Author: Stew Friedman

Research shows that many men want to have richer lives, with greater emotional engagement and joy in their family lives and bigger contributions to their households. But they face substantial barriers at work, in their homes, and inside their own heads.

Just as women need support from their organizations and their families to surmount the hurdles of fear and tradition, men need help in getting past the roadblocks that keep them from engaging more fully as caregivers and homemakers. And, of course, for women to advance in the world of work, men must advance in the world of home. The really good — seemingly paradoxical — news is that when men find smart, creative ways to “lean in” at home, they also perform better at work. This article shows how.

Getting Past What Holds Men Back

Traditional gender stereotypes are prisons for men too and hold many back from trying. Men may wonder: What if I’m just not a good dad? What if I’m perceived by my friends as unmanly because I’m doing “women’s work”? What if my children see me as a poor role model because I’m not the main breadwinner? What if my boss thinks I’m less committed because I’m not at the office as much as the other guys at my level?

How does a man garner the courage to act, despite these worries, and get his boss and co-workers to encourage him to have breakfast with his family, leave in time to pick up kids at school, and be truly focused on his family when he’s with them instead of constantly checking his digital device about work matters?

Even in unsupportive work environments, men can make high-yield adjustments intended to make things better at work, at home, in the community, and for their private selves (mind, body, spirit) — pursuing what I call “four-way wins.” These are often small changes, designed to benefit key stakeholders in all parts of their lives. And that’s what makes them work.

Diagnose, Dialogue, and Discover

For over a decade, students in my classes, as well as thousands of employees in hundreds of companies, have found that three steps make it possible for men to overcome the obstacles and lean in more at home in ways that, at the same time, benefit their careers.

Step 1 — Diagnose: Figure out what’s not working for you and what you wish you could do to ameliorate the situation. What’s the problem? Your spouse isn’t happy with your involvement? You’re missing your children’s childhoods? Your commute is too long? You’re exhausted? You’re distracted by work at home and by home while at work?

Asking these kinds of questions often produces these knee-jerk reactions:

• There is no solution that will work because my boss would never go for changes.
• I can’t ask for something that’s just for me and my family because it’s selfish.
• I know I’m not happy but I don’t see how things can improve short of leaving my job.

To get to the next step, it helps to find a peer coach (or two) — someone preferably outside of your immediate work circle — to brainstorm potential fixes. I have never seen anyone voice a problem for which someone else, with a fresh perspective, could not find solutions worth trying, especially if these solutions have real prospects of benefiting others.

Step 2 — Dialogue: Talk to those around you — at work and at home — who matter most to you about what they really expect of you, how you’re doing, and what you could do better. More often than not, what we think others expect of us is greater than (or a bit different from) what they actually expect of us. For example, you might think that your wife wants you home for dinner, when in fact it’s the morning routine — getting the kids up and off to school — that is actually important to her as she is also trying to get to work early. Or you might think that being at work until very late is seen by your co-workers as a sign of your commitment and great performance, when it is actually viewed as an indication of your inefficiency; as in, why can’t you get your work done faster so that you don’t need to be here this long into the night?

Find out exactly what your important stakeholders need from you. Once you know more about what’s actually expected, then you’re ready for the next step.

Step 3 — Discover: Try a small change for a brief period of time — a week or a month — and keep front of mind the benefits not to you (you will not forget those, I promise), but to key people at work (increased productivity because you’ll be less distracted by family issues, have more energy, and be more committed to the organization), to people in your family, and to your friends and community.

Experiments and Their Impact

My research team studied what hundreds of people did when each was asked to design and implement an experiment for a four-way win. We observed many kinds of experiments, and these were most popular:

• Rejuvenating and restoring: Take care of your mind, body, or spirit. Example: Start an exercise regimen program and watch carefully for the ripple effects at home, at work, and in the community as your energy increases and social connections strengthen.
• Focusing and concentrating: Be present for one person or task at a time. Example: Unplug from all digital media for one evening per week to connect with your family and friends to enable you to engage more fully, and with less distraction, at work.
• Time-shifting and replacing: Work remotely or during different times to increase efficiency and improve productivity. Example: Stay at work later on Tuesday and get in earlier on Thursday, or work on Saturday instead of Monday.
• Delegating and developing: Reallocate tasks to free up time, increase trust, and develop others’ skills. Example: Give work to junior people on your team who are eager to learn and prove themselves while freeing up your time for more important activities.
• Exploring and venturing: Take small steps toward doing something new that better aligns what you do with what you aspire to do. Example: You and your wife would like to have regular family dinners at home, but neither of you knows how to cook. Take a cooking class together and learn a new skill, strengthen your relationship, save money by buying groceries instead of getting takeout, and eat healthier because you’re consuming fewer processed foods.

