Parents Who Lead with Wharton Professor Dr. Stewart Friedman

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and thirty six, which is airing in early to mid March. We're going to be interviewing Stu Friedman, who is the author of the new book Parents Who Lead. He's also a professor emeritus at Wharton here in Philadelphia, so we've gotten to meet in person a couple times, which has been great. He's a wonderful person to talk to, so I'm really looking forward to that. That's so cool. Too bad he couldn't have joined you live. We probably could have worked that out, but that would have required me to think ahead. Yeah, and that would have been happened my brain's a little bit moshe right now because still in the newborn phase, you know, yes, well, plus then you'd be a little farther from the baby, which makes things harder. And there you go. Yeah, yeah, So you know, he wrote a book and I know you enjoyed it. But I just thought this would be a good time to update our listeners about how our reading is going in this year. Now that we're you know, about a sixth of the way through as this is airing, did you end up getting to read a lot while? I mean, I was going to say on your maternity leave, But again, every time I say that, I feel bad because you didn't. You don't really get that kind of protected swaths of time. Yeah, there's there's upsides and downsides, as we've discussed, and in general, I like the upsides. So I'm just keeping that in mind as I am doing all sorts of multitask work. But I have been able to read because one of the upsides of nursing is you have a ton of time to read, Like you can't really do much else. I mean, I do have to do other things. I'm like walking around the house carrying a baby, but I sit there and read on the kindle app on my phone. I've gotten through a couple books I read Selene on your recommendation. Did you like it? Yeah? I thought there was you know, I liked a lot of it. I think there was some strange like is he actually accusing George Bush Senior of being part of the murder of the Chilean finance minister? Unclear? Well he didn't, He's really did he not specify who the person known to everyone who's in the CIA and somebody else? Says the Vice President. I'm like, that's so funny. See, I'm so much less politically minded that I was like vague, like I did not it was not I didn't. Yeah it was. I guess it wasn't that vague, But it also was not like a central point of that. But it just coming back to that, I'm like, well, that is a pretty studdying accusation. I didn't think that was, you know, jury thing. I'm pretty sure because that, well, maybe if we ever have him on our guests, we'll be like, did you mean to make a political statement with that book or was it just more of a character study? Which is how I read it, And I felt like the Selene character herself was what I really enjoyed about. Yeah. No, she was quite the interesting private eye that I wish her husband had been more developed too, as her just sort of one of the least developed sidekick characters in a and he was intriguing enough to be interesting. But I agree, I would have liked to know more of a backstory. And yeah so, but I mean, as you wrote, the descriptions of Yellowstone and the area around Yellowstone, the Montana parts of Yellowstone are just gorgeous, and I really enjoyed reading that, especially having been there about two years ago now, so you know, if he describes it well, and that is kind of how that wild, wonderful area of this country looks. So I really enjoyed that part of it. You know, I've I've been reading a lot of other stuff too. I've got a through some lists and figure out what I want to read next, because I just finished Selene and I finished a book called A Time to Build, which is about the sort of politically the decline of institutions and how we should probably have stronger institutions in this country, between voluntary associations, churches, unions, things like that that people join that they don't have to right, and those are have gotten a lot weaker, all of those things that on both sides of the political spectrum. So interesting argument. Yeah, how about you? What have you been reading? Yeah? So, I mean this year was the first year I kind of tried to set up reading lists ahead of time. Normally, I'm much more like, Okay, I'm done, so what am I going to read next? And this time I made a Q one list that had about eight books in it, and Q one is not over and the time it airs and I'm done about five of the books, so we'll see. I do enjoy kind of not having to think about my next read and having it all selected for me, even though I guess I'm the one still doing It's just past Sarah. Yeah, it's past Sarah. But no, I find that sometimes if I don't do that, I get stuck in this like hinterland of Oh I need to pick something new, but what should I pick? And then you know, I don't have something from the library, and then I have to put it on the whole list. But if you think ahead, you can really game that library's holeless system. And I've actually been really pleasantly surprised that some fairly popular titles have come through for me faster than I thought, Like, I just got The Dutch House by and Patchet from our library, and I assume that would take weeks to months, but it actually was much faster. I did just finish The Snow Child, and I thought it was really another one of those I don't know. It's not a perfect book, but it's got great outdoor vistas as well. And I think I'm craving wintry scenes because we don't have any actions actually get me. So I had somebody on my Instagram comment that they read that paired with The Grade Alone, which is also set in Alaska, and I'm like, oh, what a perfect little winter winter moment. Yeah, winter duo. So maybe I should just go to Florida. I'm not feeling like I need that. Well, I'm sure there's