Anna Squires Levine, president of the co-working space provider Industrious, didn’t follow the standard script when she took parental leave this year. Instead of disconnecting completely, she told her team she would be reachable by phone after two weeks, involved in key decisions again after four weeks and back in important meetings after eight weeks, on her way to resuming a full-time workload by the end of her 16-week leave.

She designed the process herself, based on what she felt would work best for her as she prepared to welcome her third child after a recent promotion and company merger. But she worried it would send employees the wrong message about fully unplugging on leave.

“What I was afraid of was that any choice I made would be seen as the blueprint for what I expected everyone to do,” Levine said.

Management experts said she was right to be concerned.

Leaders “are role models,” said Sankalp Chaturvedi, a professor of organizational behavior and leadership at Imperial College Business School in London. “People think about leader signals as more powerful rules than what is actually written in HR policies.”

Even when executives play strictly by the rules they can influence norms, if the policies are designed with choice in mind. As options for scheduling and returning from parental leave get more flexible and less prescriptive, the opportunity for new parents in the executive suite to set patterns for everyone else — whether they intend to or not — only increases.

Levine tried to be upfront about her plans while clarifying that the design of her leave wasn’t a new expectation for anyone else.

In an email to staff, portions of which she later posted on LinkedIn, she detailed her timeline for resuming various duties and underscored that it was one example of a choice within the boundaries of Industrious’s existing policy — not a new model.

“It’s super important to me that every teammate at Industrious does parental leave in the way that works best for them, supported by our parental leave guidance,” she wrote. “That’s different for each person and can change over time.”

Levine shared in the memo that she had taken two parental leaves before, one where she was fully offline and one where she stayed “casually in the loop” on major work developments. When her third child arrived, she had recently been promoted and Industrious had just been acquired by CBRE Group Inc. Levine knew she wanted to be involved at work again earlier and with more structure than before. Still, she stressed that hers was a personal choice and not a required template for others.

“My style isn’t everyone’s,” she wrote, “so please don’t use this as a model by definition for yourselves or your teammates!”

When employees misread workplace expectations, it’s usually because leaders haven’t made them clear, said Donelson Forsyth, a social psychologist at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. He warned that with flexible policies — whether covering caregiving leave, vacation days or hybrid work schedules — ambiguous or uneven use can unintentionally create shadow systems, where some employees feel empowered to set boundaries while others don’t.

Levine’s goal was to avoid exactly that kind of confusion. She wanted to communicate her plan without signaling a single “right” way to take leave.

“I was hoping mostly to give everyone a really transparent window into how I was thinking about it so that they could support me and also so that I could support them and no one was left guessing what my plan was,” she said.

Allison Whalen, co-founder and CEO of parental-leave consulting firm Parentaly, said Levine’s concerns echo what she hears regularly from executives navigating their own leaves.

Whalen noted there are ways to offset the chance that employees read too much into the boss’s own behavior. “One of the most powerful things that any senior leader can do to set the culture around parental leave is when you hear that somebody is not going to take their full leave, simply ask them why,” she said.

Only 27% of private-sector workers in the US have access to paid parental leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many employers that offer it are getting more creative with how or when it’s used, giving new parents more options to stack their leave time with a partner’s or to better align their time away with their priorities at work or at home. When that’s the case, the example set at the top may determine whether the flexibility feels like a genuine option or not.