agonyaunt | AAM: Postdoc angry manager didn't disclose her pregnancy earlier

My new hire said I should have told him about my maternity leave before he arrived

I’m writing for a bit of a reality check. I know you aren’t an academic expert, but this feels like more of a people management problem to me. I am a principal investigator (PI) in an academic laboratory in Canada, so I manage a small team. I started a new team member, Joffrey, in January. Joffrey is American, and it took a little time to get his paperwork in order. He was on a one-year renewable contract; I had committed to him for that period of time (breach of contract would need to be pretty egregious for me to be able to fire him —not that I was planning to). I did expect/hope that he would stay for at least two years, and that hope was communicated at the start. The point is that he had some guarantee of stability.

He’s been working on a team project with a team which includes two other PI’s and two industry partners, who he met during the interview process, and there are five other team members at his level who he is working with.

Joffrey quit after just two months – two days after I announced to the team that I was going on parental leave in five months. I announced it as part of a discussion introducing the person who would be covering my role on the team for the time I’ll be on leave (it’s Canada, so I will be gone for six months or one year).

During his resignation, Joffrey had a litany of small-ish complaints (it took a month to get him ethics approval from the hospital to see the data he was going to be working on, so in the meantime he was doing small learning “pointless” tasks, it took a month for him to get onto the extended health plan, he didn’t like his work station location). His big complaint, however, was that I should have given him the “professional courtesy” of telling him about my upcoming parental leave before he arrived – so approximately 7-8 months before the child is due.

I do get that it’s a big deal to move countries for a job, and it’s a really big thing to quit a job in a foreign-ish country after you’ve gone to the expense of moving. My guess is that it felt a little unsettling to know that his first point of contact would be leaving, but this feels like an extreme reaction. I was just one manager in a team of mentors, and I expected that he would be up and running and a well functioning team member after seven months working on the project, so the impact on his career would be minimal (or positive if he demonstrates good leadership).

Obviously I released him from his contract at his request, but I feel taken aback by his expectations surrounding parental leave. I found it incredibly regressive, but am I being unreasonable?

No. It’s not reasonable for a colleague to expect to be informed about your pregnancy when you’re only one or two months pregnant. (Is Joffrey aware that many people wouldn’t even know they were pregnant that early, let alone be sure of their plans?) Sure, I can see how starting a new job and learning that the person you thought would be managing you will be going on a lengthy leave, but (a) it’s scheduled for seven months after he started, not a couple of weeks, and (b) that’s not generally “I must quit this job” territory or “how dare you not inform me of this earlier” territory.

You told your team when you were four months pregnant. That’s really reasonable, and it’s earlier than many people do.

It sounds like Joffrey might have been dissatisfied with the job in general. Sometimes when that’s the case people search for clearly articulable reasons to pin their dissatisfaction on, even when that’s not quite the thing driving their unhappiness. Maybe that happened here, or maybe Joffrey is just unreasonable. But you didn’t owe him earlier notice.

AAM: Postdoc angry manager didn't disclose her pregnancy earlier

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