was still a stretch. This enabled a good level of stability and routine, particularly as their nannies stayed for long periods.
Managing as a single parent
Where there is one parent or carer rather than two, challenges are much greater.
Jody Evans, Associate Dean at MBS became a single parent when she was six months pregnant. Her son is now ten years old and, as she puts it, ‘literally grew up at the Business School’.
She has been reluctant to tell people how to juggle career and parenting as there is, of course, no one right way. But, she shared with me that her approach is to include her son in everything she does, not seeking that allusive notion of balance—rather combining her two worlds as much as possible.
Her son sat in classes while she taught, saw her present at industry events, travelled with her for research projects and played Lego at her feet while she finished writing papers at home.
He now talks with pride about what his mum does and understands why she travels and is out quite a few evenings. As Jody explains, ‘The more he understands what I do and why I do it, the less guilty I feel when I have to spend time away’.
I always like to set expectations for parents returning to work after leave that their arrangements are likely to be less than perfect, that things will be difficult and messy, but their kids will undoubtedly survive and that they have the wonderful advantage of experiencing the company of
