When Should You Tell Your Boss You’re Pregnant?

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. I’m talking today with two guests, Tiziana Casciaro, a professor at the Rotman School of Management, and Lotte Bailyn, a professor from MIT Sloan.

Tiziana is the author of the HBR case study, When to Make Private News Public, and Lotte is the author of Breaking the Mold, Redesigning Work for Productive and Satisfying Lives. We’ll be using that case study as a springboard for a wide-ranging conversation on work and life. Thanks to both of you for making time to chat today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

SARAH GREEN: So I’d like to start with the particulars of the case study. The basic plot is that there’s a female executive and she’s facing two bits of really good news. She’s up for a major promotion at work, and she’s also just realized that she’s pregnant. And she has to decide whether or not to tell her boss now, before she’s promoted to a position that will require a lot of international travel, or whether she should wait until after he’s made his decision. So I’d just like to start by asking each of you how you’d advise the woman in this case.

LOTTE BAILYN: I would advise her to do a lot of thinking before this meeting takes place– and we can talk about that later, what she should be thinking about– and to wait until she actually gets offered the job. And during that conversation, to explain to her boss that she’s pregnant and then proceed to give him the proceeds of her thinking about the job. That’s a short version.

SARAH GREEN: OK. Tiziana, would you also advise her to wait until she has the offer in hand?

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Well, it’s an interesting question. I agree with Lotte, her advice seems very reasonable. At the same time, I can also see that in this particular case there’s a feeling of loyalty. And the desire to be straightforward that somebody in this particular position might have that would prompt her to be clear from the get-go even before the offer is made.

It would, of course, maybe have disadvantages to doing that potentially. But knowing a bit about women who are going through such choices, I can see that they would personally want to come clean, even though it might come to their own detriment, potentially.

SARAH GREEN: Well, maybe it also gets back to, Lotte, what you were saying about the kinds of things she needs to be thinking about. So it sounds like some of the things that she’s thinking about are, for instance, the nature of her relationship with her boss. Which Tiziana, to your point, a lot depends on how much trust there is there.

What are some of the other things that someone in this position would want to think about? And I should say that while the person in this case is a pregnant woman, it could just as easily be a man facing a personal situation at home that he needs to talk to his boss about.

LOTTE BAILYN: Well, I think what she needs to think about to the extent that she knows– and that’s another reason why that will come up mainly in the conversation with Tom. What are the actual goals of this job? And why is everybody presuming that you’ve got to travel all the time to meet those goals?

We’ve got research that shows that virtual meetings work well once face-to-face meetings have been established. That would fit, more or less, pregnancy mode. So I think thinking very creatively and imaginatively on how this job can best be met given her conditions, and not automatically assuming that the way it’s been defined is the way that its goals have to be met.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Absolutely. And I would add to that a consideration of what the organization tends to do in this particular case. That should be front and center in a professional’s decision on whether to talk about it and when.

Organizations can differ widely in terms of how much they make such arrangements possible, how much they support them, how much they facilitate them, or how much they give people freedom to come up with the arrangements themselves. And this should be a criterion along which possibly this professional should decide how to proceed.

SARAH GREEN: Something that I find interesting about this question– how innovative can you be in the requirements of the job– is that at HBR I often feel like because we focus so much on the cutting-edge companies, or the best places to work, or that kind of thing, I wonder if I sometimes get a distorted view about how many companies out there really would let someone be this creative with the nature of their job.

At the same time, I wonder how many of us working in corporations really count our HR managers and our managers short. And maybe if we just asked, they would be willing to be more innovative. What’s your sense of how it really plays out there in the real world?

LOTTE BAILYN: Well, we know that quite a lot of companies have what they call flexible work arrangements on the books. That doesn’t mean that they are really ready to use them. And in fact the way that it’s usually done, an individual negotiation between an employee and a supervisor is probably the very worst way to do it.

And we now have examples, like from Best Buy and the results-oriented work environment, or results-only work environment, that when it’s done collectively in a work group, both the company and the employees gain. So that’s one part of the question that lots of companies have it on the books, but they don’t necessarily implement it in a way that really makes it easy for people to be innovative.

So I think you have a point there, but I also agree with your second point that I think people can ask. They can define and negotiate about– I still think it’s best done collectively with the people you are interdependent with rather than just on an individual basis. And if you put innovative ideas on an experimental, a pilot basis, let’s try it for six weeks, see if it works. I think that often is a strategy that can work.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: I’ve seen women who individually concoct all kinds of flexible work arrangements to be able to perform their job in the face of these competing demands, and it can be extremely innovative in that process. I’ve also seen groups of professionals, and the ones that I can mention tend to regard groups of women who may be in sub-units of an organization are over-represented.

