I grew up with my grandmother. Regular readers of The Corner Office know that she was my role model and my mentor. What I talk about less is my mother. 

My parents were divorced and in many ways she was a single mother though she had the privilege, and I use that word deliberately, of not bearing all the caregiving responsibilities alone. We lived with my grandmother and my aunt. Three working women who did the 9 to 5 and then came home and did everything else. Years later, I became that working mother. I did all of that for my girls, and more. And now, after decades in leadership and human resources, I have come to recognize something that I can no longer stay quiet about: many organizations still expect women, especially mothers, to perform this same extraordinary balancing act professionally, while pretending that times have changed. 

The Mother's Day gap 

Every year around Mother's Day, organizations publish thoughtful messages about appreciation, sacrifice, resilience, and the importance of family. Senior leaders post photographs with their mothers or their partners who are raising their children. And then Monday arrives. And many of those same organizations return to leadership systems that reward uninterrupted availability, geographic mobility, constant responsiveness, and performative visibility. Systems that were never designed around the realities of caregiving or modern life. 

 The proxies we use for commitment 

 Caregiving changes everything about how time, energy, and emotional bandwidth are managed. Mothers experience this most visibly but the broader issue affects millions of employees balancing children, aging parents, health concerns, and emotional responsibilities outside of work. Yet many organizations continue evaluating leadership potential through systems that reward people who appear endlessly available. Who is online the latest? Who responds instantly? Who attends every meeting? Who never takes leave? 

These questions become proxies for commitment even when they are poor indicators of actual leadership effectiveness. I have watched exceptionally capable women quietly passed over for opportunities because they were perceived as less available. I have seen leaders hesitate before mentioning family obligations because they feared it would affect how they were viewed. I have seen women return to work after six weeks of maternity leave not because they were ready, but because they understood, correctly, that they were now operating under a different level of scrutiny. 

The double standard hiding in plain sight 

Consider how differently flexibility is interpreted depending on who is using it. A senior manager working remotely while traveling internationally is viewed as strategic and trusted. Another who requests flexibility to manage caregiving responsibilities is viewed, consciously or unconsciously,  as unreliable. The issue is rarely overt discrimination because it is subtler than that. Leadership cultures reward uninterrupted professional visibility because that model feels familiar to those who succeeded under it.  

What organizations claim to want — and what they actually reward 

Organizations say they want empathetic leaders. Resilient leaders. Emotionally intelligent leaders. Psychologically safe leaders. But many continue rewarding behaviors that directly undermine those outcomes. Leaders who are always available normalize exhaustion. Leaders who never disconnect create pressure for others to remain permanently connected. Leaders who treat caregiving as an inconvenience signal that family in whatever form, is a liability. Leaders who reward visibility over effectiveness quietly narrow their own talent pipeline. And over time, the culture absorbs every one of these signals.  

Here is what I know from experience: the skills required to manage children, competing schedules, emotional needs, unexpected crises, exhaustion, and logistical complexity simultaneously are not separate from leadership capability.  Capabilities like prioritization, emotional intelligence, trust-building, psychological safety and resilience under pressure are highly valued competencies. Yet organizations systematically fail to recognize these competencies because they developed outside the office walls. 

 What actually needs to change 

The organizations that may well thrive over the next decade may not be the ones demanding the most sacrifice. They may in fact be the ones who redesign work around modern human realities. That means evaluating leaders on the quality of their outputs and not the quantity of their visibility. It means acknowledging that caregiving is not a distraction from professional life but is part of the human infrastructure that makes organizations function. It means moving beyond symbolic appreciation. Because the gap between what organizations post on Mother's Day and what they structurally reward the other 364 days of the year is a leadership problem to be solved. 

And it is one that HR, more than any other function, has both the responsibility and the standing to address. 

 See you next time.  Right here in the Corner Office.