After graduating from HBS, Daisy Dowling (MBA 2002) built a successful career in executive coaching and leadership development, working at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone. Over time, she noticed a pattern: Her sessions with some of firms’ highest-achieving employees often ended with questions about how to manage the demands of parenting and work. Much of the information she found was long on platitudes and short on practical, actionable advice—so she started asking other parents what they wished they had known, ultimately interviewing hundreds of parents in the corporate sector, as well as in medicine, the military, nonprofits, education, performing arts, academia, and in frontline service jobs. In 2016, Dowling used her findings to launch Workparent, a coaching and consulting firm that has advised parents on five continents, with clients ranging from top banks and law firms to Pfizer, Disney, and the US Air Force. A parent to two daughters, Dowling is also the author of Workparent: The Complete Guide to Succeeding on the Job, Staying True to Yourself, and Raising Happy Kids. In this episode of Skydeck, she talks to Associate Editor Julia Hanna about hitting the post-COVID reset button, communicating on the job about being a working parent, and vanquishing the guilt monster.

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Julia Hanna: Working parents have made it through the height of the pandemic. And here we are, still working—some with a hybrid arrangement, some fully remote, and others of us with an in-person, full-time schedule. So given all that, are the challenges you’re hearing about from Workparent clients the same or a little different now?

Daisy Dowling: The answer is both. So there are certain working parent challenges that I think of as the eternal challenges. And those are around things like time management, handling guilt and feelings about being a working parent. But what the pandemic did was focus us on getting through the day to day, getting through the week, thinking, can I help my third grader through his or her math homework and still make it to that important work deadline that I have when I’m working at home and my child is distance learning.

And that took us away from thinking about some of the bigger picture challenges that a lot of us are now confronting. Those include things like: Where do I really want to go with my career? How do I approach this new hybrid work environment, whether I’m working remote, in person, some combo, whether my colleagues are…how do I do that effectively?

How do I think about reforging some of those connections with other working parents and really building up my support team? So I encourage each of my clients to think of it as a big reset and as an opportunity to take charge and to take a fresh look at how you’re combining career and caregiving, and to think about some solutions that may not have been relevant or available a year ago, but now are.

JH: Can you tell me a little bit about some of those solutions that are available now?

DD: Yeah. So if you and I were in a coaching session together, one of the very first things that I would ask you about, would be to look at what I call your village. Right? So we all know that old kind of hackneyed expression, it takes a village to raise a child. But what nobody ever tells you is that it takes an even bigger village to raise a child when you’re also working full-time, and that you want that village to support not just your child, but also you. And nobody tells you that that village is not going to just suddenly kind of spring into existence around you as soon as you become a parent. You really have to form it, you have to recruit the villagers, you have to be the mayor of the village, you’ve got to be the architect of the village and think about how to build it out.

So the first thing that I do with so many of my clients is sit down with this special tool that I call Eight C. Each of the different Cs is just a different category or type of health and support that you might be able to get as a working parent, that would be really helpful to you, that would be beneficial. And we go through each of those categories and they include things like care, community, colleagues, corporate or institutional benefits. We go through each of those different categories and we sort of gently push and nudge. And we see what types of support may be available to you, but that you might not be using. Maybe, you know, those days that you’re late getting home from work, when you are in person, maybe there’s a neighbor who also has kids who you could rely on to keep an eye that your kids get off the school bus and home safely. Or maybe there’s a colleague, if you’re a brand new parent, who has a one-year-old, who’s just been through this whole back to work after parental leave transition, who could give you some pep talks over the next six months.

That support can come in so many different ways, but the more thorough and thoughtful and creative and strategic you are about thinking about how to get it, where it is, what you could reach out for, how to get that help, the better off you’re going to be. And that reset is really important right now. We’ve been so used to making do, we’ve been so used to isolation, that we almost have to retrain ourselves out of that. And I see a lot of parents who say, oh, no, no, no, I can, I can take care of that myself. Or I should be able to, you know, make do without care on Thursdays because I work remotely, and just sort of gently walking people through, “Hey, what would be available if you did ask for help and how could you do that and what help might you get?” is really the first task for so many parents, including me.

JH: And what other advice would you have for parents who need a sort of reset at this moment?

