Alpha Dads are married to full-time professionals. None of them have illusions of achieving perfect harmony. The biggest thing for sure is time management.
An Alpha Dad is being proactive with his calendar-weeks out, planning his schedule meticulously, moving in-person meetings to conference calls when he needs to and being blunt and in-your-face about it. Even when he’s in the office, he sometimes has to leave at 3:30 p.m. to drive his son to his hockey games, a fact he broadcasts to help dispel the stink that can trail people when they sneak out early. “Everyone knows my routine when I’m not there,” he says. “Between 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m., I’m available by e-mail. If there’s anything I have to review, it’s well into the evening.” In other words: It’ll get done, but on his time. Most people understand that if he leaves for the day, he will just change his work location.
After the Globe and Mail newspaper published an article about the "Deloitte Dads" in March, Deloitte consulting group’s chief diversity officer started getting calls from other companies wanting to learn how to do the same thing. “Welcome to Deloitte Dads, the Fraternity of Paternity,” reads one of their leaflets, followed by a quote from President Obama from Father’s Day, 2009: “I know I have been an imperfect father. I know I have made mistakes. I have lost count of all the times, over the years, when the demands of work have taken me from the duties of fatherhood.”
As a Lean In circle for guys, the Deloitte Dads lack their own demi-celebrity in the mold of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose best-selling book urges women to pursue their careers aggressively and not be put off by worries about how they’ll balance their work with their families. Sandberg touches on men and how important it is to choose the right one to procreate with—“She actually suggests that if men want children, they could also raise them!” says Gloria Steinem—but she’s primarily focused on women and what they can do to push their way further up the ranks of corporate America.
That’s a fine agenda for Sandberg’s book, but, asks Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University who studies families and work, “Why do we continue to focus on this as a women’s issue, when the evidence makes it so clear that it’s shared by men?”
A March 2013 Pew Research study about modern parenthood found that nearly equal proportions of parents were twisted up in knots trying to “do it all.” Fifty percent of working fathers and 56 percent of working mothers found it “very” or “somewhat” difficult to balance work and family, according to Pew, while 48 percent of working fathers and 52 percent of working mothers responded that they’d prefer to be home with their children, but needed to work for the income. Men spend three times as much time with their children as their grandfathers did. Yet most employers haven’t acknowledged this shift.
Roger Trombley, a research engineer at Ford Motor who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. When Trombley was expecting his first child, he and his wife, who also works at Ford, weren’t thrilled with the child-care options available, and she wasn’t eager to become a stay-at-home mother. Trombley remembered that a colleague from several years back had worked out a novel solution with her husband, with both taking part-time schedules to allow them to split the week up and each be home with their kids for half of it. Ford didn’t offer paternity leave, but it did offer a part-time track so long as an employee’s manager approved it. When baby Dylan arrived, Trombley went to his bosses and told them he wanted to drop down to 70 percent and work from home two days a week.
“Knowing there was potential backlash wasn’t going to change what I was doing,” Trombley says. “There was some nervousness. If I go on this, will it affect my performance reviews; how people view me at work; my potential to get promoted? But none of those concerns have come to fruition, at least in my situation. I’ve gotten great feedback.”
Initially, Trombley could get some work done on his days at home, dealing with email when his son was napping. “Once he stopped the nap it became a little trickier,” Trombley acknowledges. When Dylan was old enough—he’s now 3—he started going to preschool a few hours a day, allowing his parents more time to dent their workloads on the days they were home with him. After school, Trombley takes Dylan to the park or the zoo. There are now three other men in his department with similar part-time setups; there were none when Trombley started. “Each and every one of them came to me and asked for recommendations on how to create the situation for themselves,” he says proudly.
Farrell believes that white-collar jobs, especially high-level ones, can and should be shared between two or even three people....with the freedom and flexibility that new technology makes possible.
The idea that men are more fulfilled when they spend less time accumulating corporate pelts and more time roughhousing with their toddlers is generally still more mocked than celebrated.
Yet, wives are now primary earners in 23 percent of U.S. married-couple households, according to Breadwinner Moms, a May 29 Pew Research study. The share of couples in which the husband outearns the wife has dropped 20 percent since 1960.
Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 3, 2013
Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
John Agno: When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women
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