By Debbie Green, founder and wellness coach at Wishfish Coaching & Development

If you manage people, here’s a question worth sitting with: would the parents on your team say they feel supported, or simply accommodated? The two sound similar, but they aren’t the same thing.

I’ve coached parents back into work for years, and one thing I hear consistently is confusion about how they’re now being measured. Many workplaces still unconsciously reward visibility – always in the office, always online, always available – over what someone actually delivers.

Some of the most efficient people I work with can turn something around in half an hour that someone with more time on their hands might take four. Parents don’t lose that efficiency after having children. If anything, it sharpens, because every hour must become intentional. The risk is leaders mistaking a quieter working pattern for a smaller contribution.

Long hours were never proof of commitment

Related to that: organisations that equate long hours, or constant presence, with leadership potential are measuring the wrong thing. It doesn’t determine whether someone is a great leader, and it never did. I’ve watched brilliant people become quietly overlooked simply because their working pattern looks different now – not because their capability has changed at all.

One of the biggest assumptions I see leaders make, often without realising it, is that parents – particularly mothers – become less ambitious after children. Priorities evolve, but ambition rarely disappears; it tends to become more focused, more values led.

The problem is when that assumption gets made for people, instead of having a conversation about it. Leaders quietly stop offering opportunities, stop stretching their people, stop inviting them into the room, because they’ve decided on someone’s behalf that they ‘probably won’t want that now’. The risk isn’t parents losing ambition, its organisations lowering their expectations of them.

What genuinely helps

 I have noticed things shifting. Pre-pandemic, leadership development residentials were often all-or-nothing: stay overnight or don’t come. Now there’s more openness to letting people access the same development without staying away from a child overnight. It’s a small example, but it points to something bigger; that flexibility and ambition aren’t opposites, and organisations that treat them as such lose good people.

The support that actually works embodies trust, clarity and realistic expectations, without removing opportunity or challenge. Compassion and accountability aren’t opposites either – the best leaders I see combine empathy with honesty, and flexibility with responsibility.

Practically, that tends to mean a few specific things, which include:

• Be specific, not just kind. ‘Take the time you need’ is well-meant, but it’s less useful than being clear on what’s expected. Take time to outline the priorities, the timelines, how you’ll communicate and what ‘good’ looks like.
• Build in more than one check-in. A single return-to-work meeting rarely covers it. The people I see fare best when there’s a conversation before they’re back, another once they’ve settled in and space to revisit it again a few months on. Not only at the point where something’s already gone wrong.
• Plan for the unpredictable rather than treating it as a failure. Children get ill, often and without warning, especially in that first year. Build some flex into how that’s handled as a matter of course, rather than letting someone feel they’ve let the team down every time it happens.
• Ask the question: what support would help you to do your best work? Don’t assume, have the conversation.

There’s a practical business case underneath all of this too. Whatever your organisation is, you need working parents to be able to return into it easily. It’s important for everyone working within your business for it to be a seamless process, and it’s worth remembering this isn’t only about parents. The same applies to anyone quietly caring for someone else too.

In practice, that starts with looking at who’s being overlooked, not just who’s asking for flexibility. Some of the most capable people I coach have been passed over for something because a leader above them simply hadn’t thought it through – rarely out of malice, usually just inattention. That’s not a small miss. It’s talent walking out the door, or staying and quietly switching off. The return to work is one of the clearest points at which you find out whether your culture truly ‘walks the talk’.

So, if you lead people: would they say they feel supported, or simply accommodated? It’s worth taking the time to ask and listening carefully to the answer.

Debbie Green is founder and wellness coach at Wishfish Coaching & Development and co-host of Secrets from A Coach podcast. For more information visit: wishfish.org.uk and secretsfromacoach.com