Rechartering Leadership:
Promoting Family Values and Ethical Leadership
“Work is love made visible” – Kahlil Gibran
Background:
The desire for the good liberation of women coming out of U.C.L.A. in the 1960s held freedom from enslavement as a natural good. Freedom is a good. However, it came at the expense of shunning the very foundation of civilization – the family. Some, like Cheryl Lewis, went so far as to say that the nuclear family itself is a vestige of white supremacy. And entry-level work is economic exploitation. As a man who cleaned the stainless steel toilets of prisoners when he was sixteen – I take offense.
The movement also encouraged a woman to become a professional in the workplace so that she need not submit to her “lord” at home, as the husband was called by the revolutionaries. But this gave those women, using their same terminology, a work master who bought her life’s time. Exchanging her family for money while picking up a second master competing against her family – keeping her original “lord” at home. The extremists’ result was not to support women but to refuse future women their mothers at the best – or existence at the worst.
And as inflation increased from the new incomes driving product demand, simultaneously, the influx of new professional women increased the labor supply, slowing compensation, so the working-class women were forced to keep working to keep up for the next fifty years. This outcome created a tragedy of epic proportions:
Birth rates plummeted by more than half, from 23.7 per 1,000 live births in 1960 to 11.4 in 2019.
At the same time, employment of women with children under age 3 increased from 34.3% (26% of household income) in 1970 to 63.8% (37.5%) in 2019.
Some 5.6% of women, as of 2019, even work multiple jobs.
Good intentions with half a century of evil results for the economy, businesses, and children.
Leadership today is beneath the dignity of humankind.
The excellence demanded of the organizations we’ve led was perverted by the anti-family motives arising out of the 1960s. Corrupted for profit. Career paths chosen over family paths. Catastrophically low birth rates celebrated.
And organizations imply organization. The building block of civilization – the family – must be protected if we are to have any organizations at all.
Wisdom: Key Principles for Ethical Leadership
We leaders must rechart our priorities. We must return to the freedom our families and organizations were first called to.
We must uncorrect those joyless dystopian theories if we are to align ourselves with our own societies’ stability.
Only there may we live to become peace-loving families, and only after the anti-family tyrants are defeated. We dream, but the dream for many working Moms has turned into an inflation-driven nightmare. The work influenced by the intellectually miserable – activists without families or productive work themselves – their jobs merely grifts.
We bosses who listen to them or just focus on the bottom line encourage overwork and unknowingly undercut our entire ethos as freedom-loving people when we force Mothers to make a choice at all.
Unlocking Leadership Wisdom: Embracing Fear
Let’s consider what the wise action should be. Wisdom is to properly fear.
We need strong Moms with rewarding careers who sit in the seats of power – in the corner offices at the end of our hallways. But we leaders must realize they are Moms and Wives first – not executives who happen to have a kid.
For these wise Moms, to properly fear means to never give up the lesser (promotions) for the greater (our kids). But for we wise business leaders, proper fear means never sacrificing the greater (civilization for all) for the lesser (financial success for one).
Tradeoffs reveal traitors.
To become wise, our knowledge must take the courageous leap into the darkness of the divine transformation through the heroic hallway of insight. Our companies need a transformation if we are to be resided with wisdom and families.
More Moms saying no. More Leaders saying yes.
More Moms as Leaders.
My alarm sounds at 3:30 AM most workdays. After a twenty-minute drive, I arrive at the office at 4:15 AM. I do this because my kids are asleep, and they never know Dad is at work for several hours. I work until 5:00 PM (rarely later – yes, 12+ hour days) and still be home right after they get back from school. I rarely miss a family dinner or a sports drop-off. I can be home and at work more than most, simply because I mostly forgo all the other trinkets like T.V., social media, drinking with friends, and hobbies. And because my family has me around, I am energized to work even harder. And because I enjoy working harder, I can invest more financially into longer family vacations. Last year, I spent 44 days traveling on family vacation plus another 18 days on vacation with just my wife and myself traveling without the kids. It’s a good life when you spend 62 days on vacation reinforcing your family. Yes, I sleep in on the weekends.
