Telling your boss

Telling your boss may be a difficult one for you as it may make you consider what pregnancy will mean for your career.

Also, your employer may not initially think of the joy of your expanding family and may be more focused on the logistics of trying to replace you.

There may also be politics at play about what this means for your trajectory and how taking time out to have  a child will change the optics of the team or the staff.

My advice would be to tell your boss as soon as possible as it will be mutually beneficial.

It will help you when you are in the horrors of morning sickness and need a last-minute sick day or to work from home, and when you need to duck out for appointments during the day, as you will!

On your employer’s side knowing early means they can keep it in mind when distributing workload,  forecasting future work and projects and assigning clients.

I took this approach on my second pregnancy, my boss could not have been more supportive and it really helped me to manage my time and strike a balance between hitting targets, only taking on what I could cope with and not being involved in too many additional projects.

However, in my first pregnancy it was a different story. Again, I was lucky in that my boss was very supportive…once I told her that was! 

I waited until 12 weeks into my pregnancy to do this, for a number of reasons:

• I was just coming to terms with being pregnant myself, even though it was planned it was still a big deal
  
• I was worried about a miscarriage so was extra cautious
  
• I was on a team of young professionals none of whom had children and I think if I am honest, I was trying to fit in for as long as possible and not be the pregnant “aul one”
  
• I was also working towards a promotion and I didn’t want my boss to think that my pregnancy meant I wasn’t committed. The plan was to hopefully get pregnant, get the promotion while pregnant for all the hard work for the past few years then pick up when I got back from maternity leave

My plan to tell my boss was to do so after an important meeting with my clients, as I had read somewhere that it is a good idea to tell your boss after you have executed something really well while being pregnant so they can see that “ok she is still capable” … silly in hindsight but that was my logic!

In the end I decided to do it after a big business review meeting with my top client that my boss was accompanying me to in London. So, I flew the whole way there and back trying to be chirpy and upbeat when in reality I was exhausted! The meeting went well thankfully and then on the Monday when we returned to the office I told my boss.

In hindsight I should have told her weeks before this, and avoided the secret deep breaths over team lunches to suppress the morning sickness!