Your best employees are running a second job right now. It’s called summer

Every June, my coaching conversations change. The leaders I work with are still talking about strategy and succession, but underneath, a second operating system is running. One client described her summer as “a staffing plan involving three camps, four children, three pickup times, and one car.” Another scheduled our session for her car, in a parking lot, between a board call and a camp release that happened at the exact same instant as her other child’s, twenty minutes away. The American school summer runs roughly 10 to 12 weeks. The standard American job offers nowhere near that in vacation. Into the gap, working parents pour a privately assembled patchwork: multiple camps with different hours, different locations, and different start dates. Securing even this patchwork is a competition—registration for the most sought-after programs opens in January and many fill within hours. Most workplaces treat this as a personal logistics problem. It isn’t. It’s a predictable, recurring operational reality affecting a large share of the workforce, and the way organizations handle it—mostly by pretending it doesn’t exist—costs them more than they think. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to A Cup of Ambition\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career \u003Cem\u003Eand\u003C\/em\u003E being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Eacupofambition.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com\/","the