Fatherhood Is A Leadership Issue

Peter was fighting back tears. I was interviewing him about his very successful business career when he had to pause, suddenly speechless. He was sharing how much his fast-track race to the top and prioritisation of work over everything had hurt his young daughter – and left a lasting, psychological wound still impacting her as a young adult. It’s not just women who struggle with the impossible juggling act of life’s Second Quarter, the overly dense demands of the decades between 25 and 50. Many men I interview describe these years as “a slog,” “a madhouse” or “a mess.” They’ve been imprinted with society’s gendered roles just as surely as women have. Where employers have welcomed (sometimes grudgingly) women’s impressive waltz into the workforce, they’ve been a lot less enthusiastic about embracing younger men’s parallel foray into fatherhood.

This Father’s Day, dare to be a Great Place to Work for Fathers. Because if companies want more women to be leaders, they must allow men to be fuller fathers. This requires leadership, and lots of it. Often from a generation of men who have made different personal choices. Here are three steps to getting fatherhood onto the leadership agenda.

Leaders are Fathers Too – Say So

Geoffrey Williams, the head of Diversity & Inclusion at Burberry, makes a point of talking about his family. “I talk about my kids in meetings, I share that I’m leaving to attend important school events, and I share when my 2-year old hasn’t slept all night and I’m feeling pretty shattered.” This, he suggests, is an invitation to others to integrate some glimpse of their personal selves into their professional personas. This requires breaking down the invisible, unspoken but very resilient Berlin Wall that business has erected between the personal and professional realms. And the message needs to come not just from the Diversity guys, but from everyone on the Executive Team too.

Masculine corporate cultures make any mention of family, beside the token photo on the desk (for the few who still have such a thing) or the competitive comparison of vacation destinations, taboo. This compartmentalisation is something that makes some companies pretty intolerable to women – as well as to a growing number of young men and parents of any gender.

Father’s Day Leadership Tip: Intentionally share your own reality and balancing act, to allow people to know they are not alone – and that it’s not just women who juggle multiple roles inside and outside of organisations. It’s everyone.

Let Fathers … Father

Slowly but surely, maternity leave is evolving towards the more gender neutral parental leave across companies and countries. But the reality inside many of the companies I work with, is that culture eats policy before breakfast. Many senior men struggle to comprehend, let alone encourage, young fathers to take time out with their families. “I made sacrifices,” one executive told me, “if you’re ambitious, you suck it up and prioritise. Take leave if you want, but don’t expect the promotion you were hoping for when you return.” This attitude is not dissimilar to many first-generation female leaders who had to fight their way to the top – and weren’t very supportive of the next generation of women arguing for more balance. The cross-generational competition between women has started to fade as their presence has become more widespread and more secure, at least in some organisations. But the cross-generational incomprehension between men is at its peak between Boomer men and the Millennial men now struggling with sleepless nights and 24/7 days.

This year, Father’s Day overlaps with Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the US. But the wounds of ancestry are powerfully chiseled into parenthood across generations. For America’s African American community, fatherhood is a national leadership challenge. Former Vice-President of the National Center for Fathering, Bernard Franklin, reminds us that “in many inner-city African American neighborhoods, nearly 70 percent of the children will go to bed tonight without their father present.” Not helped by recent research suggesting that men who were fatherless as teenagers have higher testosterone levels, shaping them to repeat their own parents’ patterns. Addressing the fatherhood challenge of this community will take leadership – from more than the mothers currently picking up the slack.

Father’s Day Leadership Tip: Acknowledge fatherhood as a 21^st century priority – at work as well as at home. Encourage young fathers to take parental leave, visibly applaud them when they do – and still promote them. Gender-neutralise all talk of parenting and care, and share experiences from role models of all genders who have made mindful trade-offs and choices – and still lived to be loved by their own progeny.

Bring Your Role Self to Work

We now know that many of the men we work with are fathers. The Covid pandemic was a moment of revelation. We saw their kids running around in the background of their zoom calls. Celebrate the news. You may be sceptical about invitations to “bring your whole self to work” and the concept is being somewhat wilfully misinterpreted by the cynical. It’s not about indiscriminately ratting on about your beautiful babies or your marital pressures to long-suffering colleagues who’d rather you shut up and deliver on your deadline.

It’s actually a potent leadership skill. To learn how to share enough about yourself to enable others to feel at home in the workplace. To build what Harvard professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. So that they perform better, so that teams become more than transactions. So they may want to go that extra mile for you when your mum is dying, or your kid’s just born. So that mental health issues can be tabled before yet another ‘human resource’ melts down. It means not relegating the most important dimensions of most peoples’ entire life and happiness to the lowest priority in their office pile.

Cain Ullah, the co-Founder and Board Member of UK-based digital transformation firm Red Badger, is leading by example. At age 40, he passed on his CEO role to work three days a week after his second son was born. “My wife and I agreed for my career not to be prioritised above hers,” he says. “The man having to do five days a week and earn the bread is a cultural stigma that should be broken.” Just this week, he encouraged a new recruit with a newborn to treasure his child’s first year – and take his full paternity allowance. “He is new and feels guilty about taking too much leave as he wants to make a good impression. I told him he won’t ever get the first year of his child’s life back.”

Father’s Day Leadership Tip: Wish the men in your organisation a Happy Father’s Day. And know that, as the ladies have been suggesting for some time, fatherhood is actually 365 days a year. For the rest of your employees’ careers. And beyond. Get with the game.