DD: So if you’re listening to this, raise your hand if you feel a little tired, combining career and kids. And if you do that, I just want you to know you are absolutely not alone. So many people I talk to feel just a little bit ground down, like their battery is a bit low. If that’s the case, I want you to think about how you’re using your time. Now I know that all MBAs are really, really good at thinking about how to get the most out of their time. We can pack things into our calendars. Here’s a trick for any working parent who wants to take control back and get that little bit of relief, to get that time back so they can go for a walk or to the gym or to sleep half an hour later. It’s to take your past week’s calendar and your past week’s to-do list and a red pen and to literally go through every single different commitment that appeared on your calendar in your to-do list over that past week or over that past 10 days. And as you go, to circle any of the items that you might have reasonably or possibly deferred, delayed, said no to, gotten a little bit of extra help with, avoided, what have you. And as you go through that list, you’re not going to find tons and tons of things. You’re not going to be able to free up, you know, 50 percent of your calendar. That’s just not realistic. But you will find items that you circle that you think, hmm. I could have won myself back 30 minutes here or 30 minutes there. And more importantly as you go, you’ll see some themes. Maybe you tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist. You’re always kind of hovering on projects before just shipping them out, you know, at the last minute kind of playing with details. Maybe you tend to say “yes” a little bit too easily and you need to make “no” more of your default. And as you come to those insights, I want you now to pivot to your next week’s calendar and to-do list and to apply the same critical eye and to say, gee, what things might I be able to take out? Maybe I can get the notes from that meeting instead of dialing in via Zoom. And as you do that, you’ll free up some time.

Now that time may not be a lot. It may be three percent of your time, but three percent of your time, five percent of your time, well, that’s two hours over the next week that you could grab dinner with a friend, that you could go to the gym, that you could meditate, that you could do something else that you personally find restorative. And five percent of your time over the next year is actually 12 full business days that you could be on vacation or doing something else that you want to do. So the name of the game here is to resist the constantly on, I have to soldier through treadmill, to say, my ability to look after myself, in order to do that, in order to get a little bit of a break, a little bit of downtime, a little bit of battery recharge time, I’m going to have to find the space to do that and to use this tool, to use this technique in order to find that space.

JH: You know, there’s been a lot of research and sort of public discussion about the different ways men and women approach their parenting roles and divide the work of running a home. Anecdotally, what do you see in your engagement with clients and what fixes can you offer for making the situation more equitable, if it’s not?

DD: Yeah. So this is a question that I sort of hesitate around, because there are so many different configurations of family, of ambition, of role, and some of it has to do maybe with historical gender approaches, and a lot of it doesn’t. I love to tell people there’s 52 million American working parents and certainly many more overseas, and no couple or family is alike. What I do think is really important to do, regardless of gender, is to be very, very clear with yourself and with your partner, whether you have an opposite-sex partnership or whether you have a same-sex partnership, to be very clear and deliberate about how you intend to collaborate and how you intend to divide the work of raising kids while you’re each pursuing careers. And a technique that’s vital for you to use to do that is the weekly check-in, where together the two of you as a team are looking out ahead over the next week, not just for, “I’m going to do this and you’re going to do that,” but proactively spotting some of the sort of fires before they spark up. So if you have a really early morning on Thursday and can’t do daycare drop off, or I’m not going to have time to make dinner on Wednesday and, you know, are we going to order in, what are we going to do? If you can actually, the two of you, however the load is balanced, if you can get ahead of some of those fires, what you will do is not reduce your workload, but you’ll reduce that level of tenseness and friction that exists between so many couples. And I say this personally, too, I live this as much as anybody else. You’ll feel like you’re in a more collaborative frame and not sort of bickering over who took the dishes out of the dishwasher.

JH: I love that. We all want to do our best, but inevitably we trip up here and there. What are some common mistakes you do see working parents make, and what advice would you have for avoiding those mistakes?

DD: One tripwire I see is people under-communicating about being a working parent in the workplace. Now those of us who are really focused on being good, diligent, conscientious professionals can sometimes feel a little bit goofy or awkward when we talk about the fact that we’re expecting, or the fact that we have a child who’s sick at home. And even though the pandemic opened us up a lot to, you know, more conversation, there’s still sort of a taboo, some of itself self-inflicted, around sort of being your working parent self at work. Now what that creates is an opportunity for other people to fill in your story because they don’t know what your story is. Let’s say you go in and you are feeling a little bit sort of tentative, because you’re, you know, this high-flier focused on the next promotion. You go in, you tell your boss that you’re expecting, and you just share that piece of information. Well, you’re well within your rights to share that, and your boss hopefully will be happy for you. We don’t know, hopefully there’ll be a supportive reaction. But unless you tell your boss your intention is to continue on, working with the same clients that you have been working with, to keep shooting for that same promotion that you’ve been working towards for a couple of years, that you have all the same professional ambitions that you did before… Your boss, not from a place of malice, but your boss may say, oh gee, well, hmm, this person’s expecting. Is family now more important for them? And in a very nice way, maybe they’re trying to give you flexibility or accommodate you, they might not put you on that huge new client assignment or they might not be advocating for you as actively as they should, in terms of that promotion. In other words, they may, instead of sort of understanding you, they may be overstanding you a little bit. And all of that stems from the fact that you haven’t sort of put some of your cards on the table in terms of, yes, I’m expecting, but here’s what I still want as a professional. And my intention is to try to combine career and kids in this specific way.