lots of beachy tropical reads. Actually, I have a lot of them on my Q two list. There's a couple from some Miami author that is set in Cuba. So I'll report back about those awesome. Well, we are looking forward to this interview with Stu, so we'll get right to that. Well, Sarah and I are excited to welcome Stuart Friedman to the program. He is the co author, with Alyssa Westing, of the new book Parents Who Lead. He is also a professor emeritus now I Believe at Wharton, which is at the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia. He's hosted a great show on Sirius XM radio on work and Life. I've been able to be on that a few times, which has been a lot of fun, and he is just an all around great person. So we're excited to have you here, Stu. How's everything going, Very exciting time in my life. Thanks so much for having me. Laura, Sarah, it's great to be here, no problem. So tell us a little bit about your career journey and your family as well. All right, well, it's a long story. I'm going to be sixty eight this summer, so I'll try to keep it brief. I have three kids, been married since nineteen eighty, so that's going on forty years to a woman who I met at a graduate school interview and we ended up going to the same graduate school together. She in clinical psychology and me in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan, and our eldest is thirty two. And we also have a twenty nine year old and a twenty six year old's a boy boy girl. The eldest Scott married last year and by adoption, I now have a thirteen year old grandson. Wow. And next month our first biologically created grandchild arrives. It all goes well, so we're really looking forward to that. Yeah, new phase of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and my father died two weeks ago. Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry ninety oh wow. Well, you know that was a profound change as well. And so it's this magical cycle of life that is I'm right in the thick of it. And yeah, it's quite mysterious. So that's a brief on sort of my family life. Shall I say more about how that intersects with my sure your career, because I know you had a corporate career and then you wound up over at the University of Pennsylvania. Maybe can talk a little bit about about that. Well. I started at the University of Pennsylvania in nineteen eighty four in the psychology era as an organizational psychologist and have been teaching leadership and teams for for a long long time. When my first was born, though, I had a kind of epiphany when I realized that I now had to take care of him, which is something that perhaps you've talked about this on your show. I don't know if this is more true of men than women, but I had no clue what I was getting into. But I couldn't stop thinking about what I needed to now do to take care of him and to create a world in which he was going to grow up safe. So I brought this question to my students in the NBA classroom. This is a course on basic management, Intro Management class, and I set aside the class session for that day, which was about motivation and reward systems, and I said, you know, there's something else I need to talk with you about. And I just started ranting. I hadn't completely unprepared, but well, it was a memorable day because I asked the students, what are you, as future business leaders, going to do to ensure the healthy development of the next generation not just of talent in your companies, but period. And of course they were annoyed that I wasn't dealing with the topic that they had prepared for. This was back in the day when students used to prepare for class. Let's not get into that. But further, you know, there were people saying, you know, professor, nobody cares about your family, and why are we talking about families and children here when that's not really the agenda. We're in a business school. Of course, other people in the room, men and women, were quite interested in this question and really leaned into the conversation. One of them in response to my question, what are you going to do to cultivate the next generation to make it a safe environment for them to grow up? And one of them said, well, you're the professor, you tell us. And of course I had no answers. I only had the question. And that's what I made a career of, is asking annoying, provocative questions. If you want proof of that, just ask my daughter. She'll tell you that I'm really good at asking annoying questions. But putting that aside for a moment, it was an important moment for me because I realized that with my training and access, I could explore this question seriously, and I did so. I founded the Wharton Work Life Integration Project in nineteen ninety one, the same year that I was asked to start the Leadership program. At the Wharton School. So in parallel, I was pursuing new knowledge, practical knowledge about how to cultivate leaders, which is what my dissertation had been about the decade prior, and where I was working on with companies on their talent management systems and at the same time going into the field and also doing survey research on what does it take for people to integrate the different parts of their lives in a way that works for all of them. So notice the name of the project was the Work Life Integration Project. It was not about the balance project. And I've been railing for three decades plus now against that term that's common in our vernacular. Well, let's I mean, why is that why? Because you know, one of the reasons we wind up using it a lot is that's what people search for, because it's the word that people use. But why do you like integration as opposed to balance? Well, integration or harmony that are better terms than balance. Because the balance metaphor you know, the scales and balance or seesaw it connotes in your