Supporting employees through late-term pregnancy loss

We meet a lot of parents who share how parental leave or becoming a parent impacted their career path.

So when we happened to connect with one mom who made a career pivot from almost a decade in the CIA to joining the tech industry, we were intrigued to hear more about her story.

Cassandra Babilya, an employee experience leader at Amazon, joined us to talk about her path to parenthood.

Cassandra is a passionate working parent advocate who authors a newsletter called #MakeWorkSuckLess, which she has recently focused on writing about the parental leave experience.

In the episode, Cassandra shared her experience with pregnancy loss at 22-weeks and how her team supported her through this deeply personal, traumatic time.

She also talked about how she used parental leave to her advantage to return to work in a role that was more meaningful to her – which she calls her career “glow up.”

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Allison: Hi Cassandra. Thank you so much for joining me today on the False Tradeoff Podcast in your final, final days before you welcome baby number two.

Cassandra: Thanks, Allison. No, no, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I actually think the first time you came into my sphere of influence was when you joined Hebba Youssef's HR therapy almost a year ago. And it was so great. I loved it. And then that's when I started following you and liking and loving everything that Parentaly does.

Allison: I was going to say, I feel like I know you as a “LinkedIn friend.” You know, we see each other on LinkedIn all the time. And so when Jenna said, we're bringing her on the podcast, and by the way, we got to make this happen right now because she's already started her parental leave, even though she hasn't given birth yet. I was like, great, let's make it happen. 

Cassandra: Oh yes.‍

Allison: We don't usually start our podcast this way, but I am going to start it with you. I would love for you to give a really quick overview of your career trajectory because you did make some big pivots. And I'm also curious what role parenthood or the desire to be a parent played in that big change from your first sort of career into your second.

Cassandra: So the general trajectory of my career went from spy to employee experience in tech. So I started off with a totally normal, really, really, really common career trajectory. I started off at the CIA when I was 22 years old and I spent eight years there as a, like a chief support. ‍

Allison: Just an easy question to start off!
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Cassandra: So they would do everything from HR to finance, to security, to logistics, to making sure that, you know, the base has food and people can come and go on helicopters and interacting with embassy personnel and interacting with foreign personnel, literally the whole thing, and also running like the office. So I used to say, I'm keeping the lights on and keeping people alive. I spent eight years there before making a 180 into tech, where I have been for another eight years. 

So along the way, I've made a couple of career pivots. That big one from the CIA to tech was probably the biggest one. I wasn't a parent at the time. I was 30 and I was looking ahead at my life and looking at the other women role models around me and seeing a pattern that in order to succeed in that business as a woman, you likely were going to spend your career working your butt off, make it to the top and have no one at home to welcome you when you come home. To have no family, no kids, like you, maybe don’t even have a dog, but that was hard because we were…our lives were booked in one to three year increments, one to three years out.

And so it made it really hard for particularly women to settle down and find their people and build a family. And so one of the 587 reasons that I left the CIA had a lot to do with the fact that at 30, I started looking backwards, like, okay, there's a clock here. And if I want my life to look different than what I see around me, I need to be intentional about that and I need to find a different path. I need to take back control of my life. And so I left and like ropey doped into tech, into kind of the perfect role for me because of communication and employee experience. And so my hashtag is #MakeWorkSuckLess. 

And I like to say that that is fueled by 15 years of rage moments with the government and with tech. And I love being able to use my really, really terrible experiences to support other people and help them make work suck less for them. That was my first career pivot.

Allison: I was going to say, and so then what were the other career pivots? Was that once you joined the tech company?

Cassandra: Yeah, so my latest career pivot actually happened with my first son in 2021. He'll be three when this one joins us in a few weeks. I really took that career transition, and I do look at parental leave as a career transition. Sometimes it's temporary, sometimes it's long-term, sometimes it's permanent. 

But I looked at it as a career transition and an opportunity to reassess what I wanted my career to look like, realign to what my professional goals were for like the new me, and then relaunch my career when I came back. So I worked really closely with an incredible manager and an incredible team at that time to take my 20 weeks of paid leave, another eight weeks of ramp back time off with my kid, really leaning into being a mom, and then coming back and saying, okay, well, what do I actually want to do over the next few years? 

