Manager training for every type of workplace leave.
Three evidence-based trainings that give every people managers the information, vocabulary, tools, and confidence to support their team through parental leave, medical leave, family caregiving, sick leave, and more. Available exclusively through CPLL.
Managers are the single biggest variable. Most were never trained for leaves.
When an employee announces a leave—such as a pregnancy, serious diagnosis, deployment, sick relative, or the death of a parent—their manager becomes the most important factor in what happens next. Not the policy nor the benefits package, but the person they report to.
Most managers know this instinctively, and yet, most feel unprepared for it. They worry about saying the wrong thing, asking an illegal question, or overstepping. So instead, many say very little, and that silence is what employees remember.
68% of returning parents say their manager had the biggest impact, positive or negative, on their return experience.
The cost of that gap isn’t hypothetical. Organizations invest in leave policies that employees are then too uncertain, uncomfortable, or afraid to actually use. The published research puts a fine point on it: after California passed its paid family leave law, more than half of eligible employees didn’t know the policy existed, and over a third who did know chose not to use it out of fear of consequences.
A policy nobody uses isn’t a benefit. It’s a line item. The Leave Leader™ Manager Training Series exists to close the distance between what your organization offers and what your people actually feel free to take.
Three short trainings. Every type of leave.
Each of the trainings in this series can be completed in about an hour (or less) and is available in an online, fully self-paced format. Managers who complete all three earn a Leave Leader™ Certificate of Completion from the Center for Parental Leave Leadership.
Making Leave Manageable®
Built on CPLL’s RETAIN Coaching™ methodology and the 10A Transition Touchpoints™ framework, Making Leave Manageable® walks managers through every phase of an employee’s parental leave transition: the announcement, the planning, the handoff, the time away, the return, and the months of adjustment that follow. It’s grounded in over 35 years of research in adult development, leadership transitions, and organizational psychology, and it’s the only manager training built specifically around the parental leave transition as a full arc rather than a single date on the calendar.
Making Leave Manageable® is the manager-side counterpart to Lead Your Leave™, CPLL’s training for expecting and new parents. Both are built on the same 10A framework, so managers and employees walk into the transition speaking the same language and expecting the same process, which is what turns leave into an improved and shared culture instead of a one-sided policy.
Developed by CPLL.
Leaders and Leaves™
Leaders and Leaves™ trains managers to support employees using paid family and sick leave policies. It teaches the six specific supervisor behaviors that research identified as central to making leave feel accessible rather than risky, and it was the core intervention module tested in the randomized controlled trial described below.
Developed by Drs. Kossek and Hammer. Available exclusively through CPLL.
Leave Supportive Supervisory Behaviors™
This training covers the broader supervisor role in supporting employees’ family and personal lives, building on decades of research into Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors, the framework Drs. Kossek and Hammer developed and validated across multiple industries and workforce types. It establishes the foundation that Leaders and Leaves™ then applies specifically to leave.
Developed by Drs. Kossek and Hammer. Available exclusively through CPLL.
Together, the three trainings do something no other manager training does. Making Leave Manageable® brings the depth of a methodology built specifically for the parental leave transition. Leaders and Leaves™ and Leave Supportive Supervisory Behaviors™ extend that capability across every other kind of leave a manager will encounter. Managers receive one certificate and the skills to navigate every leave scenario.
Built on research, not best guesses.
Tested in a randomized controlled trial. Published in top-tier journal.
Most manager training on this topic is built on opinion, anecdote, or legal risk avoidance. This series isn’t.
The research behind Leaders and Leaves™ and Leave Supportive Supervisory Behaviors™ was led by Ellen Ernst Kossek, Ph.D. as Principal Investigator and Leslie Hammer, Ph.D., funded by the National Institutes of Health through the Small Business Technology Transfer program (grant #2R42AG060347-02A1), approved by Purdue University’s Institutional Review Board, and registered as a clinical trial. The study was conducted in partnership with Purdue University and Oregon Health & Science University with initial consultation by the Center for Parental Leave Leadership.
The study ran for six months across two large public universities. One was randomly assigned to receive the supervisor training. The other served as a wait-list control. More than 900 employees and over 500 managers participated. Then the researchers measured what actually changed.
The findings were published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, one of the most rigorous peer-reviewed journals in the field.
What the research found
Compared to employees at the control organization, employees whose supervisors received the training reported:
- Greater use of paid family leave, at both three months and six months.
- Stronger organizational commitment, at both three months and six months
- Higher job satisfaction at three months
- Higher perceptions of leave supportive supervisor behavior at six months
The training helped the people who needed it most. Women reported stronger organizational commitment. Employees managing significant childcare responsibilities reported higher job satisfaction, better general health, and greater use of sick leave. Employees caring for both children and aging parents at the same time reported higher job satisfaction.
Expert Tip: One behavior really matters
When the researchers looked more closely at which supervisor behavior was actually driving the results, one stood out above the rest: role modeling.
Supervisors who visibly took leave themselves, talked openly about it, and treated their own time off as legitimate changed how their employees perceived support and how satisfied those employees were with their jobs. Of the six behaviors the training teaches, that single one carried the effect.
It’s a useful thing to know before you train a single manager. Employees are not primarily listening to what their manager says about leave policy. They are watching what their manager does.
Citation: Kossek, E. E., Allen, S. J., Lawson, K. M., Hammer, L. B., Bodner, T., Xu, J., Holladay, C. L., Woods Herron, A., Cavanaugh, K. J., & Perry, M. (2026). Offering paid sick and family leave is not enough: Leave supportive supervisor behavior training improves policy use, health, and work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001395
Citation: Kossek, E. E., Allen, S. J., Lawson, K. M., Hammer, L. B., Bodner, T., Xu, J., Holladay, C. L., Woods Herron, A., Cavanaugh, K. J., & Perry, M. (2026). Offering paid sick and family leave is not enough: Leave supportive supervisor behavior training improves policy use, health, and work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001395
These are proven, learnable behaviors that decrease risk, increase retention, improve productivity, and enhance team culture.