mind and to all those a part of the conversation a win lose, right, one's up, the others down, And that is that's limiting. It's of course true that we have to make sacrifices and that we can't have everything all at once. No one has balance. And I've been studying this forever and I can tell you no one has perfect balance, and no one has it all at the same time. And the idea of thinking about trade offs and sacrifice as the default in your head and in your actions and the way you see the world leaves you missing opportunities for taking action, intelligent, mindful, proactive, conscious action that is intended instead to create wins or success for it. Not just your work, not just your family, not just your community, not just your self personally, mind, body, and spirit. We're all but all four parts of your life. And if you frame it that way, if you think about, what can I do that's going to have a positive impact on all the different parts, either directly or indirectly, Like say, for example, by taking care of yourself, you become a less annoying colleague and a better mother and friend. If you think about, well, how can I take action that's going to be good for all the different parts my life and the people who matter most to me in the different parts, well, then you are much likely to pursue and find those wins instead of assuming trade off. So that's one of the main reasons why the balance metaphor is harmful and why it's much better to think in terms of harmony. I like the metaphor of the jazz quartet, which I wrote about in the Total Leadership book a dozen years ago, where you think about these different parts of your life as instruments or players, and a jazz quartet, where the idea is to try to create something beautiful together, where there's improvisation, constant change on a motif that is being developed over time, not at a single moment. And sometimes you just hear the trumpet and the other instruments are musical term resting. Other times you're hearing well the bass and the drums are playing. The others are silent, but they're always listening to each other and responsive to each other, and it's a whole that you're looking at. It's a more dynamic and I think realistic way to think about the relationship of work and home and community and self. The last thing I'll say about this, I think it's an important one, is in the late nineties I was asked to join the Ford motor company. So I took a leave from Wharton after being a professor there for fifteen years, and left for a few years to serve as the head of leadership development for Ford Motor globally. So my wife and I now we have three kids. They're twelve, nine, and six at the time, and we moved back to ann Arbor where we went to graduate school. Except now we're not starving graduate students. I'm a fat cat senior executive at a big company, and so our lifestyle was very, very different. And you know, I got there having written an article in the Harvard Business Review called Work and Life the End of the Zero Sum Game, which was one of the first pieces to really address this issue. And I inherited a small team that eventually grew during our time there, where total leadership was created. But when I first arrived, the people who were in the leadership development center said, hey, you're a mister work life. I need Fridays off or you know, I need this, I need that, And I said, whoa wait a minute. Working for me, I now have a real boss for the first time in my life, who's expecting a lot and very very demanding. How are you going to help me and us succeed. How by your being off on Friday? Is that going to help us? So, yeah, you had to look at the business case for things, which we're going to take. Speaking of the business case, see, we got to take it at ad break real quick. So we'll be back in one second. So we are back with Professor Stewart Friedman, who is the author of the new book Parents Who Lead, And we've been talking about why we want to think of work in life as more of a jazz quartet as opposed to a balanced metaphor. And when you do this right, there can be career wins to thinking about family as well. You're mentioning that you were looking at this corporate from the perspective of like, how does friday off help me? Right? Like, how does this help advance our bottom line as the boss? So what did you find, I mean, what is sort of the business case for this? Well, one of the reasons why this total leadership approach works both for individuals and now in the focus we've got for people who are in parenting partnerships. That's how we refer to people raising kids together because it comes in many different forms. Of course, those partnerships One of the reasons why it seems to work in different societies and different cultures around the world because we've brought it to companies and individuals worldwide, is that the method and the principles are customized to the individual's situation. So there's no one best way to make it work except that it has to work not just for you and your kids, but for your career and the people in your work environment as well as in your community. And that's the leadership mindset that we train people to adopt. So the key to success in this is to think as a leader about how you can make change happen in a way that's good for you and for us. And so when people came to me and said here's what I need, I said to them, great, tell me how that's going to help us. And what I found and this was sort of the magical question in a way that really opened up possibilities for innovation. You take responsibility for thinking through how what you want it's good for you, is going to have some kind of positive effect for what we're trying to do together. And when you challenge people with that question, and I've done this now tens of thousands of times, I've never met anyone who