They learn how to run things without you. They’re forced to adjust their processes, other people step up to fill in the holes, and decisions are made - all without someone who was previously very involved. Four months happens to be the perfect amount of time for a team to adapt to someone leaving. I don’t know if there is research to back this up but I am going to go ahead and say four months is perfect - but not in a good way. This definitely struck a chord with me.įeeling relevant again It’s not that I was unhappy at my job, I just wasn’t quite sure how I fit back into the picture after an amount of time that was, in theory, so short, yet seemed so long.
She needed time to be with her family and let her job be just that: a job. For her, when she had her twins, she found herself less ambitious in her career. She talks about different phases of a career and how you need different things out of a job at different times of your life. Kim Scott writes about this in her book Radical Candor.
Staying passionate and engaged with what my team was doing was harder to maintain all I really wanted to do was get home to my family. Obviously, having a job is very important, but I’m talking about the actual work. Going back to work Having a child tends to put you in a different headspace at least, it did for me. In hindsight, it would have been better to completely check out. Trying to stay connected gave the opposite effect, and instead, made me feel even more disconnected.
INBETWEEN LAND KEY DISAPPEARS FULL
I found myself in a weird inbetween land of only knowing some things and not having full context. The reality is that it’s very hard to do that without causing more stress on everyone, and looking back on it now, I probably shouldn’t have even tried. I wanted to stay in the loop: keep up with emails, give input on projects that I normally would be a part of, and just be a contributing part of the team in general. Trying to stay up-to-date As hard as it was to check out and leave things unfinished, it was just as difficult to find a balance of how to check in. But even softening the blow didn’t take it away - it’s hard to leave a team you care about with a bunch of things to do to pick up your slack.
They knew I was going and I did everything I could to minimize the damage. I couldn’t help but feel like I was leaving them high and dry, and I had a good amount of guilt about just disappearing. It’s hard on them, and it was hard on me. Leaving the team It turns out that just getting up and leaving your team in the middle of projects is hard. But, I wanted to shed some light on the other side of this coin: the challenges. The cultural benefit for the workplace at Zendesk certainly doesn’t hurt. On paper, this leave is all positive: Zendesk, as a company, putting its employees first and being so progressive time with family and the ability to recharge and be with my newborn for the first 4 months of his life. Needless to say, we had our third child back in April he’s fantastic (and I’m not biased at all.). I know it seems a bit short-sighted to have a kid because you could get 4 months off of work, but when you are planning it anyway, it definitely can act as the push you need. My wife and I were planning on giving a third kid a go - this paternity package certainly didn’t hurt the discussion. How amazing for any parent to be able to take 16 weeks to spend time with your family without the stress of child care, work, money… etc. Zendesk offers a 16 week parental leave package. Now that I’ve been back at work for several months, I have overcome this challenge and have some insight to share with those curious or concerned about doing the same. I don’t know that I avoid either one of these concerns but, I do think I am touching on a real topic for a lot of new parents that are facing similar situations - and I’m hoping that my vulnerability to do so makes it easier for people to understand this thing that so many others go through. I wasn’t sure how to approach this topic without sounding like a “spoiled millennial” or, even worse, give the impression to my employer that I am ungrateful. Do you remember that time when you took 4 months off from your job and when you came back everything was exactly the same?… Yeah, me either.
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