And relaunching into people leadership and building this incredible team and building out this function for this incredible team. And it was so amazing to have the support and the confidence from leadership and my manager and my team that I could do that despite the fact that like half the meetings I was attending at the time, I had a kid attached to my boob. So, there was that.

Allison: We hear this so often that people are able to make really powerful pivots through parental leave. And I think there's this outside perspective that that's bad. Because when we think of your role changing through parental leave, we automatically think of the bad way that that can happen. You get fired, you get demoted, you get layered, you get put in a role that's not as important. 

And I think that's what people think when we talk about roles changing through parental leave vs. the positive side to that, which I think your story is a great example of that, which is no, if you have agency in your career and you're super intentional about that, you can actually use parental leave to your advantage to return into a better role. So change is not bad as long as it is aligned with your goals and what you need.

Cassandra: Right, it's possible. And I call it the career glow up because for me it truly was. And I'm trying to be intentional and create that same sort of glow up this time around. I am currently, as we sit here, on day two of my parental leave. 

Allison: Congratulations!

Cassandra: And I spent the past couple of months preparing not just a turnover document or finishing up projects, but truly thinking about again, what do I want my career to look like when I return back to the workforce in five to seven months? What do I want that to look like? Who do I want to be working for? What type of work do I want to be doing? What type of work do I not want to be doing anymore? I think that's a really important question to answer for yourself. And seeing how I can position myself to make that happen.

Allison: So are you about to pivot again or are you doing a little bit more of tweaking or will this be a big pivot?

Cassandra: So that's a great question. I think I'm in a little pivot right now. What I did, setting myself up to prepare to go on parental leave, this is like a very long, long-term plan that I've set up for myself here. I actually in January moved over to a different team than the one that I had been on for a few years. My manager had departed the company, so it was an opportunity for me to kind of reassess and realign then and now, and move over into a really, a more stable team. And so one, stability is important for me, because I would prefer not to come back to just a total, you know, Michael Bay explosion of my career and team. I love being surrounded by people who are, you know, supportive of me and my goals and what I can do and what I can bring to the table.

It was also an opportunity for me to really narrow my scope of focus for two months. I got like six months of work done in two months on a very narrow scope program of something that I'm super excited about. And that actually jazzes me up. It's something that I get to be creative in. And then turn it over. So there's nothing, I don't feel like the ball is gonna drop and while I'm out there's not gonna be anyone there to take over for me. I think I've set myself up so that if that's what I want to do, if I wanna build that out when I go back, great. If it's not, also great. So I think I'm setting myself for, we'll see what it looks like when I return and what I'm feeling in the moment because I definitely recall feeling very trepidatious with the first time around returning. I told my boss at the time, like, I'm 50-50 gonna stay, 50 -50 gonna leave. I'm not sure yet. 

Allison: Really?

Cassandra: Oh yeah, I was really not sure if I was gonna stay in the workforce, if I was going to take a long-term leave of absence and just be a mom for a couple of years. And I'm giving myself the space to have those feelings again, if they pop up.

Allison: It's so funny. I was running a training yesterday for a very high performance environment and a very large company. And they had asked a question about how many people drop out of the workforce or, you know, don't come back to work. They don't switch jobs. They stay at home. And I was like, that's so fascinating why they're even asking that question. One, I don't know the answer off the top of my head because there's some complicated data around that.

But two, basically my advice to them was don't even think about that. You're not on leave yet. You don't know what the feelings will be. And I think that that story is a perfect example of that. And I see this over and over again that you don't need to even tell people that before you go on leave, because you have no idea how you're going to feel. It was just such an interesting question of, you know, it's like while they were preparing to go on leave, they were already thinking about that. ‍

And my advice was like, wait until you're in the moment, see how you feel then. And it sounds like that's the approach you're taking this time of I'm just gonna lean into these feelings and see what I want to come back to. Is that a fair statement?‍