couldn't come up with a really good answer because what they're asking for us something that they really care about, and they're going to get very creative about how they can make change happen in a way that's good for them and for you. So there's no one magic solution other than to think of yourself as a leader in the different parts of your life and that you're charged and your ability really is to look for opportunities to make things work for not just you, and that makes it easier for everyone. So when people come up with the idea of, say, shutting off their online stream for say a chunk of four hours on a Wednesday afternoon, and they realize that that's going to be something that is going to be good for them and for their productivity as well as for their kids and their friends. You can fill in the blanks as to how that would play out, right. They then pitch it to their boss in the following way. I'd like to try for the next month or so, an experiment in which I'm offline for you know, for this chunk of time for the next four weeks or so, and I believe that that's going to improve my performance in ways that you will benefit. Dear boss, would you be willing to try that for a month and see if it works and if it doesn't, will try something different or go back to the way things were. Is that something you'd be willing to try? And most most people will say, sure, you're doing this for me, I get it, let's try it, which is a very different scenario than Okay, I need Wednesdays off. I need to be off Wednesdays because I need to get to my kids, you know whatever, the soccer game or you know, doctor appointment. And the way that most managers respond to that kind of question is no, why do you realize the pressures that I'm under and you're asking me for more? Why why get out? No? Or if I have to, here's another demand on me. But if you instead think of it in terms of how you're doing this, it's going to be beneficial to your boss, and of course it can be and you and you set it up as an experiment that's time limited over which your manager has control and influence on the outcome, and you would just if it's not working with her, with your boss, well that's much more likely to succeed. And it's going to overcome the resistance that people have to trying something new. So does that answer your question? It does, And I have lak and I know I said go ahead, ran up following. So do you find that men and women respond differently to some of these concepts, because, as you're speaking, I'm like, personally very excited and happy to hear a male person in particular discuss this because most of the time, unfortunately that's that's not the messaging I've heard from men of your generation, to be completely honest, men that I work alongside. So I love what you're saying, but I'm curious whether you get different responses that are gender based. That's a great question, Sarah. When I first started doing this work, you know, in the early nineties, I was one of the very few men talking about this stuff. So when we convened the Wharton work Life Roundtable in the early nineties, which brought together business leaders, you know, the early movers in the work life movement, friends and colleagues of mine who were policy advocates and early change agents, as well as government agencies, and we held it at the Wharton School, there was a flurry, really an explosion of interest, Like, what's a man at the Wharton School of Business doing talking about children? Huh what? So I was an odd messenger and got a lot of attention simply because of that, because I stood out and was talking about an issue that was if you ask your mothers, they'll tell you because you guys are a generation behind me. It was an emergent issue that was the sole province of women practically, I mean, there were a few other guys. And so one of the things that I think made the Total Leadership initiative successful and continues to grow is that I very consciously and subversively used language that was going to resonate with men to get into the issues that were of great concern to men and women of course, but that there was a stigma associated with approaching as a man. So Total Leadership was about improving performance and results at work and at home and in the community and for yourself personally, your physical health, mental health, spiritual growth and development. So notice what the lead is there. Total leadership is about improving performance and results at work. Okay, that sounds right. I can talk about that. That's something I care about. So we very deliberately use language that men could get into and that worked. That worked, and then of course once you open up the conversation. So what we help people to do is learn how to be real, to be whole, to be innovative. Those are the three principles we found are crucial to growing as a leader and to finding harmony among the different parts of your life. And it starts with your values and your vision. What do you care about, where you're going, where if you come from, and why does that drive to you to where you want to go? Being real and writing about that, talking about that, getting peer to peer feedback on that, and of course that opens people up to who am I? What's my purpose as a leader, not just here but everywhere? Who are the most important people? Be whole meant to identify the most important people to you at work, in your career, as well as at home, however you define homer family and in your community, however you define that, And what do those people expect of you? And what do you expect of them? And now talk to them and here's how to do that. About what you actually expect from each other, not what you think they expect, but what you actually expect. So we train people to do this is leadership basics. Build trust, gain support, see the reality of what