The taboo against PTO and the weakness it reveals

“Our best people don’t take time off.”

Cool. So your whole plan depends on them never getting sick, pregnant, or hit by a bus.

Congratulations. You’ve built a culture where your best people are your biggest risk.

If your company stalls when one person steps away, it’s not proof of value or loyalty.

It’s a sign you’ve built fragility into your org chart.

Parental leave is the rare stressor you can see coming months in advance. If your team can’t absorb a 3-month absence without scrambling, what happens when real emergencies hit?

It’s not about generosity. It’s about whether the business can scale without scrambling.

This is where parental leave turns from a policy into a window into the vulnerabilities in your business.

When teams don’t plan for leave, the work gets spread across people already maxed out. That’s not “lean,” it’s a recipe for burnout.

Or they bring in a contractor who’s expensive, slow to ramp, and missing key context. Now they’re paying two people and getting less.

Quality slips. Deadlines move. Productivity slows.

That’s not coverage. That’s a single point of failure.

And if things fell into chaos when they left, why do you expect perfection as soon as they come back?

“Women aren’t as focused after they have a baby. You can tell their heads aren’t in the game.”

No duh. She had a baby. You should have seen this coming.

A system that only works when everyone’s at 100% isn’t efficient. It’s brittle.

Parental leave isn’t the liability.

Pretending it won’t happen is.

It isn’t a performance problem. It’s a design problem.

The average cost to replace a skilled employee is 1.5 to 2x their salary.

Compared to that, a well-run leave plan is cheap insurance.

You don’t need deluxe benefits, but you do need foresight.

Leave shouldn’t be a fire drill, it should be a resilience test.

If you’re building for resilience, your leave policy should also hold up under pressure.

I put together 20 questions to help teams spot weak points before they become emergencies.

Check out the resource