Cassandra: Lean into the uncertainty. No, absolutely. And it's like not even the uncertainty of what I'm going to be feeling. It's the uncertainty of what is this girl? What is this baby going to be like? What are her specific needs going to be? What is our bond going to be like? What else is going to be going on in our lives? Leading into this uncertainty of what your role or what your potential role might look like when you come back. I fully expect that things will be different.\

Allison: Right.‍

Cassandra: Probably not as different had I stayed on the previous team, but still different. And I'm okay with that. Like we will figure it out when we get there. We will cross that bridge when we need to.‍

Allison: I want to pivot the conversation ever so slightly to talk a little bit about you experienced loss at 20 weeks of pregnancy and you've been very open about that. You've posted on LinkedIn in your newsletter about that experience. Can you tell me about what that experience was like working full time while going through such a traumatic experience

‍Cassandra: Yeah, so our second pregnancy, we were expecting another boy and found out at our 20 week checkup that things were not good and that he would, he was perfectly happy inside me but would not survive outside me. And so we had to make the really just incredibly heartbreaking decision to terminate for medical reasons at 22 weeks.

And I remember spending the first evening after getting that news, researching my company's policies to understand what benefits, what parental leave benefits were applicable to me in this scenario. Because I needed to know, well, I knew that I was not going to be able to handle going back to work immediately. And I needed to know how to set myself up, how to set my team up while I was out for whatever that absence was going to look like.

And I was pleasantly surprised and so thankful to find that my company offered up to 10 weeks of my parental leave…was applicable to a loss in the second or third trimester.

I think one of the things I need, like people writing these employee handbooks and policies and leaders and CEOs to understand is that, loss in the second and third trimester, the physical symptoms that, you know, birthing parents, women experience are exactly the same as when you give birth to a live baby. There's bleeding, there's emotional changes, there’s…I spent a week with ice cold packs on my boobs trying not to let my milk come in because it really, really wanted to even though there was no baby to feed.

I spent three weeks out. I probably could have taken another one or two. I wanted to get back to work, but I wanted to get back to work. And once I felt like I was physically, mostly physically recovered, emotionally though, it took me a lot longer. And working through that and leading a team and working full -time was probably one of the most challenging things that I've done. 

I needed a lot of support and understanding, especially early on from my direct reports who were incredible and understanding. And they made my first meeting back was a team meeting with them. And they were like, you don't need to say anything. We're just going to give you some updates of things that have happened and things that are going on. We don't need anything from you. We don't even need you to say anything or respond. We're just here to support you and let you know what's been going on. 

I had an incredible manager who handled all communication for me because I was not capable of having any sort of discussion with anyone outside of my husband during that time. And I've definitely made use of resources and communities both at work and outside of work to get the mental health care that I needed to recover fully.

Allison: We get asked a lot, what should managers do if they have a direct report that experiences that type of loss? I always struggle to answer that question. I'm curious if you have an answer to that. It's such a personal experience that I just struggle with the banner headline of what managers can do. So maybe if you have even guiding principles that you would be able to share.

Cassandra: I think the number one thing to do is follow their lead. Hopefully you've built up enough of a relationship, enough psychological safety and trust between you before something horrible like that happens to where your report knows that they can share what's going on and share what they need from you. For me, my manager actually did not talk to her myself. I asked my husband to call her because I, again, I couldn't.

And she rolled with it and I asked her to relay the news. I asked her to just tell my team, clear my calendar and cover anything that needed to happen. That to me was the biggest amount of support that I needed. I just needed a buffer. Um, but that was me. So I think following the lead of the person that you, who support you're giving, I think that's the best thing that you can do. And if you're unsure, ask.‍

Allison: You mentioned that the policy was really helpful, mental health benefits that the company provided. Are there other things at a company level, policy benefit that would have been helpful to you or were especially helpful that we haven't mentioned?‍

Cassandra: So I think the you can take up to the 10 weeks was an incredible benefit. I would have personally benefited from someone telling me, you should take some put closer to four to six weeks off. But the policy was written in a, I guess, vague and expansive way for a reason.