people actually expect of you, not what you think they expect. And what most people discover is that what other people expect of them is less than what they thought, especially ambitious, high potential men and women, less than and a little bit different than what they thought. And if you don't believe me, try this at home because or wherever you are, because you'll find that. And this is the great aha. People go into these conversations fearful men as well as women. They're afraid. They're especially afraid to talk to their mothers. That's the most critical stakeholder in life. It seems most people are afraid of what they're going to hear. They have a conversation like this with their mothers, they find that they have more support and love in their lives than they had imagined. Particularly at work, people want you to be successful and they want to help you in a way that's good for both of you. So then that leads to ideas for innovation. So the third principle we found that people who are really good at this is that they're constantly innovating. They're constantly experimenting with ways that are good again for all the different parts what we call four way wins. And you know, men once they're you know, given not just license and permission to pursue these issues, but you know, when this is done in companies, they're like required to talk to your kids and your spouse and your friends as well as your business colleagues about what you need from each other and to get creative about how to solve the puzzle of integrating the different parts. And when we first did this twenty years ago at Forward, with our mid career high potentials from all around the world, men and women, it was like a festival. They were so happy that we were compelling them to address their whole lives, not just their business lies. So, Stu, I want to pivot to this subject of your new book, the Parents Who Lead, because you're taking this idea of envisioning you know where you want to go and being innovative and getting fees and applying it to parenting in particular. And you've been telling us, of course that this is part of the whole broader total leadership, but this book in particular focuses on the parenting aspect of it. I think most parents are not used to thinking of themselves as leaders. But why do you think that's the right metaphor for what parents are in their families. Well, what is it that leaders do. Leaders see reality as best they can, and then they try to take action to bring others along with them to a better tomorrow. They try to mobilize people towards a goal that matters. That's what leaders do. And you can do that in an organization that's hierarchical and you have people reporting to you, but you can do that anywhere. So the conception of leadership that we're talking about here is not so much about executive authority in a hierarchy. It's about how you get people to go along with you to what you envision is a better tomorrow, one that's going to be good for you and for them. And that's kind of what we're doing as parents, isn't it. One hopes we're trying to drive the children to something. But well, I mean that, yes, it's hard. It's hard. I mean this is one of the lightmotives of our book, of course, is that this stuff is difficult, as leadership is. But what we find is that when we help people to envision their roles as leaders and to use some of the evidence based knowledge we have about what it takes to lead well, like being able to articulate a compelling image of an achievable future, a vision. We have some tools for how to actually do that, and it's not that complicated. Anyone can do it. It starts with identifying your core values, which anyone can do and should do, sharing those with your partner, and talking about what you have in common what you don't, Articulating in a page or so your description of an ideal day fifteen years from now, what happens on that day in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, Who are you with, what are you doing, and most importantly why, what's the impact you're having? So writing that out, having your partner do the same, your partner in parenting, comparing those and realizing, oh my gosh, we have completely different futures. What are we going to do about that? Or wow, there's a lot of commonality or whatever it is. But to get on the same page, and that's often a challenging conversation, but a crucial one to have. It starts with that, with being real and articulating you know you're with passion, what it is that you're trying to do. And for some people in our who've read our book and who've been in our program that we've been doing for the last few years, the research basis for this, for parents who lead, they realize, you know, that's it. I don't need to do anymore. We've got we're going to do this now. This picture of fifteen years from now. There's stuff that we could be doing now, and of course we try to help them hold on. Now take the next step first, which is identify who matters most to you in your life, what you think is important to them, and then talk to them and starting with your kids, so they get on the same page as to what they think their kids need from them as parents, separately and together, and we distill the essence of the literature and child development in terms of what is it that children need. We're not child psychologists, we're organizational psychologists, but we sort of curated the wisdom of that field just to help frame the conversation about what your children need and how to talk to them at different ages. You know, obviously you talk to a four year old differently than a fourteen year old. But what we have found is that people come up with, you know, creative ways to talk to their kids, to develop more meaningful connections and to build trust with them by listening to them. Here's what