So the particular female group that comes up with ways in which they take on the work of a woman who’s on maternity leave for the limited period of time in which the woman can not be at the office. And they develop what some conditional researchers will call a transaction memory system. It’s a collective way in which you transfer knowledge across coworkers. You have to [UNINTELLIGIBLE] encode it, to retrieve it, such that somebody can be absent for awhile, but others fill in the gaps.

And I’ve seen it emerging spontaneously, informally, in organizations, and be very effective when the people are left enough alone to do their thing. So I know my perspective is yes, we can rely on the creativity, the imagination, the initiative of individuals and groups. But there’s no question that organizational formally can also support these processes that are essential.

SARAH GREEN: Now Lotte, you sounded like you had something to say there jumping in.

LOTTE BAILYN: I think what I was thinking about is when Tiziana was talking about emergent ways that groups can deal with some of these issues, which I agree, that certainly happens. And what I think would be wonderful if organizations then advertised those ways, instead of, as they tend to do, trying to keep them secret. Because that’s a way of defusing this mode of work throughout the organization. And as Tiziana says, it usually is very effective.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Absolutely. They also really– I’d like to see them advertising and making it more public, as opposed to almost being ashamed of it.

LOTTE BAILYN: I agree.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Because it feeds this understandable perception that if you’re not around and you have these extra responsibilities, which are substantial, it’s true that you have extra work to do on the homefront. But the perception is that because of these added responsibilities, there is no way that you’re going to work as hard as people who don’t. In fact, from what I’ve seen, women– but also men as you said, Sarah– men that face similar constraints can be extremely innovative and extremely clever in redesigning their own work.

So advertising and making these approaches more well-known and shared in organizations also would help decrease these perceptions that it’s impossible to make it work. And so these folks that have these special arrangements are shirking work, and are not doing their share, and would be paid as much as everybody else who does more work, it’s completely inaccurate in many situations.

LOTTE BAILYN: And it’s also if you don’t define working hard as the time put in, there’s a lot of research that shows that actually constricting time makes people more efficient.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: That’s right.

LOTTE BAILYN: And more effective in the way they work. So one of the issues is we always tend to assume that the time at work is what’s important, and that’s why this results only where you’re not looking at the input of time, but looking only at the results, is so important for people who make these, because of necessity, these different kinds of arrangements.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Absolutely.

SARAH GREEN: Now, I’d like to get a sense of how some of this has changed in recent memory. Because one of the reasons that I personally found this discussion very interesting is a very close friend of mine is now eight months pregnant and is looking for a job. And she is now well past the point that she has a choice about whether she’s going to tell people or not, because it’s obvious that she’s expecting a child.

But even when she wasn’t showing, it never occurred to her that she might want to keep that confidential. She was sort of cheerfully telling everyone about it. Which to me, it struck me as rather brave because I don’t know that I would have done that. So my question is, is this a sort of generational shift to moving towards sort of a more transparent work life kind of culture? Am I an old stick in the mud for thinking that I wouldn’t say that?

LOTTE BAILYN: Well, I think with pregnancy specifically, I think the reason that people are hesitant because it may not be in the end to work out. And therefore, to tell people and then have to take it back– miscarriage is much more prevalent than we think. Particularly if people are older, and that certainly is happening, they’re becoming pregnant older. So I think that’s legitimate, but your general question, I have mixed feelings about this.

The ideal organization in my world is one who legitimates people’s private lives and personal needs, but doesn’t necessarily have to know what they are. So that someone could say to a work group or to a supervisor I need this kind of schedule. And the answer is well, let’s figure out how we can manage this for you, without necessarily knowing why you need that. There are a lot of assumptions under that, that people want to do their work well, et cetera.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: And with regards to the notion that women might be more relaxed about sharing information, which is what your comment about your friend was hinting at. It might be that because there are more women in the workforce and in different roles and it’s become more prevalent, it happens more often that there are these events and they cannot be kept private because they become self-evident, and so people become more used to them, that’s possible.

But I am not sure we have changed very much in the way we perceive professional women that walk around with a big belly. And there’s a study that came out in 2004 in the Journal of Social Issues by Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske, and Peter Glick that looks exactly at how professionals that become mothers are perceived by others.