Fueling Leadership Excellence: Harnessing Passion and Energy for Optimal Performance
If we do not live with passion today, we may never live.
It is what we wish to become, not do, which will give us boundless energy. It is who we are – Moms, Dads, Sons, Daughters – who work in the offices of organizations. Not office workers who happen to be Sons and Daughters.
If we want passionate company cultures, we must dignify our team as humans first. Not as tools of the trade.
Only then can their imaginative capacity be unleashed because we acknowledge them for themselves – the truth – and not as the office worker in cubicle 12B. And certainly not ourselves as the lords of the office.
And no one will be more committed to us than when they know we’re committed to their kids’ success.
For years, we’ve had a corporate chaplaincy program. This has resulted in hundreds of confidential corporate-sponsored counseling sessions on the topics of work-life balance, home management, grief counseling, hospital visits, and marriage. We have made it our job to un-burden ourselves and actually become an asset to the families that entrust us with Mom and Dad for a few hours each week.
You see, when Moms and Dads know we are committed to success in their homes, their full passion and wisdom reflect back to exponentially benefit our now rightly-oriented organization.
This is why Peter Drucker told us culture will swallow up strategy.
Fostering Leadership Discipline: Balancing Sacrifice for Family and Organizational Commitment
Organizational leaders should set boundaries for working parents more aggressively than they would set for themselves. This makes our prerogative clear and constrains the time they can work. Here are a few rules I’ve used over the years:
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- No parent works more than half-time when their kiddos are on a school break.
- You must have the same or more days away on vacation – out of town – with your spouse than you did the previous year. I track this for myself annually.
- You must have the same or more days away on vacation with your kids and spouse than you did the previous year. I track this for myself annually.
- You should miss work regularly to be somehow involved while the kids are in elementary school: Homeroom Mom, Donuts with Dad, coach, and join the P.T.A. board.
- No work phones after 5:00 PM and never on Fridays through Sundays. (If you’re really aggressive like me, don’t give out your cell number for work at all. Make people schedule a video call to speak with you. And to first send an agenda.)
- No email on weekends.
- Weekday weekly lunch dates with your spouse or child at school.
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These are especially important to aid our single Moms and Dads.
We leaders must example this sort of sacrificing commitment to our own families if we want our team to know they have the green light to do they same for theirs. It’s proper to place our family above our organization – yes, even us founders.
Not just in words. But with our calendar and pocketbook.
This is the noble culture to create.
This coming culture will unwind the corrupted double-master curse made over every family and society these past sixty years. For their belief in selfish individualism was a destructive lie.
The highest walk of a man is in his support of the family.
Her purpose is not in what she does but in who she raises.
His purpose is not in what he does but in who he rises up to become for his family.
And if we truly believe this – that family and civilization are more important than another turn of EBITDA – then we must tell it and show it. For that’s how you prove it. The only way to change the hallways is to walk down them ourselves.
The right-aimed organization will provide families with joyful work.
Not happy work – joyfully meaningful work.
Happiness is a trinket; joy is a trumpet.
A Challenge for Leaders
I hereby issue a challenge to all who consider themselves worthy to be called a leader:
Refuse to see the home in competition with work. Both are holy. Both can support one another.
Encourage the rooms off the hallways of our homes to be filled with more joy. Only then will the offices off ours fully flourish.
Practically, perhaps you could implement my insane schedule for your family or one of my rules for your organization. But whatever you do, lead first as a friend of all families then allow the discipline and passion to flow from that.
Your discipline will define you.
Your passion will purpose you.
Your wisdom will welcome you into any living room you wish.
I believe profamily leadership will once again rise to the dignity of humankind – and profitability.
Now go back to work, Moms and Dads.
Rick