The research identified six specific, learnable supervisor behaviors that make leave feel accessible instead of risky. Together they spell LEADER.
Listen and give emotional support.
Make it comfortable for an employee to say what they need.
Educate and increase access.
Know the policies well enough to help someone use them.
Address negative perceptions.
Reassure employees they won’t be penalized, and shut down stigma when it appears.
Create a coverage agenda.
Organize coverage creatively so the team keeps working and the employee actually gets to be away.
Respect time off.
Agree on communication preferences and then honor them.
Role model leave use.
Take your own time off, and let your team see you do it.
Two of the most revered and cited work/family researchers + the person who helped translate it for parental leave.
Leaders and Leaves™ and Leave Supportive Supervisory Behaviors™ were developed by two of the most established researchers in work, family, and occupational health. Dr. Amy Beacom, CPLL’s founder, and Dr. Amy Pytlovany, CPLL’s Director of Research, served as subject matter experts to the research team.
Meet Dr. Ellen Ernst Kossek
Ellen Ernst Kossek has been recognized for helping to create and advance the field of work and family, as one of its more generative scholars, and for advancing understanding of gender and diversity in organizations.
Dr. Kossek is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor of Management Emeritus at Purdue University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. She is currently a research scholar affiliated with centers in the U.K. and Canada, and a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Center for Families at Purdue University.
She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree with honors. She served as the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
She has been recognized on Stanford/Elsevier’s list of the world’s top scientists (2020 to 2024). She has published in many major management and social science journals and been quoted in outlets from the New York Times to CNN to the Financial Times. Her research has been funded by the NIH, NSF, and the Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations, and she has won awards for teaching, service, and mentoring other scholars.
She is currently a visiting scholar in the U.K., writing a book on workplace flexibility policies and remote work in the digital age, and continuing to study leadership interventions that foster employee boundary control and support across the work-family nexus.
She has also done significant public service, most recently for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on how to support family caregivers in STEM. Prior to becoming a professor, she worked on human resource issues for major corporations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Contact: ekossek@purdue.edu
Meet Dr. Leslie Hammer
Dr. Leslie Hammer is the Associate Director of Applied Research at the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences and Director of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center, a Total Worker Health® Center of Excellence at Oregon Health & Science University. She is also a Professor Emerita at Portland State University and a leading international expert on workplace mental health, work and family, and occupational stress.
She specializes in the mental and physical health effects of supportive supervision at work, with extensive experience designing, implementing, and evaluating worksite interventions and evidence-based supervisor training, including the Family Supportive Supervisor Behavior (FSSB) training and the Mental Health Supportive Supervisor Behavior (MHSSB) training.
Her applied research focuses on workplace interventions aimed at improving supervisor leadership skills, and on evaluating the impact of those trainings on both supervisor and worker mental and physical health, safety, and wellbeing. She has been Principal Investigator on six large workplace intervention randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of supervisor support training, funded by the NIH, CDC/NIOSH, and the Department of Defense.
She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology, and the Founding President of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology. She co-wrote Working Couples Caring for Children and Aging Parents (2008) and publishes widely in outlets including the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Contact: hammerl@ohsu.edu
CPLL’s Role
Dr. Amy Beacom, CPLL’s founder and CEO, has spent two decades studying how managers and employees navigate the parental leave transition leading to the creation of the RETAIN Coaching Method and Making Leave Manageable.
When long-time colleagues Drs. Kossek and Hammer began this research, they brought her in as a subject matter expert, drawing on that frontline expertise to help shape the study’s approach to the manager-employee relationship. Her contribution is formally acknowledged in the published Journal of Applied Psychology article.
That collaboration is also why the Leave Leader™ Series exists as a series at all. CPLL is the only place where this trial-tested supervisor training sits alongside a training built specifically for the parental leave transition, creating one certificate pathway for any organization’s managers and people leaders.
The only place to get all three.
CPLL is the exclusive licensee to deliver Leaders and Leaves™ and Leave Supportive Supervisory Behaviors™. If your organization wants its managers trained in either program, CPLL is where that happens.
Combined with CPLL’s Making Leave Manageable®, built on our own RETAIN Coaching™ methodology, the Leave Leader™ Series brings together two distinct research traditions into a single training pathway. Organizations don’t have to choose between depth on parental leave and breadth across every other kind of leave. With this training series they get both.
Built to actually get completed.
The research identified six specific, learnable supervisor behaviors that make leave feel accessible instead of risky. Together they spell LEADER.
Format
Self-paced and fully online (live training is also available)
Time
About one hour per training, three hours total
Completion
Leave Leader™ Certificate of Completion for all three
Delivery
Available through the RETAIN Coaching Hub™ or as standalone organizational training
Who it's for
People managers, supervisors, leaders, and HR teams
Manager training fails when it’s too long, too abstract, or too far removed from the moment a manager actually needs it. The research team designed these modules to be brief, low cost, and scalable by intention, not by compromise. That’s why each training in this series was designed to be completed in a single sitting and applied the same week.
Leave isn’t a rare event. Across a workforce of any size, there is almost always someone preparing for leave, on leave, or returning from one. The Leave Leader™ Manager Training Series exists to make sure the person leading everyone through it knows exactly what to do to improve the leave experience for the entire team they’re supporting.
Ready to close the manager gap?
Not sure where manager training fits in the context of leave support within your workplace? Take our free Parental Leave Program Self-Assessment to see where your organization stands.