EP 44: Where is Your Chair? A Better Way for Dads to Work

Interview with Eric Arthrell / Researcher on The Changing Desires for Fathers At Work

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Eric Arthrell, a long-time management consultant, was the lead author on Deloitte’s “The Design of Everyday Men Report” – a look at how top-performing fathers want to work differently and what the best companies have done to retain and support them. Key finding: inclusive work cultures do better in terms of both financial performance and innovation. But he also found that without senior managers modeling this behavior men were unlikely to be open at work about their role as fathers. Listen to Arthrell talk about how companies can enable men to be better fathers at work and relieve some of the burden on working mothers, and what lines working Dads need to draw for themselves.

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Transcript

00;00;05;06 - 00;00;24;21
Paul Sullivan
I'm Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men were the go to. Parents often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their roles. One thing I know from personal experience is being lead. Dad is not a traditional role for men.

00;00;24;23 - 00;00;43;09
Paul Sullivan
Whether you work full time, part time, or devote all of your time to your family, parenting is so often left to mothers or paid caregivers. But here at the Company of Dads, our goal is to shake all that off and create a community for fathers who are lead dads, and to welcome other dads who want to learn more from them.

00;00;43;11 - 00;01;10;22
Paul Sullivan
Today, my guest is Eric Arthrell, a long time consultant for Deloitte, where he worked in both corporate strategy and something called human centered design. More on that later. He's a father of two. A year after the first is born, he took time off from work to care for their daughter as his wife returned to her job. The experience informed the way he looked at consulting, which at its core is trying to help companies improve how they operate.

00;01;10;24 - 00;01;42;19
Paul Sullivan
The result was a project he led for Deloitte that resulted in a paper called The Design of Every day Men report key finding inclusive work cultures outperform in terms of both financial performance and innovation. Recently, Erik left consulting to start a company with his wife, Erin, called Moosh, which makes bamboo tissue. I asked him to come on the podcast because it important research paper he coauthored, but also because I want to hear how he nimbly moved around the world of work and family.

00;01;42;21 - 00;01;46;05
Paul Sullivan
Eric, welcome to the company Dads podcast.

00;01;46;07 - 00;01;48;06
Eric Arthrell
Hi, Paul. Thank you so much for having me.

00;01;48;08 - 00;01;58;04
Paul Sullivan
All right. Very quickly, let's get to the elephant in the room. What is human centered design and how does it relate to the research you did around father's?

00;01;58;07 - 00;02;27;19
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. For sure. So, when I was at Deloitte, I was working for a subsector of Deloitte called Dublin. And Dublin is a human centered design and innovation, consulting practice. And the in a nutshell, human centered design is trying to understand human behaviors and how those humans interact with products and services. So you can design the best products and services, for those humans.

00;02;27;22 - 00;02;53;15
Eric Arthrell
And so the fundamental difference, between sort of your traditional corporate strategy approach or a human centered design approach, is that human centered design always starts with what is desirable. What do people actually want? How does that fit into their lives? What kind of problems are they facing, and how can we solve those problems? And to do that, you actually need to take a very in-depth research approach.

00;02;53;15 - 00;03;14;28
Eric Arthrell
And so with human centered design, we would go really, really deep with a small number of people to best understand their behaviors and their wants and their needs. And through doing that really deep research, we can develop insights which can lead to new products and services or or updating a certain product or service to make sure that we're meeting those human needs.

00;03;14;29 - 00;03;34;28
Paul Sullivan
Is it fair to say, and you kind of give a concrete example for our listeners, fair to say, like instead of designing, a chair without talking to any people of different shapes and sizes, you might first, talk to those people of different shapes and sizes and see what they want in a chair. Is is that kind of a good way to put it?

00;03;35;00 - 00;03;52;22
Eric Arthrell
Exactly. And so there's many layers to this human centered design conversation. And so the layer that I would put on that is that when you're designing a chair, you're thinking about how the person sits down on that chair and how they get into the chair and how they get out of that chair. But you're also thinking of where does that chair sit within the room that it's in?

00;03;52;24 - 00;04;13;24
Eric Arthrell
Where does that room sit? Within the house. Where does that house sit? Within the neighborhood? Where does that neighborhood sit? Within the city. And so you're considering all these levels of context, when you're designing that chair. So it's not necessarily just about, you know, having the right tweaks and features that make the chair really usable. It's about understanding the whole experience around it.

