Imagine that a temporary absence from your workplace could lead to 10 years of sustained high performance being forgotten. Imagine that your relationship with senior partners at your firm, with whom you had previously worked closely, significantly worsened. This was Diane’s (not her real name) experience following her early return to work from parental leave. “Before I went,” she told us, “I was promised, ‘You will get all your clients back,’ so that was part of the reason I came back. I thought the sooner I came back and got my clients back, the better. But when I came back, that didn’t happen — I didn’t get any of them back.” On her return, she found that not only did she fail to get her clients back, but the colleague who took them over didn’t even know that she had previously managed them.