Posted on 15th June, 2026 in Blog

The most expensive point to lose top talent

Organisations invest heavily in talent. They compete to recruit the brightest graduates, train them, develop them, give them increasingly complex work and invest senior time in their progression. Over the course of a decade, those individuals build technical expertise, institutional knowledge, client relationships and judgement that cannot easily be replaced.

And then, just as that investment should really begin to compound, organisations start losing a disproportionate number of women. For many, research shows that the inflection point is motherhood.

This is usually discussed as a gender or inclusion problem – I see it as both. However, it can also be looked at as an extraordinarily expensive talent problem.

The timing matters

The timing of maternity leave is significant. In many high-performance professional environments, women have already spent perhaps eight, ten or twelve years building their careers before they have their first child.

This means organisations are not just thinking about replaceable skills. Those taking leave may hold critical client relationships and have built internal networks and credibility. They are often moving towards the levels at which organisations expect them to originate business, lead teams, manage clients and become the next generation of senior leadership.

The critical point is that an organisation has already made a substantial investment in getting them there. Yet this is also the point at which careers can become significantly more vulnerable.

Some women leave; others remain but step sideways, slow their progression or find themselves moving onto a different trajectory from the one they were on before leave. And because this often happens gradually rather than through a dramatic resignation immediately after maternity leave, organisations can underestimate what they are losing.

The problem isn’t simply retention

A woman returning from maternity leave is often described as a ‘returner’, which is technically true. But returning to the building — or logging back onto the system — is not the same as successfully returning to a career.

The more important question is what happens next. Does she return to meaningful work? Do senior people continue to invest in her? Does she remain visible? Do important relationships survive the period away? Is she still considered for the assignments and opportunities that will move her career forward?

And, crucially, do the people around her continue to make the same assumptions about her ambition and potential? My research shows that these seemingly small factors accumulate.

Someone can be retained while gradually becoming less central to the organisation’s future. That is why measuring maternity return rates alone tells us relatively little and why so few organisations have sought to isolate this metric.

Careers run on more than performance

One of the themes that emerged strongly through my research into maternity transitions in high-performing professional environments is that successful careers are not built on output alone. Of course, performance matters enormously; but so do relationships, sponsorship and visibility.

Before leave, these factors may have taken years to build, yet time away can disrupt them surprisingly quickly. For example:

• A sponsor moves firm.
• A client relationship is handed over.
• A colleague becomes the obvious person for a particular type of work.
• Someone isn’t invited to a meeting because people assume they won’t want to travel.
• A manager, trying to be supportive, avoids offering a demanding opportunity.

None of these decisions necessarily looks significant in isolation and many are made with good intentions. Collectively, however, they can change a career. Once momentum has been lost, rebuilding it can be much harder than preserving it in the first place.

Getting a return on returners

This is why I think organisations need to look at parental transition through an investment lens as well as an inclusion one.

If you have spent a decade developing someone with the potential to become a partner, managing director or senior leader, the objective cannot simply be to get them back through the door after parental leave. It should be to protect the value of the investment you have already made.

That doesn’t mean pretending nothing has changed. Becoming a parent is a major life transition. Priorities, constraints and sometimes ambitions can change. But organisations should be wary of making those decisions on someone’s behalf.

The question organisations should ask is: what does this talented person need to continue building a successful career here?

Retention is only the beginning

There has been enormous progress in parental leave policy over recent years. Many organisations now offer generous leave, enhanced pay, coaching, flexible working and other forms of support.

But the real return on that investment will not be visible in the number of people who come back after six or twelve months. It will be visible several years later looking at the arc of returners careers. Who progressed? Who continued to win important work? Who retained sponsorship? Who reached the senior leadership team? And who quietly disappeared from the pipeline along the way?

For organisations serious about retaining their best people, parental leave isn’t simply a period of absence to manage well. It is a point at which years of investment can either continue to compound — or begin to leak away. And that makes it far too commercially important to treat as a maternity issue alone.