S4 E72: Servant leadership at home and at work
with author and community leader dad Brian Anderson
Key Takeways
My book is about my journey creating Fathering Together and what I learned from my own father, as I reflected on our relationship and all the new skills I'm gaining, being in a community of dads who really want to live an intentional life of fatherhood and having a kind of a dad first mentality where our lives are centered around fatherhood
For me it really boils down to being a servant leader in your home. Not just, all these books we read about CEOs that became servant leaders to reinvent their organizations. And so I said how do we reinvent our homes with stepping in and being a parent and not just defaulting from the mom for everything?
I was working full time, I was getting an organization off the ground. And the organization I was getting off the ground is what I really wanted to be doing my day job. I was burning out on that. So all of my creative energy was really getting poured into this new endeavor called Fathering Together as a non-profit. And so my daughter was getting my scraps, the energy that was left over the stale day old bread version of me and she's a very perceptive, very empathic kid. And so she picked up on that and she called me to the floor and said, All right, dad put your money where your mouth is, right?
I've had 17,000 different hats over the last year and a half, but having that moment and that kind of metaphorical slap in the face from her made me realize, even though my passion right now is creating this new organization and connecting one-on-one with dads, helping them understand where they're burning out or where they're disconnecting with their children and their partners it allowed me also to turn the mirror on myself and say, okay how do I keep some creative energy on the side so that at the end of the day when they wanna play Legos or Barbies or any number of games, I don't say, Oh, let's watch a movie instead so that I can quietly answer emails while they're glued to the tv. That's not parenting, that's babysitting, and I don't wanna be a babysitter. Most dad I talk to don't see themselves as babysitters. And stepping into a new mindset with my kids was essential.
As they look back on the pandemic, a lot of us have realized our obsession with working and working is not healthy, and how do we have a better balance individually, but systematically across whole sector is to allow for everyone to be able to go on vacation or leave work on time so they can be a coach for a sports team or take their kids to piano lessons or any number of things that might also give them life rather than just the work we do.
I'm definitely one of those personality types that I burn white and hot pretty quickly and go for broke and I know this about me, and yet I still recognize when I'm getting too hot and I need to slow down. The first time I really burned out, I was a social worker and community organizer and I was putting in long hours. I didn't really have a friend network to balance out my weekends, and I just didn't have a release for the stress in any sort of healthy place. When I'm burning out is my creative energy is gone. When I wake up in the morning, I see my to-do list and there's just no joy in that work, right?
But the other piece of it is a cynicism builds up in me and I'm like why am I the one that has to fix this system? Or when I was a social worker, why is this person in the place that's making me work harder, right? Like I wasn't angry at the system, I was angry at this individual who was the victim of the system, but I was, really aiming my anger and frustration at the wrong places. If I'm working a nine to five job with benefits, then I can tell my boss, Hey, I really need to go on a vacation. If I'm consulting, then I just slow down my client intake, right? And try and pull the levers on what needs to happen so that I don't completely wake up one morning and I'm just like, Nope, I'm just gonna stay in bed all day. And then I'm not communicating to my partner, to my children, to my friends. Like I just vanish for a minute. And unplanned absences are not helpful, right? If I can tell my partner, Hey, I really just need the morning, we can plan for it, right? And make that work out.
The way we tackle systems though is human relationships and recognizing that no system is ever going to be perfect a way to mitigate that is to keep a human and centered design to whatever system we're building and so many systems that, as parents we encounter on a daily basis, whether that's public education, healthcare systems, you name it, there's just not a human centered piece to it, especially as AI is taking over and automatic phone call systems and, hit buttons here and there. A lot of the questions that people come up with that they need an answer to fall in these gray areas, right? Most of us can just google a basic answer and find the solution. It's when Google fails us that we really need a human being. And when we have systems that don't have humans in them, then things start to break down, at least from my perspective.
