Should I have expected a promotion after taking 6 months of shared parental leave?
I've been in my current role for four years. From December last year until the middle of May this year, I was on shared parental leave.
My company's promotion cycle works like this:
- Self-evaluations and manager reviews take place in June.
- Promotion decisions are announced in October.
Before I went on leave, my line manager told me I was getting close to promotion level. He suggested that I set goals and demonstrate my capabilities in the months leading up to my leave so that I wouldn't effectively lose a year of promotion progress while I was away.
Based on that conversation, I put a lot of effort into delivering against those goals before going on leave.
Last week, I had my promotion feedback meeting. My manager told me I had performed well, but I wasn't promoted. Naturally, I was disappointed because I believed I had done what was expected based on the guidance I'd been given.
To be clear, my manager never said that taking shared parental leave affected the decision, and I know that explicitly penalising someone for taking leave would not be acceptable. At the same time, I only worked for part of the review cycle because I was away for five months.
What makes this more complicated is that I knew I was in a strong position for promotion before taking leave. Even so, I decided to take the time off because the opportunity to spend those early months with my baby is something I'll never get back.
Going into it, I understood there was a chance that taking a lengthy leave might affect my promotion timeline, and I tried to prepare myself for that possibility. However, now that the decision has actually been made, I find myself more disappointed than I expected. Part of me wonders whether I'm being unreasonable or contradictory: I consciously prioritised family over career progression for a period of time, yet I'm still upset about missing out on the promotion.
Am I being reasonable in feeling disappointed given the expectations that were set before my leave, or was it unrealistic to expect a promotion in a year when I was absent for nearly half of the review period?