An experiment is time-limited and has measurable outcomes. While you believe that your request will not only not diminish or interfere with the work you produce — and indeed will enhance your productivity because you’ll be happier, healthier, more energized, less distracted, more committed to the team, or more relaxed (or all of the above) — the proof will be in the pudding, and your colleagues and family will be the judges. Because you’re experimenting, make it clear that after the agreed upon duration, if the experiment is not working for them, then you will return to the status quo, or try something else. No one has anything to lose, and all have something to gain. More often than not, when approached with this goal — to make it a win for all concerned — people around you might surprise you with their reasonableness.

When you invest intelligently in being a better father and see how this makes you more confident in your parenting skills and happier in your marital relationship, you become less distracted at work, more energetic, and have a clearer focus on business results that matter. You begin to grow more confident in yourself, and this helps you overcome anxieties you may have about what others might think of you as you do more at home or spend less time at the office. Here are some examples of men who’ve done so.

Peter wanted to leave work earlier than usual to get home to his new born son. “After my son was born, I found myself excited to get home to see him. These early departures have forced me to be much more disciplined with my time and helped prompt me to delegate work to my very capable and enthusiastic colleagues. I more than exceeded my original goal of leaving early 1-2 times per week and surprisingly found myself less overwhelmed at work than I was previously. My idea for the next phase of this experiment is to coordinate departure times among my peers, such that one of us covers the “after-hours” time slot each day of the week.”

Leonard, a financial services professional, wanted to spend more one-on-one time with family members. He and his wife committed to and carried through on a date night and he played tennis with his six-year old son. But the biggest gain was in building his relationship with his two-year-old daughter, who had previously been “a Mommy’s girl.” “I feel more productive, motivated, and focused as a result of this experiment. Since my home life is better, I can now allow myself to concentrate more on work when necessary without guilt that my home life is suffering.”

Joseph, a research team leader at a pharmaceutical company, conducted an experiment to become more systematic about how he used his time at work and saw dramatic improvements at work, at home, and in his community. He made more family dinners, read to his children nightly, had no missed Parent/Teacher conferences, and his family reported that he now “always delivers.” His research team was happier and more productive both as a result of his increased delegation as well as his “managing up to minimize ‘reactive’ work.”

The results can be dramatic, but usually the interventions are fairly simple. One man tried creating a shared calendar with his wife — a no-brainer, right? It resulted in him missing fewer family commitments and being able to better set expectations of workload and plan the production schedule with his team at work. And he gained a new admiration for his wife’s ability to manage the children’s complex schedule while working full-time herself! This in turn led to a better marital relationship. Another told me that he started doing the dishes regularly, and taking on more chores around the house. This not only gave him more time at home doing things with his children, it dramatically improved his relationship with his in-laws and his wife, removing what had been a source of stress in his life that had affected both his home and work.

What we have seen over and over again is that no matter what the experiment — whether it’s about disconnecting from 7:00 to 10:00 PM for one evening a week, coming in late two mornings to go to the gym, leaving early a day a week to coach, scheduling group meetings between 10:00 and 3:00 so members can leave early or come in late and not miss important group meetings, or any number of minor adjustments — productivity usually increases at work because employees are happier and more focused on results that matter while retention increases because they are more committed.

Employers, this is not charity. This is not capitulation. And — though it has gotten a lot of attention recently as such — this is certainly not a women’s issue. Helping men to be more active at home, if that’s what they want, makes good business sense. It’s wise to encourage employees to engage in dialogues with important people in their lives and to experiment with small changes that can enrich their families, enhance their engagement with their community, and improve their health — all while enhancing your bottom line. By making it easier for men to live more whole lives, employers are indirectly contributing to paving the way for the women in their lives to give more of themselves to their work and careers. And children — the unseen stakeholders at work — win, too. We as a society are all the beneficiaries.

The Twitterverse has been aflame with a lot of noise about Sheryl Sandberg, Anne Marie Slaughter, and Marissa Mayer. But a lot of this talk is knee-jerk criticism that misses the big picture: our nation’s failure to address the issue of integrating work and the rest of life has finally emerged as a critical economic, social, political, and personal issue affecting not only women, but all of us, and it’s capturing deservedly serious attention and accelerating experimentation with new models in our brave new world. For the first time in the 25 years since I’ve been studying the intersection of work and life, it’s now front-page news and everyone has an opinion — because for the first time everyone feels that they have a stake and a voice. It’s no longer only a women’s issue.