And so by starting with the one-on-one interactions that we have and how do I help my neighbor, or how do I help my coworker get through it through the day that much easier. Then we begin to start seeing these patterns in other spaces If you're working together and that relationship connects you, even if you have a lot of differences, you found a common ground to struggle against this other thing. And the more, those interactions, those human relations start to look through these lenses of problems we all have. When we look at these problems from a shared lens that we can all solve, again, human centered, but basing it on a foundation of trust in one another to fix a system and to build a new system rather than, just the other way around of, here's a solution, let's see if it fits.
When I talk with corporations and dads who are in corporate leadership positions, they all talk about wanting to be more involved with their families. And I say how do you role model that? How can you reorganize the internal systems to be more family friendly and employee friendly so that there is that ability to step away, having more flexibility in the humanity that we all share.
One it's recognizing though that a lot of the leaders are dads themselves and they are perpetuating their own disconnect in a way by working the longer hours, assuming their partner and everyone's partner can stay home or assuming that everyone has the freedom and the privilege to just take time off.
If you have more voices and more perspectives to solve a problem, it's gonna be nasty and gnarly and it's gonna take a lot of time, but you're gonna get a healthier, more relationally focused solution. And, relying on just a few key people that tend to be white men at the top to make it for everyone. You're not gonna get that depth and richness to a solution. And The first thing is make sure that people that are making the workplace policies and building culture are those that have a stake in it from different perspectives. And that could mean inviting an entry level employee to give their perspective a parent, a non-parent, any number of voices to say, Okay, how do we make this work?
But the other piece ultimately is making sure that the leadership walks the walk with everyone else. And I've met some really innovative tech companies that are coming up and from the very beginning of their formation setting up policies that even if no one has children, yet they're putting in a policy so they can be attractive to people who do have children. Having a diverse group of people, helping them set the policies within the corporation or the company, and then having the senior leadership following through with those policies in their own lives and being vocal about it.
It creates not just an atmosphere for people to be more honest and open about it, but it also creates another level of comradery within the office and making it okay to have a personality and a richness to your life that you can then share within the office that may not have happened before.
Honestly, moms have done enough, I'll put it that way. Like we see in conversations around race and larger gender dynamics that we've seen these past few years. Moms have said enough of what they need from their husbands and partners, and my wife will say the same thing she's told me multiple times, I don't always practice what I preach. I am human. I make mistakes, but I know what I need to do and I'm doing my best to implement plans in our family that alleviates stress for my wife and some of the things are easy for me to do. Some of it, it's harder cause it goes against my nature or it's just more complicated. But I think honestly, like the onus is on us as dads to listen, but also to hold each other accountable.
How do we recognize that by giving dads opportunities to be dads. We're liberating everyone within the family. We're allowing dads to build better, more emotional connections with their children. We're allowing moms to find free time to pursue a career, to pursue a hobby. We're allowing our children to recognize, Oh, both my parents are people I can rely on, not just my mom.
For dads to say to one another, dad to dad, you gotta step up. It takes the burden off everyone else. Just like in affinity spaces for racial conversations. White people need to hold white people accountable and dads need to hold each other accountable and not a way that's, again, not shaming.
I really do see a sea change of dads saying, I wanna be more involved, I wanna be more engaged and we have to learn a lot from moms. A lot of the solutions are there already. We just need to translate them better for ourselves. But also recognizing that a lot of the job skills we have around communication, team leadership, program management, that the skills to be a great dad are not all that different from being a great teammate in an office space, it is just tweaking it a little differently.
If the workplace is traditionally the man's domain, then obviously the mom's domain is the home. I think there's a balancing that has to happen in both spaces, right? Like men need to give up their gate keeping of the corporate world and the nonprofit space, the business world and having more voices in leadership.
Bio
Brian Anderson is a husband, father, and gender equity advocate. In his professional life, he's a Grants Manager for i.c.stars and the Co-Founder and Board President of Fathering Together where he writes and speaks on the importance of dads living connected lives. He's worked with dozens of companies and hundreds of dads to translate their professional skills into home-life strategies. In his personal life, you can find him building Lego structures, cooking, and writing stories with his two daughters. In September 2022, he published his first book, Fathering Together: Living a Connected Dad Life, which lays out servant leadership as a model for fatherhood.
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