But I would have benefited from someone saying, it's expected that you take closer to the full amount of time. Because I felt a little bit of a, okay, well, when should I get back? Even though I want to get back, when should I get back?‍

Allison: Yeah. That's a really good point. I have a friend that went through a similar loss in her second trimester. And because of the work that I do, I was one of the first calls. And that was her question. She said, I'm allowed to take, I think it was 16 weeks, but what should I take? What is culturally acceptable? And I spent my time basically encouraging her to turn that off. I mean, it's, it's...

But it's understandable. You want to know what should I take both what do my coworkers expect, but also like what do other people like what is and I think maybe this was coming from a place of what's the playbook? Like I can imagine that you feel very lost in that moment. 

And so receiving some guidance, I think she felt very almost relieved when I answered that for her and I said, you should take a lot. I mean, this is not like, go take a week because you need to recover from the immediate impacts of labor. I mean, this is a much longer period of time that you need to take and you should take, and this is what we see other people do. And I think there was a relief there of that's what other people do. And so I'm okay. 

I hadn't thought of it from the company's perspective of establishing this is what you should, or even having managers be really, I don't know, I think managers are oftentimes worried about saying the wrong thing. And so they almost default to listening, but that's a really good perspective to think about pushing a little bit on, do you, you should take more time if that could be helpful.‍

Cassandra: Yeah, I think for me, I was managing a team too. And when you go out on parental leave like I am now, I had months to prepare. At the 20 week point, I had put my parental leave on the calendar for the following February, but there was no time to prepare. There was no time to hand off anything. It was just...one afternoon, I went to a doctor's appointment and then my team didn't hear from me for three weeks.‍

Allison: Right. But you know, everything, they're fine, right? I think that that's what people struggle with is feeling, thinking about others, right? When it's like, I think being able to give you the confidence in that moment of saying, we'll be fine, right? And to take that time. Right, exactly. Every once in a while. No, and thank you for sharing that because I know that this is a...‍

Cassandra: They're fine. It's okay to think about yourself. Yes.‍

Allison: It's a very personal experience and you know, I do think that there's a lot of companies...and managers want to be supportive, but they really don't know how. And I think it's a hard thing to say, hear the instructions. And so I think that even by hearing people talk about their experience, it is actually very helpful for managers, HR leaders to be able to hear that. 

Let's go back to this parental leave. I want to hear a little bit more about how you are planning for this parental leave differently than the first. I've read online, you've posted on LinkedIn about communication preferences, very different. Tell me more about what you're doing differently the second time around than you did with your first leave.‍

Cassandra: Yeah, so I spent the past two months writing about preparing for parental leave, everything from like when to tell your manager and the pitfalls of an early share versus a later share, how to build a turnover plan, how to work in communications preferences into it, how to set yourself up for that career glow up that we were talking about earlier. The biggest difference that I am making this time around is, is setting myself up with clearer boundaries, clear defined boundaries. I had extremely clear, rigid boundaries the first time around. Like, I did not want to hear from work at all. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to hear nothing. I wanted nothing. My manager, she was great about it too. She was like, so you can have your compensation statement. That's going to come in while you're out. And I was like, I don't care. Save it til August. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. 

So I came back after five months out and I got my compensation statement. We reviewed my annual performance feedback as well as I learned that the team had gone through just an incredible organizational shift. New name, new scope, a couple VP changes while I'd been gone. Just everything was different. My role was different. It was like  coming back to a new company. 

This time around, the communication preferences, they still have clear boundaries about who I want to hear from, my direct manager, what I want to hear about. So I want to know about any big org changes or leadership changes on the team. I do want to get a snapshot of what my compensation is going to look like. That feels important right now to me.

And how I want to hear from it, I am not checking my work email. So I handed over my personal email and said, if you'd like to send over any documents that you need me to review related to comp or performance or whatever, feel free to email them over to my personal email. I will not be doing any work video screens. We can FaceTime.

And so we're going to FaceTime once a month. And I just said, like, I want to FaceTime once a month. We can schedule it on, on the calendar. If things need to shift, they need to shift. That's okay. 

But I'd like to hear like, how's the team doing? Is there any big news to share? But like, I don't want to hear about the drama, anything that's going to resolve itself by the time I'd come back anyway, any programs or projects that I was running, I don't care because I can't do anything about it while I'm gone. 