00;04;13;27 - 00;04;34;18
Paul Sullivan
This is a for listeners, this is an incredible segue into what we're going to discuss today, because before the pandemic, that chair, sat in an office somewhere. And if you're a consultant at Deloitte, maybe it's at your Deloitte office, or maybe it sat at your client's office. Now, that chair, where does it sit? Does it sit in, in a cafe?

00;04;34;19 - 00;05;10;25
Paul Sullivan
Does it sit, in your home office? Does it sit somewhere else? And so that's, you know, it's a big shift. And, you know, in the report, you know, you talk about the culture and this report was written, just slightly before the pandemic, a little bit before the pandemic. But you talk about back then, you know, that one of the things that was really difficult for men wanting to do more, for their families, was this always on, always available culture, i.e. that that chair was in the office you were supposed to be in that chair.

00;05;10;28 - 00;05;20;19
Paul Sullivan
Do you think this got worse or better during the pandemic? And you know where we are now? It's you know, some people are calling the next normal.

00;05;20;22 - 00;05;41;04
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. I think that's a really great question. And so when the pandemic was first hitting, I was working within, a diversity equity and inclusion part of Deloitte. And that was one of the main questions that we asked ourselves is that now that we're all working from home, what is work life balance going to look like for a lot of people?

00;05;41;07 - 00;06;03;13
Eric Arthrell
And I don't know, I can't necessarily answer that question directly for you. But what I can say is that a lot of the invisible work, the invisible barriers, the invisible challenges that maybe happened within people's homes related to childcare or caring for the home or supporting your partner and their careers as well. A lot of that invisible work came to the surface.

00;06;03;15 - 00;06;16;12
Eric Arthrell
And so I think what happened is that you had a lot more people saying, hey, at 10:00 Am, I gotta jump out for my kid's dentist appointment and I'll be right back. And that was sort of openly accepted as, as, as your reason.

00;06;16;12 - 00;06;40;21
Paul Sullivan
But but that was actually that was actually well planned. I mean, the other part of it, there's this door behind me on many podcasts, a small child has come through that door. And if you think pre-pandemic, there is that famous, clip on the BBC that, you know, talk like an economist would be a kid. Kid, runs in mom, runs in after and drags the kid out as if he's, you know, about a club dad with a bat.

00;06;40;23 - 00;06;58;05
Paul Sullivan
And that just doesn't happen anymore. So. But that shift that, you know, that was a period in time, you know, we had different restrictions. You're you're based in Canada. I mean, I'd say it's different rotation to Canada versus the US, but there was that period where, okay, we're all in the same, you know, chair, as it were then.

00;06;58;05 - 00;07;18;03
Paul Sullivan
That chair is in our in our home now. It's kind of going, you know some people's shares at home, some people's chairs back at the office. Some companies are more, you know, tolerant of of, you know, interruptions and people, you know, either the child coming in or somebody else coming in or the the worker going out. Where are we now?

00;07;18;03 - 00;07;33;15
Paul Sullivan
When you think of, you know, having done all that research back then, where are we now at least sort of, you know, the most progressive companies and, you know, we know the, the more progressive ones. But where are we now with is this companies that are really trying to sort this out.

00;07;33;17 - 00;08;11;16
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. I mean I think we're starting to see I think previously what you saw was, a really strong dedication to being in the office and a lot of the outside of work responsibilities where we're kind of invisible. But there's one there's one stat that I heard recently, which I think is incredibly interesting, is that for fathers, something like 85 plus percent of millennial fathers take part in changing their baby's diapers, whereas 30 or 40 years ago, for a different generation, that was like a single digit percentage point of fathers that were engaging and changing.

00;08;11;16 - 00;08;21;27
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, yeah. But that but back then it was like 3% of fathers changed one diaper. Like one day it wasn't like they were actively doing like, I did it. That's that's one you.

00;08;22;03 - 00;08;43;04
Eric Arthrell
Yeah, yeah. And so I think what we're seeing now is we're seeing, whether you're being told to come back to the office or you're being allowed to work from home, I think that there was a narrative that that is disproportionately affecting mothers because of the responsibilities they have outside of the workplace. And, of course, mothers carry a huge load outside of the workplace.