Along the two primary dimensions along which these perceptions tend to be formed, there are warmth and competence. And there’s also– the study is pretty recent, 2004 is not that long ago– indicate that there’s a trade-off for women along the dimensions of warmth and competence.

So either you end up being perceived as a warm, but less competent homemaker, because now you have a pregnancy, you have a small child, and so on. Or you’re perceived as competent as a professional, but cold. Because you keep working hard on your professional life and that must mean that maybe you don’t pay enough attention to your family life. And this kind of trade-off was not seen for men.

So I think probably all of these forces are operating at the same time. On the one hand it’s becoming more prevalent and more visible that these combinations of needs on the professional and the personal front have to be addressed and managed. On the other hand, these visceral perceptions may still be around and that they’re hard to fight. And that’s why I think it’s important to allow for the creativity and the innovation in the approach that people take to performing their job.

And I agree with Lotte to also leave people alone in terms of allowing them not to disclose everything that goes on in their personal life, and why they need what they need. It becomes very important, because these perceptions are still there, and they still have to be managed to allow these professionals to do the best job they can. And often the result that we don’t want to see is great talent like the one described in the case which was inspired by a real story, and the person that was going through this particular problem was really extraordinarily good at her job.

LOTTE BAILYN: And what happened in real life?

TIZIANA CASCIARO: In real life what happened was that she did disclose right away. She wanted to show her respect and her trust in this future manager that she had heard wonderful things about, and wanted to start off on the right foot. And in her mind, being clear and being completely transparent was a way to do it.

LOTTE BAILYN: And did he give her the job?

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Absolutely. Absolutely. This was an organization that cared deeply about making the environment relatively friendly, even though it wasn’t always obvious. But it wasn’t a given in advance, it was hard to predict that that would be the case.

And that’s where I think, as you said before, advertising the company’s approach to these problems and the practices around it, would make life a lot easier. I think if we could simplify it by making it more transparent, how the company will respond, we would decrease the load, both cognitive and emotional, that comes with all these transitions that happen at the same time.

LOTTE BAILYN: And the best way to do that is to highlight the situations where it has been done.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: Do you know companies that do this, Lotte?

LOTTE BAILYN: Well, I know companies that are getting a little better. The Best Buy, you know, the row, they’ve had fairly good success. Of course, they haven’t done it in their retail stores, it’s only at corporate headquarters.

SARAH GREEN: Lotte, I think you raise a good point there, where this is really only a debate you would have with a very talented pool of white collar workers, really. I don’t see a lot of this conversation happening about people in blue color or pink collar jobs.

LOTTE BAILYN: So I think there is beginning to be some effort on that fact, on at least providing some flexibility by having some multi-training and multi-skilling so that people can more easily fill each other’s jobs. Because you’re absolutely right, that most of the flexibility we’ve seen in an organization is for the professional and technical workforce, and not for the other workforce. And the more low-income workforce which probably needs it more than anybody.

SARAH GREEN: I wonder how you guys see this in sort of a, if I can suddenly scale up to the really big picture. When you talk about work and life, it seems to me that companies have been happy to see the wall between work and life come crashing down when it applies to things like people willing to work on the weekends. Or yes, we’ll pay for your cell phone, but we expect you to be available at all times, that kind of thing.

But where I see the walls still sort of existing in a one-sided way is that sometimes it seems like we could bring a little bit more of life into our work. What would need to happen to sort of make that wall fully come down, do you think? And do we want it to come fully down, or has it come down too far already?

LOTTE BAILYN: Well, I think it depends what level you’re talking about. Individually, there’s some people who want to keep it strictly separate. And for some other people, they’d like to go back and forth and it’s easy. But where I think we want it to come down is what you might call on a cultural or a social level. That the domain of work, or the economic domain, and the domain of personal life, or the domestic domain, shouldn’t be seen so completely separate that you’ve got one kind of people in one, and another kind in the other, different skills, different ways of knowledge.

There you want to have much more integration so that everybody, men and women, can play significant roles in the domestic sphere. And everybody, men and women, can play significant roles in the economic productive sphere. But things have to change in both in order to make that possible.

SARAH GREEN: Well, this has been very thought provoking. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

LOTTE BAILYN: Thank you.

TIZIANA CASCIARO: My pleasure.

SARAH GREEN: That was MIT’s Lotte Bailyn, and Rotman’s Tiziana Casciaro. You can join the debate yourself at hbr.org.