Meet Dr. Amy Beacom, Founder & CEO
She created parental leave coaching and consulting when no one else saw the gap.
It all started with a promise.
The Center for Parental Leave Leadership began with a promise Dr. Amy Beacom made to herself on one particularly dark night in 2006, exhausted, in pain, and shocked by how completely unprepared she had been for what it meant to become a working parent.
At the time, she was a doctoral student in Organizational Psychology focused on leadership and executive coaching at Columbia University while working in Corporate Affairs at Pfizer. Career-driven, ambitious, and the primary breadwinner for her family, Dr. Beacom had not made a single contingency plan for her work. Three weeks after an unplanned cesarean, she was back on the job, navigating severe postpartum health issues, failed breastfeeding, and a loneliness no one had warned her about.
That night, she made a promise:
If she got through this, she would do whatever she could to make sure no one else ever felt what she was feeling.
It’s a promise that has driven her ever since.
She started building the answer to a question no one else was asking:
Drawing on decades of research and her own hard-won experience (and the gift of a “boss lottery” win in her manager at Pfizer), she developed what would become the RETAIN Coaching™ methodology—pilot tested in Australia, refined through practice, and brought to scale in 2014 through CPLL.
Author. Researcher. Founder. Creator. Visionary.
Dr. Beacom holds a doctorate from Columbia University, with a combined focus in Organizational Psychology, Women’s Leadership, Work/Family, and Applied Anthropology. She has dedicated over 35 years to research and practice in executive coaching, adult development, leadership transitions, and organizational change, integrating transition theory, perinatal mental health and wellness, unconscious bias awareness, leadership development, and systems thinking into a single, unified methodology.
Her work has shaped how organizations, policymakers, and communities understand parental leave as a leadership development opportunity rather than a business disruption. Dr. Beacom has partnered with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies, multinational nonprofits, government agencies, and religious institutions. She has trained and certified 150+ RETAIN Parental Leave Coaches across 36 states and 8 countries, and her manager training program has been used in 80+ countries worldwide.
She is recognized as the nation’s leading expert on the parental leave transition and has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Fast Company, and countless others. She co-authored The Parental Leave Playbook (published by Wiley, 2021) with Sue Campbell, the first evidence-based coaching guide written specifically for parents navigating this transition.
Amy lives in Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn New York, along with her husband and their teenage daughter—and misses her son, who is away at college.
Meet the rest of the team.
No one builds a field alone. Behind CPLL is a team of researchers, strategists, consultants, and practitioners who didn’t just sign on to a job. They signed on to a belief: that this transition deserves better than a policy document and a stack of forms to fill out.