00;08;43;04 - 00;09;05;12
Eric Arthrell
But I think what is happening is that you're seeing a lot more dads say, hey, I also want that work from a home role. I also want that flexibility. And and some organizations are offering that and some aren't. And the ones that aren't offering that, that flexibility. I think previously they might have had their pick at top talent, because they pay a lot and they demand a lot.

00;09;05;14 - 00;09;23;11
Eric Arthrell
But I think a lot of that top talent is saying, hey, I don't I don't want that anymore. I don't want to be in the office 60 hours a week traveling to client sites, you know, wearing a suit the entire time. And that's really going to mix up the talent pool and create a lot more, challenges for companies that are trying to attract top talent.

00;09;23;14 - 00;09;45;17
Paul Sullivan
This is an argument that I've been making, you know, since I started the the Company of Dads. I mean, there are three components of the company as a media arm, community platform and this corporate engagement and, you know, doing work with employer resource groups and helping them understand why, you know, giving more, attention, more flexibility to, to men who are dads doesn't just help those men.

00;09;45;17 - 00;10;03;17
Paul Sullivan
It actually helps the entire workforce. It reduces some of the burden women. But from the very beginning, I've been saying, look, just as you just said, you know, the top talent is going to leave. And, you know, we just watch what's happening at Twitter. You know, people are just leaving Twitter like, I don't I don't want to do that, you know, to a lesser extent less public.

00;10;03;22 - 00;10;21;22
Paul Sullivan
You know Goldman Sachs CEO has is really put a stake in the ground and said you get to return to the office. They're losing a lot of senior female executives who have the, you know, an incredible pedigree and to go anywhere. And I say, you know, it's your bottom 30%. You can tell them to do whatever the hell you want them to do.

00;10;21;27 - 00;10;47;16
Paul Sullivan
They're not going anywhere because nobody wants them. It's that top, you know, ten, 20, 25% that that have options. And you know, that's a question like we all know this. And any manager you know should know this or has a sense of it intuitively. Why when you know, top performers are saying, look, I had two years, have this reset, I'm a man, I'm a dad, I want to be involved.

00;10;47;18 - 00;11;09;13
Paul Sullivan
And hey, I'm, I'm a working mom, and I want to have greater flexibility. Why would companies even even resist? Is it is it some sort of, you know, ingrained, like anchoring bias or some sort of sort of behavior finance it that says, I did it this way. You have to what? Why would they even resist something that's we all prove that white collar workers at least prove that it worked pretty well remotely.

00;11;09;16 - 00;11;42;22
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. And so getting into the design of every Day men report, we did a lot of research on the correlation between hours worked and, like, objective output, like, you know, do people that work longer hours, do they actually perform better on the job? And, and there is research dating back decades that says that's simply not true, that there is a point of diminishing returns where the amount of hours that you're working can lead to exhaustion, can lead to just poor performance.

00;11;42;22 - 00;12;09;18
Eric Arthrell
And that leads to mistakes being made it so it can actually be detrimental to be working too many hours and not taking the breaks that you need. But that for some reason, I actually spoke with the with the, with an academic researcher, like a, a PhD in their field who had done some of this workplace research, and she had told me this story about how they had analyzed a, you know, a management consulting firm.

00;12;09;20 - 00;12;30;02
Eric Arthrell
And they had basically said that like hours worked, do not correlate to better outcomes. And they presented that to to the leadership of this, of this organization. And the leadership's response was, well, maybe we just don't want those kinds of people working here that, you know, don't want to work the super long hours. They kind of looked at the data and just completely ignored it.

00;12;30;04 - 00;12;55;10
Eric Arthrell
And, it's a phenomenon that's kind of hard to, to, to give a why behind. But just the fact of the matter is, is that if you want to succeed in a traditional organization, the more you work and the more flexible you are to work whenever you're asked to, the faster you'll advance. And that's the thing that holds back a lot of mothers that have outside of work responsibilities, as we all know.

00;12;55;12 - 00;13;02;02
Eric Arthrell
And it's also the thing that keeps men out, keeps men from engaging and those outside of work responsibilities.

00;13;02;05 - 00;13;13;03
Paul Sullivan
I mean, has Kovid given us, a reset? Is Covid allowed us to have this reset to to rethink and to to actually step back and look at the data and maybe make a, a data driven decision.