Now that may not be your intention. Maybe your intention is more flexibility. It doesn’t matter what your ask is, but you need to be pretty direct and pretty open about it. Don’t assume that your boss or that your colleagues or that the people around you in your life are clairvoyant. So know what your story is and be comfortable advocating for yourself.

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JH: No matter how efficient and balanced we are in managing work and parenting, there are still moments that we feel badly about. What is your advice for dealing with those feelings of guilt that sometimes crop up?

DD: I will tell you, I’ve literally not had a single working parent coaching session, ever, in the years that I’ve been doing this, where the ’G’ word, where guilt, doesn’t come up: male, female, earlier career, later career, doesn’t matter. We all feel that sense of conflict. When we do, when the guilt monster sort of surges and comes at us, it’s really essential to push back on that guilt by just very gently asking yourself, first of all, where that guilt is coming from. So let’s say for example, you promised your toddler that you would spend all evening playing with him, but it’s a Friday night before you put him to bed, and all of a sudden your cell phone rings and it’s some emergent work issue and you have to take a call and you find yourself beating yourself up because there you go, breaking your promise. You were going to spend time with your toddler. And now all of a sudden he’s upset and you’re upset and you’re saying, “Oh, there I go again. I’m a terrible parent.” When you find yourself caught there, stop and push back and say, “Wait, where is that guilt coming from?” Well, where it’s coming from is that you are a 100 percent loving, caring, and on-the-job parent who is fully committed to your child and wants to be there for your child. And at the same time, you are a fully committed, diligent, and dedicated member of the team or member of your organization, a top-flight professional who gets the job done, and who’s working really hard to take care of that child. And sometimes those two things bump up against each other and they create that friction. But if you can step back and say to yourself, well, gee, I’m feeling this guilt, not because I am actually a bad person or guilty. It’s because I’m a loving parent and a committed professional. That throws some fresh perspective on things.

Then I want you to go even a little bit further and start challenging that guilt in a slightly more lighthearted way, by pushing back on that guilty tape with one single word, which is, really? So here’s what this looks like. If you say, oh, I’m a terrible mom today. Really? Am I really a terrible mom? If I’m really so terrible, should we be doing something here? Like, should I call child protective services? You know, is it really true that I’m not working hard because I only worked 11 hours yesterday? Is that really the case? And as you start sort of pressuring your assumptions and that guilty voice in your head, you’ll either start laughing, right? Or you’ll get a little bit indignant and say, well, of course I’m not a terrible mother. I work very hard to be a good mother or father. And that’s exactly the point. So these two techniques…instead of saying, I shouldn’t feel guilt, ditch the guilt, which I see in a lot of headlines and kind of self-help books…I just don’t think that’s realistic. Instead, put the guilt into context and accept that it’s sort of this yucky-feeling byproduct of something that’s really wonderful. It’s proof that your head and your heart are in the right place at home and on the job.

JH: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your personal situation with your own family and how you make things work day to day in Daisy’s house.

DD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first thing I’ll tell you straight up is that question, it’s an awesome question. And it immediately inspires a bolt of adrenaline in me, because I’m grappling with the same issues that every other working parent is grappling with. So if you came to Daisy’s house, you would not see this perfect, harmonious working parent experience where everything’s solved and whatever.

I am the proud working mother of two young kids who are now 8 and 10, who are awesome and feisty and busy, and keep me on my toes. Both girls. And I’m one half of a dual-career couple. So my husband and I actually met at work very early in our careers. We’ve always been really focused on supporting each other in our professional endeavors, and that has never been more tested than over the past two-and-a-half years when both of us went through the pandemic and both suddenly had to pivot to working at home. I think the bedrock for me personally, I think my husband does this also, is to get out of the business of day-to-day score keeping.

So one of the common things I see a lot of parents do is, basically give themselves like a letter grade every single day. Like, oh, I stayed really late at work to finish that important meeting. And I missed dinner with the kids. I’m a terrible parent. And the pendulum swings back and forth between, I’m doing okay at work, okay at home, but never, you know, the two things at the same time. And it’s a recipe for getting pretty bruised, honestly, because you feel like you’re always letting one side down. And this was advice I got really, really early on in my own parenting, was to think about the bigger picture.

So there are days for example, later today I’m going to be traveling for work. I won’t put my kids to bed. I won’t have dinner with them, and I won’t tomorrow or the next day either. And you know, does that make me not a great mom? No, because I’m deliberately going to try and overcorrect for that by scheduling some time later in the week, by really clearing off my calendar for the next couple of days after I get back from traveling, so that I can spend time on family.

And by thinking about that bigger picture, I’ve never gotten wrapped up quite as much, I think, as I could have in some of the nitty-gritty and the details. Like, yes, I’ve had a disaster or I was late to that meeting, but you know what? I had a really great time with the kids. Okay, tomorrow I’ll be on time. Just keeping myself on that more even keel has been really, really powerful. And it’s something that we really try and practice in this house. We goof. We get up. And we go back at it.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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