When Slaughter’s Atlantic piece — chronicling the difficulty maintaining a high-powered career while still being able to nurture her teenage sons — became the most read article in that journal’s history, the field of work/life, long in the shadows, catapulted to center stage. Then the Yahoo! controversies: first everyone had an opinion about Marissa Mayer as a pregnant CEO, then everyone had another opinion about her revocation of work-from-home policies. Now the brouhaha about whether or not Sandberg can or should speak for all women has turned the heat up further.

The key word there being heat; not light.

Each is speaking out, on the basis of her experience, about why and how change must come. As a life-long policy scholar, naturally Slaughter emphasizes policy. And as an employee and an employer, Sandberg naturally draws on her own experience. Ideas and action on both the individual and policy levels are essential, and they both recognize this. And yet each is pitted against the other, in a non-existent “feud.” Now pundits are treating Mayer’s decision about the remote-work policy at one struggling company as if it were an all-encompassing value judgment on flexibility policies.

Let’s not lose the forest for the trees. The discussions inspired by Slaughter, Sandberg, and Mayer are good news for those of us who care deeply about creating a more just society where men and women can participate in the spheres of work and home as they choose. As my 20-year study of Wharton students shows, and as others are finding as well, women are no longer alone in this fight, although it’s undeniable that they still bear the greatest burden. Men of the new generation have a different take on how work and life must cohere than do my grey-bearded peers. Young men do not merely accept that their spouses may work, they expect it. And they expect to have lives beyond work that include caring for their children and pursuing other passions. They want flexibility as much or more than women do. When asked to describe their dream jobs at the start of my class recently, one man said, “Stay-at-home Dad.”

And so we find Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, talking about the art of “conscious leadership” in his recent Wisdom 2.0 talk. This leader of one of our hottest companies is espousing the importance of taking the time to listen, ask questions, and coach rather than prescribe; of being mindful in order to make course corrections and experiment; of harmony among the spheres of life while eschewing the folly of balance; and of managing compassionately, not as a perk, but as a way of increasing economic opportunity and productivity. It’s increasingly OK for men to think like this and to talk like this.

As women (and some men) have worked for decades to help women enter and advance in the workforce, as women’s presence in the workforce has grown so that a new generation of children have been raised by working parents, and as the changing division of labor at home strains both men and women, we have entered a whole new world. The revolution is here.

But our policies have not kept pace with these changing realities. We must catch up to other developed nations. Though there’s been some movement since Jeff Greenhaus and I wrote Work and Family — Allies or Enemies? in 2000, we still need more flexible work arrangements, better-quality childcare, and, most importantly, leaders who recognize and respect the whole person. But what is heartening to me about this moment is how many have joined in the debate. And the conversation happening now will undoubtedly affect the choices that all of us — both men and women, at all levels of society — are making every day, by increasing the range of available possibilities for our companies, our families, our communities, and our selves.

For years I’ve been working on helping companies to see how work, home, community, and self (mind, body, and spirit) can be mutually reinforcing; this is the “four-way wins” approach I describe in Total Leadership. I often encounter skepticism, but some companies get it. My experience with Target should bolster anyone’s case that you can be a committed A-player executive, a good parent, an attentive spouse, a healthy person with time for hobbies — yes, hobbies! — and a community life.

In this post I describe a couple of case studies from Target executives who have been experimenting with creative ways to integrate the different parts of their lives — and how they’re teaching others to do the same.

David is a VP who is accountable for a multi-billion dollar P & L business. (All names have been changed and specific titles disguised.) He has structured several experiments to simultaneously improve his performance at work and his life at home. Now that he’s done a number of them, he says he’s learned that by framing these changes as experiments he can overcome what at first seems daunting. The first, he told me, “had a huge impact for me and probably an even more significant impact for my wife and family.”

“My initial challenge was this: I spend most of my waking hours at work and I’ve always shut down from work at home. But this was hurting my relationship with my wife because we didn’t talk about what was happening with me at work. We talked about the kids and that was what we had in common. The work problem was that I never had enough time to prepare for all my meetings. So the experiment was to look at tomorrow’s calendar and pick the biggest meeting for which I needed to prep. On the drive home I’d think about what I should do at that meeting and when I got home I’d talk to my wife about it.”

“This gave us something new to talk about, it gave her a much better understanding of what I do, it engaged her, and it enhanced our relationship because we were having richer conversations. Simultaneously, I was able to prepare and do a dry-run for my meeting. What was cool about it was getting an outside person’s perspective. My wife made some good suggestions! And I’ve had better meetings as a result. But the big takeaway was to question the way I was doing things.”

