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{"id":17353,"date":"2022-02-25T10:21:46","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T04:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecorporatemagazine.com\/?p=17353"},"modified":"2022-02-26T15:19:48","modified_gmt":"2022-02-26T09:49:48","slug":"inspiring-working-parents-everyday-louisa-symington-mills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecorporatemagazine.com\/inspiring-working-parents-everyday-louisa-symington-mills\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspiring Working Parents Everyday |Louisa Symington-Mills"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t

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Inspiring Working Parents Everyday |Louisa Symington-Mills<\/h1>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t $\"Inspiring$ \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Louisa Symington-Mills<\/p>
CEO and Founder,Cityparents<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Cityparents Ltd is an award-winning organization supporting working parents and professionals in corporate roles who want to balance their work and home lives. Founded in 2012 by Louisa Symington-Mills following her successful career in banking and finance, Cityparents provides expert-led resources, information, and advice to individuals and businesses across a range of topics, including career progression, work\/life balance, home\/family life, and parenting, wellbeing at work, inclusion, and creating flexible and inclusive workplaces.<\/p>
Louisa is still comparatively early into her working career. Having founded Cityparents in her spare time, she ran the organization alongside a regular day job for several years before taking the helm as full-time CEO in 2017. In addition to her role as CEO, Louisa now holds an Independent Non-Executive Director position at an LSE-listed private equity company.<\/p>
Louisa is a phenomenal networker and persistent and persuasive in inviting leading City names to support Cityparents. Under her inspiring leadership, membership has increased rapidly since its launch. Cityparents now supports nearly 30,000 working parents across a broad range of corporate professions.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Louisa is an empathetic manager who has fostered a culture of trust and collaboration across the small team at Cityparents.<\/p>
As every member of the team works fully flexibly and remotely, this is an essential ingredient in the success of the overall business.<\/p>
As a leader, Louisa responds astutely and quickly to changing business needs and is always open to trying new initiatives, with an intuitive understanding of when \u2013 and when not \u2013 to sustain these over the long term.<\/p>
She instinctively understands the needs of the working parents. For example, knowing that the pandemic was placing huge time pressure on working parents, Louisa created a new range of Shorts \u2013 short-form video content \u2013 to enable members with limited time to continue to access Cityparents\u2019 expertise. These have been and continue to be extremely popular. Louisa and her small team continually and proactively refine the business offering to ensure it always remains relevant; as a result, Cityparents continues to grow and thrive despite the challenging backdrop of the past 18 months.<\/p>
Cityparents \u2018punches above its weight\u2019; it has gained high profile and credibility in a very short space of time.\u2019 It has also provided a strategic drive for many organizations\u2019 HR policies and gender agendas.<\/p>
As a specialist in work\/life issues, Cityparents is a vital source of support for its members as they go through the most challenging periods in their careers. By meeting other working parents experiencing the same challenges, members are encouraged to believe it is possible to have fulfilling home and work lives.<\/p>
Crucially, Cityparents practices what it preaches; every member of the team works remotely and part-time, with working patterns based around the school term. Louisa has grown her small team based on two fundamental principles \u2013 hiring people that she believes are brilliant, enthusiastic, passionate; and trusting them to get on and deliver a great job, knowing they are committed to the objectives of the business and they will happily devote their skills and experience to its growth and development.<\/p>
As Louisa says, \u201cWe pay as much as we can, but our real currency is enabling colleagues to work whatever hours fit into their busy family lives. We are all parents of young children and want to enjoy a right to be present at school drop-off and pick-up, for school holidays, for sports days, doctor\u2019s appointments or when a child is ill, without needing to seek permission from \u2018the boss\u2019 for special leave or extra flexibility. We all work \u2013 myself included \u2013 predominantly during school term hours, and largely from home, with occasional trips into London when required. I trust my team inherently to manage themselves how their work and life arrangements blend together, and to draw appropriate boundaries too. As a result of our flexible and \u2018real life\u2019 approach, I\u2019ve been able to grow a team of dedicated, skilled and valued colleagues. We aim to be a role model for small businesses, demonstrating how offering a flexible work approach can be of huge benefit to attracting and retaining talent\u201d.<\/p>
\u201cAs a female leader running an all-female team, the qualities and skills we all bring to the table of empathy, support, trust, and collaboration are all precious and are interwoven through our day-to-day activities. Women are sometimes told they are too kind, or caring, or \u2018soft\u2019 to be leaders, but I believe real leadership requires an emotional connection,\u201d she explains.<\/p>
\u201cThe only time I felt my career wobble was when I returned to my corporate job, working in finance in the City of London, after my first period of maternity leave in 2012. I had a flexible working arrangement in place but didn\u2019t know how to make it work successfully in practice, and I found it hard to combine the competing demands of office and family life. I didn\u2019t know any other working mothers in the same boat as me \u2013 who were trying to keep a tough City career moving forwards while managing some work-life balance too. This provided the spark for what became Cityparents, so I never regret that career \u2018wobble,\u2019 as, without it, Cityparents wouldn\u2019t be here today.\u201d<\/p>
As winner of the GBEA social enterprise Entrepreneur of the Year award 2015, Louisa has developed a leading and inspirational profile as an entrepreneur. Her advice to anyone considering starting a new business? \u201cGet your goals straight \u2013 if you know where you\u2019re going, the path to get there will be a lot easier to find. Look for what\u2019s missing \u2013 I launched Cityparents because I was responding to both my own needs and those of the people around me, and I couldn\u2019t find any other product or offering that delivered what I was looking for. If you spot a niche or a need, go for it. Be confident \u2013 10 years ago if you\u2019d told me I would be running an award-winning and successful business, I would have laughed \u2013 I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. But as time has gone on I\u2019ve learnt to embrace the skills I have and use them consciously to get the most out of everything I do, every day.\u201d<\/p>
Louisa champions the interests and concerns of working City parents by speaking at industry events and writing regular articles for The Telegraph newspaper. She has also spoken on TV and radio and is sought out for advice by both City firms and policy-making bodies looking to support better their employees who are parents.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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