Worried about losing authority while on maternity leave
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
Your career will still be important but your focus will be elsewhere. Is this your first child? |
Anonymous
| I had similar feeling before my first. I had just gotten a promotion and was taking 16 weels maternity leave. I got some advice from a mentor that had proved invaluable in many extended absence situations. One of the other PP's talked about owning the position - that is exactly it. BEFORE you have the baby, formulate and implement a comprehensive plan of how YOU want things done while you are out and what your expectations are. Think it through so that your boss and employees are NOT trying to cobble things in your absence. That is when people learn to live without you - when they figure how that they can get it done without your input. Think through allocation of duties, processes, etc. Have a meeting where you present this plan to your boss and the people that report to you. Because folks will be following the plan that you implemented, you are actually directing traffic when you ar enot even there. |
Anonymous
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^^ totally agree with this. Have a great plan, write it out, and make sure it is understood well in advance of your due date.
I actually gained respect on my five month leave because my direct reports finally understood what my job entails. |
Anonymous
| You don't work on maternity leave and if you have a decent company they won't let you. Worjing while on medical leave technically can jeopardize the leave. |
Anonymous
The advice here is what I did and speaking just for me it worked out very well. I created a memo, I outlined each and every duty and where it would go. Because all duties did not go to one person, I think it made everyone (certainly my boss!) relieved to have me back and made it almost impossible to imagine someone taking over the position. Of course there's a mindblowing amount of work that I do; I'm very fortunate that I am extremely fast and productive so it's a lot of duties I had to distribute to the team. I also made myself available to my boss once a week for a telephone call to go over any items that could not be resolved, which I think earned me a lot of goodwill and, to be frank, made coming back a lot easier. He did not use those phone calls often (I can only think of 3 times). |
Anonymous
This. Especially if you're invoking FMLA. That being said, I'm due in 15 days, and a new attorney who has been here for two weeks is already trying to steal my position .
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Anonymous
Very sad. The working conditions does not seem to conducive to moms and babies... |
Anonymous
That is an interesting point. I was poster 14:33 above. Our company is exempt from FMLA. I was using s hot term disability and then leave time. |