is important to us. What do you think about that? How does that relate to how you're thinking about your future for littler kids. What does a good mom do? What do you want to do? What do you need from us? And so by engaging your key stakeholders, very wart knee kind of term, you're leading by listening, building trust, and then trying to create new ways of getting things done that are good for them and for you. And of course you're doing that in the context of doing the same kinds of work with your business colleagues as well as your childcare providers and teachers and friends and neighbors. But it's not like you're saying, I need this from you, I need this from you, I need this from you. It's what's important to you. So you're taking that leadership leap and seeing yourself through their eyes. And this is why it's all about leadership, seeing the world as other people do and then crafting solutions that make sense for them and for you. In the context of this very dynamic social system that you can indeed influence if you see yourself as capable of having that influence, which most people realize they have more freedom and control than they otherwise thought when you don't step back and instead you're reactively responding to the day to day grind of just getting through the freaking day, which there is a lot of that. But I am so like, I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, like about our current tiny, little, you know, day to day struggles, and I'm thinking, instead of an ideal day fifteen years from now, I need to sit my children down and talk about what an ideal morning could look like fifteen days from now, and then get my stakeholders to weigh in on, you know, what they feel might be good solutions, and maybe they can come up with some experiments, just like you talked about with the employees, of how that might benefit them and benefit me. And I totally see how this can work. And one of this that's a great idea, Sarah, I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, with your permission, But one of the things you know, Stu does talk about is this idea of little experiments right that you know they're you're as a change agent, as a leader. You, I mean, you are trying to direct toward this big future, but you need to make little bets along the way and see what works and see what doesn't. So you know, what are some of those areas to try these little experiments in. I mean, I know you've talked about generating quality time, like coordinating logistics. I'm curious some of the little experiments you've you've seen works. We're kind of getting a little practical here. Well. One of the magical things about this work with with parents parenting partnerships is once they go through the process of stepping back, I mean, this is the hard part is to find the space and realize, okay, for me to grow as my family as a leader, which doesn't mean being a micromanaging jerk like the person you have to deal with every day in the office. It's being the kind of inspiring leader who you want to be. Right. That's where some people, if I could just digress on this for a moment, they resist the idea of thinking themselves as leaders because it makes it seem like I'm not going to be like that person at the office and be a demanding command and control animal with my kids. That's totally inappropriate. Well, of course, yeah, you don't want to be that person. You want to be an inspiring leader who actually teaches kids' values and helps to liberate them to become the people they want to become, which is what good leaders do. What do people come up with? Well, everyone comes up with something that is unique and distinctive to their situation. But we have found there are common kinds of experiments that people do. And yes, experiment is a key idea because small is big. Small steps is how you get there. You can't just take the giant leap up the mountain. You have to go one step at a time, right, and you know, the smart way to create change small steps that allow you to adjust, adjust, adjust, So when people go through the process of thinking what's most important, who's most important, what do they need? They come up with all kinds of things that are designed to fit their situation. But common are quality time, which is real and it matters. And you know, we bring in some of the research that shows how it's not about quantity rather it really is about quality. So many people realize, oh, we need to find a way to shut out the digital stream for some period of time so that we can connect as human beings without being mediated, you know, through the internet, through digital tools. So let's find ways of doing that and they will experience. I mean, everybody comes up with a different way of doing it, but they will. For example, one person who we write about in the book, the father. This is a heterosexual married couple, which is obviously not the only form of parenting partnership. But he worked at the Bureau of Land Management and one of his core values was caring for the earth, and he wanted to teach his kids. He wanted to make sure that these kids knew that all the time, that that was something that they needed to focus on. And so they came up with an experiment that was designed to help to teach their kids, but also to get out into the community and to express, you know, the values that he represents at work and to help them to see what he did and why it was important. So they did a hike and pick experiment where they each weekend, you know, for a month, they'd go out to their community and they bring trash bags and gloves and they cleaned up their neighborhood. Simple, but it had all kinds of ripple effects for both him and his partner in terms of how they thought about themselves a lot about their kids and how that affected their work. But then there were bigger