It's all going to look very different by the time I walk back in. So I don't want to waste the mental space of worrying about little things that ultimately don't matter at the end of the day.

Allison: It's so funny because there are quite a few large companies that enact these policies of zero communication. And one of the things that we found in our work is the social and emotional connection. Many people actually really like and want that. And so I think we all oftentimes forget about that. 

You're making me think back to my first parental leave where I was in a really stressful scenario and I said, luckily, I mean, I knew nothing about parental leave. This was way before I started Parentaly.

But I told them, I wanna catch up. I want you to come and meet the baby. I want all of these things, but I told them, I do not wanna hear a single thing about the drama. Exactly what you're saying. Cause I'm like, I can't go there. It's too stressful. I don't even wanna hear about it. But it was wonderful to have them come to my apartment at the time, meet the baby and have that level of communication and have them know what things were fun for me to hear about vs. work, which I wanted nothing to do with, was really helpful. 

And so I feel bad sometimes for people who work at places where they expect, Oh, we can't, we're not even allowed to talk. Well, no, if you have a really good relationship, if it is a friendly relationship, if you think that that would be fun, but again, it's kind of like the same advice of following the lead of the parent who's going on leave, right?

Cassandra: Right, right, exactly. I know I like pulling for them to travel to DC so that, you know, I can swing by in an office with the baby and show her off or yeah, have my team over for dinner. Totally happy to host dinner at my house. Like here, someone watch after the three -year -old. Someone hold the baby. I will pour the wine. We're gonna have a good time, but I don't want to hear about work.

Allison: Yeah. Yeah. You are, you have direct reports still, correct? 

Cassandra: Not right now. I had direct reports when I came back. I built the team after I came back. 

Allison: Okay. Cause I was going to ask you, that's a whole other animal that we do not have time to get into is how you plan for parental leave when you have direct reports. Does that feel good that you aren't worried? You don't have to worry about that this time around because you did have direct reports the first time, right?

Cassandra: Exactly. So if I had maintained that team over the past year, what I would have done was I would have had to find a new, basically find a new caregiver manager for them and hand over all of that performance. Yeah, that's a whole other set of work stream that you need to think about.

Allison: Yeah. Okay, we are getting to the end of our time. I want to end on a very positive note. We've kind of covered all of this, but if you had to say the best thing you did to prepare for your parental leave the first time and the best thing you've done this time, what would those be?

Cassandra: Oh my goodness, the best thing I did all the times was tell my manager first when I was pregnant. Like she was the second person to find out all three times. So real early on, it wasn't even preparing for parental leave that was so important for me. It was preparing for pregnancy in my late thirties, now mid- to late-thirties. I needed a lot of support early on, especially that first trimester is just brutal.

And having a supportive and understanding manager who will work with me on flexible work and flexible leave early on, like when I need a nap, my brain shuts down. Like I can't keep my eyes open anymore. So having someone in my corner is like, yes, I got you. I understand. If you need a nap, go take a nap. If you need to go to a doctor's appointment, go to your doctor's appointment. 

So for me, one of the best things I did was sharing early and being just super transparent with the people around me about what was going on. This latest time, the sharing happened on a wider scale much later than I did the first time around, but still sharing super early with my manager was for sure the best thing for me.

Allison:  Well, thank you so much for being here when you're already on parental leave. I respect that so much. I should note the baby is not here. I would not ever allow someone in with 2-day-old. So you're on parental leave, but still awaiting the birth of your child. Thank you so much for sharing all of this feedback. I think you speak so eloquently about parental leave prep and return to work and have shared a lot of really valuable insights here. 

And so, I'm just so thankful that you spent time with us here today and we will link out. You write a phenomenal newsletter that I believe people can subscribe to via LinkedIn. Is that right? Cause I see it through LinkedIn. 

Cassandra: They can. Yeah, it's called make work suck less.

Allison: Ok, make work suck less: we will link out to that. I have loved following your journey and I can't wait to read more about your return to work eventually when you get to that point. But best of luck over the next few months.

Cassandra: Thank you so much, Alison. Thank you for having me. I loved it.