I am fiercely protective of my weeknights. I like to decompress and do anything but work – you definitely won’t find me at the after-hours event or sending 9pm emails! When my twins were toddlers, I felt I needed to guard that time even more closely. Like many working parents, those few hours between work and sleep felt fleeting and like controlled chaos.
So I wasn’t thrilled when, at my corporate job, a recurring meeting landed on my calendar every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. The leader running it worked in another time zone, where the meeting just so happened to fall in the traditional workday. Importantly, he also had a stay-at-home spouse. Week after week, I logged on, gritted my teeth, and harrumphed about why everyone else’s evening had become negotiable.
For about four months, I attended without saying anything (a nonchoice that’s fully on me). But when I finally got sick of my own grumpiness about the situation, I asked the planner whether we could find a time that fell within everyone’s workday.
The answer was immediate. “Ohhh…right. Yes.” And the meeting moved.
We like to think our everyday workplace expectations – about scheduling, attendance or face time – are developed intentionally, but plenty aren’t. Often they’re decided through a reflexive first-person lens. We assume other people’s capacity looks like ours because often times, we haven’t objectively examined the circumstances that make our own careers possible!
For some leaders, those circumstances include a partner who heroically – or casually -absorbs much of life outside work. For many employees, they don’t. That difference is profound.
Pew Research Center found that in households where both parents work full time, 52 percent report mothers still handle more of the day-to-day parenting responsibilities, while only 10 percent say fathers do more. Even when both partners have demanding careers, the work of running a family is not evenly distributed.
While some workers have stay-at-home spouses, some employees are shouldering all or the majority of caregiving. Others, like me, are caring for aging parents too. People’s support systems outside work look wildly different – they’re simply not created equally.
So how is it some leaders evaluate it as though it is?
Part of the answer is something psychologists call the false consensus effect—our tendency to assume other people think, behave, and experience the world much as we do. It saves mental effort, but it also creates blind spots. If your career has been supported by a spouse who handled school pickup, aging parents who lived nearby, or the financial flexibility to outsource groceries and cleaning, it’s surprisingly easy to mistake those circumstances for normal rather than fortunate.
I’ve coached executives who genuinely believed their people should be willing to travel on short notice, attend evening networking events, answer emails late into the night – even relocate like it’s NBD (no big deal). A common – and weak – defense is “Hey I don’t love it either, but it’s what we do around here.”
We can do better. If you want to make your corner of the work world fairer – but you can’t begin to know the logistics someone else manages to make working possible – how do you become more aware?
The same way you would with any blind spot worth paying attention to.
1. Treat your experience as one data point, not the default.
Just because you can hop on a 7 p.m. Zoom or board a plane Sunday morning doesn’t mean those are universally reasonable expectations. Before setting a norm or casually making a request, ask yourself, Who is this easy for? Who does it disadvantage? Your job as a leader isn’t to design work around your own life, it’s to find a workable standard for the mix of people you manage.
2. Pay attention to your “it’s only…” moments.
If you hear yourself justify: “It’s only one dinner,” “It’s just a quick trip,” or “It only requires you stay another hour,” stop. That language is a helpful flag to tell you you’re universalizing again. The words just/only convey that we’re minimizing a cost. If you have a stay-at-home spouse, you made not need to absorb that cost, but plenty of your people will. When you hear yourself saying it, pause and ask: Only…for whom? A small inconvenience for one employee can require heaps of logistical planning for another.
3. Separate employee performance from employee sacrifice.
One of the easiest leadership mistakes is confusing employees’ availability (or willingness to neglect their home life) with their commitment. The employee who can always stay late, travel tomorrow, or answer emails at 10 p.m. isn’t necessarily the most dedicated. They may simply have more support outside work or let’s be really real: a lower bar on their level of being present at home. Knowing that, evaluate people on the quality of their contribution, not how few constraints they have.
4. Try on someone else’s circumstances.
Before making a decision, imagine you’re the employee with the least flexibility in your department instead of the most. Perhaps it’s the single mom with a second job on top of this one, which was the case for my own mother. You could filter your expectation through her reality:
Would I still call this meeting at 7 a.m.?
Would this client dinner still be mandatory?
Would this out of town offsite still feel essential?
As someone who’s studied leadership for the last 20 years, I’ve learned that the single biggest differentiator in how well a person leads is their ability to step outside their own head and do some perspective-taking. It’s also one of the simplest ways to reduce bias, and research consistently shows it increases empathy and improves decision-making.
5. Get real about the scaffolding behind your own success.
Every career is built on some kind of scaffolding. Maybe you’ve had extra financial resources like a partner who chipped in for you to go to grad school – or perhaps you’ve been blessed with excellent health and barely needed to pay attention to the level of coverage of your health insurance.
You could have had years of dependable, reliable childcare or particularly forgiving managers or family members. The point isn’t to feel like crap about that – it’s to be aware. Once you take an honest look at what has helped your own career, you (hopefully) can’t unsee it. You’re less likely to assume everyone else has access to the same foundation.
So, air on the side of trying to understand. The employee who leaves at 5:00 every day may not be less committed, they may simply be beginning a second shift that never appears on their Outlook calendar.
Fair leadership recognizes that people arrive with different realities; it continually prompts you to question whether your expectations are built around one particular kind of life.
Before asking, “Why can’t they make this work?” ask a more revealing question: “What’s made it so easy for me to believe everyone else should?”
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