pieces of work that people undertook depending on their situation. One couple had a child with a rare genetic disorder and the mom was and their in laws lived with them. Her parents lived with them to help care for their child. But she was always reluctant to talk about about this challenge that she has, the special challenge that she has in her life with her work colleagues. But she decided after doing this initial work of thinking through what's important to me? What am I trying to get done? What if people really expected me? She realized that she could be more open about the challenges that she faced and also to try to make an impact on the research that was being done in this rare disease arena. And so she and her has been They began a fundraiser for this disease and reaching out to all sectors of their network, and as a result of that, she was actually concerned about whether she was going to make the next level promotion, but her boss, in seeing her taking the lead in doing this fundraising initiative, realized that she had. She was demonstrating real leadership there, and it changed his perception of her and made her in his eyes, a more valued asset to their business. That's one of my favorite examples in the book. But you could see there's a wide range of things that people do. Another common one is simply coordinating logistics, you know, sharing calendars. Some people don't do that, surprisingly and when they do, they realize it's so much easier if you use basic you know, project management skills to coordinate who's doing what when, et cetera. But that can be as simple as meeting over the weekend or at some point on a regular basis to simply talk about what are you doing this week that's going to be hard for you that you need some help with, and everyone around the circle does that. So that that's another kind of experiment that people have done, and that is a simple but very powerful way to bring the family together to demonstrate that, you know the value of we help each other, We love each other. We're here to support each other and to get real help and to know more about the kinds of challenges that we're each facing. So those are some examples. There's lots more, and again the fun part is you come up with your own Yeah, exactly. Well, so this is all great and great ideas. We always like to end our interviews with what we call our love of the week, which is something that is you know, we see is really cool. It's been fun in our lives lives this this week, and you know you've given us a lot of deep fodder that this can be light and fluffy if you want, we can go first as well to let you take a minute to think about it. So, Sarah, what have you been enjoying this week? Yeah, well, you know, discussing logistics and division of labor. My husband and I have a fairly hard line. I do the birthday parties most of all of it, actually, but he is in charge of the presence and he's agreed to this, so I liked not having to worry about that at all. He gave our six year old a lovely shiny skateboard this morning. But my love of the week actually goes to Whole Foods Catering because you can order it online for parties. They do cakes as well, and it's like the world's easiest thing. And yeah, Whole Foods Catering for birthday parties we've been doing. I could do my love of the week ice cream cake for birthdays, but we actually had a fun combo family, multi generational thing about a week ago that my parents have recently moved out to the East Coast to be closer to my brothers than me, and so my father and mother were able to come for our daughter's school play, which was exciting, and then we celebrated my dad's birthday afterwards with ice cream cake. So ice cream cake is my love of the week. It's just, you know, I don't know. Ice cream is good and it's the good part of cake and ice cream, but without the parts that I don't like. So that's that's what I'd say, is my love of the week. Stu. How about you? Oh my gosh, Well, this is gonna seem strange to you, and it's totally different because I'm in such a different, you know, stage of life. But my father died two weeks ago and I've just been thinking about him, you know, ever since, of course, and the day of his funeral was he was about to be ninety, was one of the greatest days of my life, as and the days that followed, you know, the shock of that loss, the void that that creates. But when your heart is just wide open and there's this big hole there and you start to try to fill it with who he was and what he meant and how he continues to, you know, inhabit every fiber of my being and what does that mean for me? And what does it mean for me in terms of my role as a father. Being able to dig really deep into that whole set of questions has been I wouldn't say joyful, of course, quite the opposite, but so rich in helping me to understand his life, his legacy, and what that means for my life. It's really changed how I think about myself and the world. By focusing this concentrated attention, especially as reflected in the social mirror around me, of you know, the people who were there and continue to be, you know, telling me about how he affected them, It's really changed how I see things, and that has been a deep, deep love for these last two weeks. That's wonderful. I mean, is it's good to have a long life well lived and then to have a chance to celebrate that, and obviously there's the sadness involved in it, but just seeing what he created over his long life and then how that can reflect on you. I'm sure that's incredibly profound. Well, Stuart, thank you so much for joining us. I hope everyone will pick up their new book. Your new book with alysso westering parents who lead lots of great exercises and there are many practical ones, as Stu is mentioning that you can do with your partner, with your children to figure out how you have this shared vision and where you want to go and the practice ways to get there. