Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Harvard Business Review Press; Daisy Dowling, Stewart D. Friedman, Amy Gallo, Jennifer Petriglieri, $29.99.
It’s a dilemma that strikes many of us: how to fulfill our own professional interests and ambitions, while wanting to be a loving, ever-present parent.
Series editor Daisy Dowling, who is also founder of an executive coaching and training firm, says every parent faces this daunting, unexplained and complex phase of professional life when “we’re not just building our careers – but building our careers as working parents.”
Schedules can vary. “Whatever the specifics, I can assure you you’re not alone. I see evidence of that every day in my role as a career coach to working parents. The kids-plus-career challenge is so complex, individual, and dynamic that there are no silver bullets; it can’t be solved through intuition or with any single approach or system. We are all grappling with this.”
You can’t build a great career without self-advocacy, networking, good communication, sufficient risk taking, soliciting feedback and so on. However, “when you become a parent, you need to change your diet, just a little: You’ll want to start seasoning your food more to taste, so that it suits you. Parental leaves, flex work, time-management hacks, new forms of communication, boundary setting – to name just a few of the tricks and tools of working parenthood – help you do so.”
All you have to do is pair career-management basics with the right combination of those extras and blend and adjust as needed to create a satisfying working-parent-career dish. ‘Working parent career management’ isn’t an either/or – it’s about bringing new elements into the mix.
This book is your tool for finding that successful, satisfying combination both today and over the long term. It will help you develop greater confidence and more of a plan, and it will point you toward great ideas for new paths to take and new approaches to try. Which is precisely what every busy professional parent needs!
What is ‘working parent career management’ all about? If the answer is correct, you could win one of four books of Managing Your Career. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by Monday, 14 March 2022. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column on 15 March 2022.