David said that the results of his experiments “have been astounding. I’m more productive and my wife is thrilled. Our company is also benefiting because of the effects on my team. I told my team that I was trying a change in my schedule and have been transparent about when they could expect to find me in the office. I was showing my team that there was a way that you could prioritize well-being holistically. This is leading them to think about some of the same things for themselves. I’m helping my team to be more engaged and to think more about their well-being, too. I’m developing better team leaders around me.”

“For example, because of the change I made, I found out that one of my direct reports was having a medical problem that was worsened by his work schedule, and we have now changed his schedule. One of my other team members told me that he feels more empowered to make choices to spend time with his family during the day. He feels more empowered — that it’s OK — and he doesn’t feel guilty about it. The example I was setting before was work first, work first, work first.”

“I might be here for slightly fewer hours now, but I’m making faster and better decisions. And, at home, my wife is now more understanding of those choices I sometimes have to make when work does have to come first. In the long-term, for Target this means that I’m a more engaged leader without an unmanageable tension between my wife and my work.”

Alan is a VP located on the West coast. He’s been in that region for 15 years and has three children, ages three, five, and seven. His wife is a finance director at another company.

“The first thing about Total Leadership that really had an impact for me was the stakeholder mapping,” he told me. In this exercise, you identify the people who are most important to you in your work, home, self, and community spheres. This is part of seeing your life not as just a random unfolding of events, but as a system you can change. “This was something that I had done intuitively on my own but I wasn’t maximizing it…. It was important to… connect with those people, find common ground, and learn what their expectations are.”

“With work I’m very intentional and so things happen, because it’s work. But if I’m truly accountable I would be taking the same approach in the other domains of life that I am taking at work to accomplish the things that matter. That was an ‘Aha!’ moment.”

“That’s why my experiment centered on time with my family; with my sister and her kids and arranging time together for all of us. I used some of the things that I do at work and applied them in this other realm. My sister owns a business and my brother-in-law has a property development job, so they have demanding schedules. Our kids are on different Spring breaks. We have a vision now (we didn’t until my experiment) of two week-long vacations per year together with the kids doing something — skiing or going to the beach — and then a couple of long weekends. Coordinating all that is difficult and so it just really wasn’t happening.”

“I was lamenting this, wondering how I might effect a change. It dawned on me that if this was work I would have all kinds of tactics. So I drafted an email to the key players (my brother-in-law, sister, wife, mom, and a couple of others) and I laid out a plan for a dinner, just the adults, to talk about what we wanted to achieve each year. We were able to come up with two week-long vacations, but planned well in advance, and then two long weekends. We set up some checkpoints and conference calls — the last thing you’d think of with family. We went away together the last two weeks of the year, and we bought those tickets in June. This was a success and an example that I’ve learned I could use in general: If a process works in one part of my life, then maybe I can apply it in other parts of my life.”

“If we’ve got leaders in the company who are able to apply skills from work to other parts of their lives and share these stories with their teams, then this can help us make our people happier and strengthen our retention of talent. We invest time and money every year training people. So when you strengthen retention and reduce that expense, then you have savings but you also have more experienced people who are more productive.

“I’ve come to realize that one of my challenges is taking time off, and ensuring that I am effective enough to do that and not miss a beat. This year I’m looking at six weeks of vacation. When I think back a few years I just wouldn’t have even considered that; this year I intend to take it all. If I only took three weeks, I would have people on my team see that as a signal. So I’m teaching others by example. Again, the stakeholder mapping and integrating the four domains in a way that works for me is important, and I also teach my team how to do that for themselves, in part so they can be effective when I’m not here. My goal is for them to be effective all the time. The more that I can lead that way, the more it means that if I’m gone for a week or two then the impact is minimal.”

Target is working on “starting a movement — not just a program” says one of the members of the organizational effectiveness team. But changing those norms isn’t easy. Max, the VP who now runs the largest P & L business at Target, admitted that he “saw a couple of eyebrows raised” when he told his team, on his first day in his new position, that he comes in late two mornings a week so that he can “go to the gym and have breakfast with my kids.”

But when senior executives are modeling healthier behavior, it lets a grassroots movement take hold. For instance, David’s boss checks in on his experiments regularly. “She’s given me tips and shared her experience on what she’s learned,” he says. “I talk to her about it to hold myself accountable. She’s reminded me that each new job is bigger and more demanding so it will be critical to continue to get better and better about managing my time and calendar as I develop throughout my career.”

When steps like these are taken to improve performance and reduce stress, and employees see that this is a legitimate and fully authorized activity, then an increasing number of them are going to generate experiments of their own. Slowly, the culture changes as new models for what’s expected emerge, and as people at all levels demonstrate that it makes good business sense to take care of all the things that matter in your life.