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, Thanks so much. It's been a real pleasure. Well, that was exciting talking to Stu. Always great to speak with him again. So our listener question this week is a sticky situation that this one came into. Sarah. This listener writes that they moved into their new district about a year and a half ago. It's highly rated, a lot of parental involvement. Been so happy with this community. But the one sticking point for her is she has been unable to become really involved with the PTA because all their meetings, including the general ones, not just specialty committees or things like that, take place midday on a weekday morning She says, I find this really puzzling because although we do have a decent population of stay at home parents, of the couples that I've met, most do both work outside the home. I've seen this issue brought up by others on social media, and the board of the PTA, which does consist one hundred percent of women who either are stay at home parents or don't work traditional jobs, are very sensitive about this. They say these meetings work for them because then they don't need to arrange childcare. She says, I don't know how receptive our school administration would be to request for changing this, because the PTA does a lot for the school, and she says she'd like to start a maybe petition or something, but she doesn't want to start some sort of mommy war controversy. The reason this is particularly sticky for her, she says, I've made the decision to stay in a career that gives me a lot of flexibility just so I can be involved with my kids during the elementary school years. But I feel like I'm not getting that opportunity because I can't make Thursdays at ten am work. So, Sarah, what do you think, Well, it's funny my first reaction to this was like, has this person been to a meeting, because I've been to like one meeting, and to be fair, I went to like the preschool PTA meeting, so maybe it's different at the elementary school PTA, which also holds its meetings midday, so I've never gone. But I mean, you have to find out what actually happens at these meetings and whether this is worth the fight or not. Because the one meeting I went to, I felt like it was more of an excuse for the women to have something to do and get together. And I say women because there were no men there. And then they spent this whole time for severing and over planning one event and really, like you know, me being there, I don't know, I guess, And it's not fair because this was just one experience and maybe all meetings are different, but I guess there are other ways to get involved. So you're going to have to decide how hard you want to fight on this issue. Some practical things I thought of were like, maybe you could ask that there would be a digest or notes sent out after each meeting, so you can find out exactly what was discussed, or perhaps you can use that to volunteer first specific events that interest you. For example, maybe you'd want to take over a career day or one specific fundraiser, and it wouldn't necessarily be needed for you to attend midday meetings in order to really do that. On the other hand, I felt like it also wouldn't be crazy they get a group of working parents that would include bothers to sign a group letter, perhaps asking for alternating meetings in the evening or a non traditional worktime. And my third option was maybe they could just arrange like a WebEx or call in option and you could just call in from work. Obviously, not every workplace is flexible enough to allow that, but some are, and from a technological standpoint, it shouldn't be that hard to arrange this day and age. Yeah, definitely a call in or WebEx option could could be great. I would also say there are probably volunteer opportunities that don't involve going to those meetings. I mean, I found that I could be a room parent at our elementary school by committing to basically four days during the year that I had some availability during the day. So if I had a traditional job, I would have taken a half day, so I could come in and run the parties, which is basically what it required, and then some support of the teacher behind the scenes. But that was more flexible about when that happened, so that might be an option. I would also say that you if you're going to suggest moving the times, you could maybe split the difference. So our elementary school starts at nine o'clock and you can drop off at eight forty five. I don't know what this listener's timing is, but if that was the case for them, maybe you could start the meetings at eight forty five, so the people who were lying on the school for their childcare could start also at eight forty five. And you know, this doesn't work if you have to be absolutely in the office at eight am every day, But if you are in a position where you have some sort of flexibility where you could come at eight forty five to nine forty five, go into work a little bit later, and so then it's not this sort of mid day thing where you'd have to start the day and not or you have to take a full you know, half day or the day off in order to go. So that might be a way to split the difference and have it be convenient for the people who are doing it, which I totally get. Like not having to arrange childcare is huge if you are a stay at home parent, because you probably don't have regular childcare that you can then you know, send your kids to. But it would be help for the people who wouldn't need to totally shift their work hours in order to do this. So just an idea. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking to Stuart Friedman about parents who lead, and we'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.