Louisa Symington-Mills is the founder and CEO of Cityparents Ltd, an organization she launched in 2012 to support working parents and professionals trying to balance career and family life. After hitting career obstacles following her first maternity leave, she built Cityparents as a side project before leaving banking and finance to run it full time from 2017 onward.
Under her leadership, Cityparents has grown to support close to 30,000 working parents across corporate professions, and Louisa has become a regular voice on workplace flexibility in outlets such as The Telegraph and before policy-making bodies. In 2015 she won the GBEA social enterprise Entrepreneur of the Year award, and she now also serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director at a London Stock Exchange-listed private equity company.
Louisa models the flexible working she advocates for: her team operates entirely remotely, with schedules built around school hours. She describes real leadership as requiring an emotional connection, and pushes back against treating empathy and collaboration as soft skills, arguing instead that they belong at the center of how organizations hire and manage people.
