A private round table hosted by the LEAD Network Spain Chapter at Juno House in Barcelona, bringing together professionals to discuss reconciling career ambition with raising children and caring for aging parents.
LEAD Network Spain Chapter, Juno House, Barcelona, June 2026
Round table conversation with LEAD Network Spain Chapter members at Juno House, Barcelona.
Building an eCommerce leadership career without pausing ambition.
Making room for children and aging parents alongside demanding roles.
Practical boundaries that protect both career goals and family time.
The LEAD Network Spain Chapter invited a small group of professionals to Juno House in Barcelona for a round table on a topic rarely discussed openly at industry events: how to build a demanding career while raising children and caring for aging parents. The format was intimate and off the record, structured around a short session followed by open networking.
The conversation centered on conciliation: how professionals, and particularly women in leadership roles, balance career goals and personal objectives with the daily reality of raising children and, increasingly, caring for aging parents at the same time. We talked through what actually helps in practice, from flexible schedules to how teams and managers can normalize the conversation instead of treating it as a private problem to hide.
A recurring theme was the “sandwich” reality many attendees are living: supporting young children while also becoming a caregiver for their own parents, often with no extra time carved out on either side. Several participants shared how they renegotiated roles at work and at home rather than trying to absorb the full load alone, and how naming that reality out loud, inside a professional network, made it easier to ask for what they needed.
We also discussed how career ambition and family responsibility get framed as opposites when they rarely have to be. The group pushed back on the idea that conciliation means scaling down goals; for most people in the room it meant redesigning how and when the work gets done, protecting non-negotiable time, and being explicit with employers about what sustainable performance actually requires.
“Conciliation is not a private problem to manage quietly. It is a design problem for careers, teams and families to solve together.”
Victor de la Fuente
Fifteen-plus years leading eCommerce strategy have run in parallel with raising a family and, more recently, supporting aging parents. Conversations like this one at Juno House matter because they replace private improvisation with shared, practical solutions, and because leaders who model conciliation openly make it safer for their own teams to ask for the same.
Leading eCommerce strategy while balancing family and caregiving.
Here is where I push back a little on how this topic usually gets framed. Conciliation is too often treated as a personal willpower problem: work harder, organize better, sacrifice more quietly. In my experience leading teams, the professionals who sustain both a serious career and real presence at home are not the ones who try hardest; they are the ones who redesign their week, their meetings and their expectations around the constraints that actually exist.
The bigger unsolved problem, in my view, is that most organizations still design roles for a version of the employee who has no caregiving responsibilities at all. Until performance expectations, meeting culture and career-progression timelines account for the reality that people are raising children and caring for parents at the same time, conciliation will keep depending on individual heroics instead of on structures that make it sustainable by default.
Explore more from Victor de la Fuente: Teaching & Speaking