00;13;13;06 - 00;13;38;07
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. I mean, I would say that the talk that I've heard, like the, the, you know, corporate execs coming out and the kind of things that they're, that they're, saying to the employee base is what they want to they want to, to promote. That's definitely where the narrative has gone. It's gone to, maintaining flexibility, maintaining an allowance to, to to take care of your personal life outside of work and finding ways to make that flexible.

00;13;38;09 - 00;13;56;14
Eric Arthrell
What are the big things that one of the last things that I worked on, about 12 months ago before I left Deloitte, was this idea of the four day workweek. And it was a yeah, I won't get into too many details around it, but basically it was, you know, at a global level, what would a four day workweek look like?

00;13;56;14 - 00;14;20;25
Eric Arthrell
What what use cases can we borrow from to, to see if it would work in a, in a, you know, a consulting type environment. And that was, that was sort of all the rage. And you saw it over the last 12 months, you've seen, you know, hard, hard core, not just Elon Musk's term, but hard, hard core work environments that are moving towards a four day workweek as becoming much more common.

00;14;20;25 - 00;14;38;03
Eric Arthrell
And so so it's definitely happening. And I think that we're going to start seeing, in the next year or two, those organizations that do move to the four day workweek, are they maintaining or even improving their performance over time? My hypothesis is that they will we'll see how it pans out.

00;14;38;06 - 00;14;54;27
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. That's intriguing when you think about this. You know, I'm not sure how the medical training works in Canada, but in the US it's, you know, sort of, you know, resident based and they finish, you know, medical school. And then the residents go and it used to be that the residents would just be ground down, you know, they'd work these shifts, you know, 24 plus hours.

00;14;54;27 - 00;15;19;13
Paul Sullivan
They'd be exhausted. And that was almost like a hazing ritual. And then, you know, they realized that patients were not doing well with tired doctors. This is not a shock. But, you know, if they could come to that realization, in hospitals where it was literally life and death, you would think, why would, you know, fill in the blank xyzzy manager, you know, work better, you know, over a sustained period of time, a very little sleep.

00;15;19;13 - 00;15;37;14
Paul Sullivan
We all understand that sometimes you have to really put in extra hours to get the project done. But, you know, what about a stay in period of time? I love this concept. The four day week is interesting to me. You're having sort of in a flexible having almost like a parent bank of of time, you know, that's an idea I like a lot where you can sort of, you know, be a little more flexible.

00;15;37;14 - 00;15;54;07
Paul Sullivan
But there's one line in the report, there's several lines of thought. There's one I want to read to you. And I wanted to sort of unpack it a bit, because your kids now are what, they're two, two and four, or am I making them? Correct? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So minor little over there, five, ten and 13.

00;15;54;07 - 00;16;24;13
Paul Sullivan
And this line here really struck out to me. And it's quote evidence shows that when men take more paternity leave, women are more likely to stay employed full time. The wage gap decreases and more women earn senior leadership positions on boards. For organizations, this means more gender equality in the workplace and greater competitiveness in today's diverse marketplace. For men, this means more freedom to express their whole self.

00;16;24;15 - 00;16;49;25
Paul Sullivan
Why is it, you know, paternity leave itself that is so important? Does that set some some marker for the rest of a child's life, or is it, you know, some company that allows paternity leave and therefore is likely to allow, parents to, to be, you know, more flexible and more, more present for their kids as they, they get older.

00;16;49;28 - 00;17;11;13
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. It's a great question. So, so that that particular line thinking of it's funny that you picked that one out because this journey for me into writing this design Liberty Men report started back in 2018 when when my wife Erin was pregnant with her first child, and I was thinking a lot about what would my role as a father look like as a as a management consultant in my career?

00;17;11;13 - 00;17;32;25
Eric Arthrell
And then just what does it look like within our family? And so I started to do more research on what is the impact of parental leave. I worked in, you know, corporate Toronto, corporate Canada environment. That's not too different from corporate USA as well. Corporate America, where men simply did not take any, parental leave or very, very little.

00;17;33;00 - 00;17;45;27
Eric Arthrell
And so I started doing research on, societies or countries where men did take more parental leave. So specifically Scandinavian countries like Iceland and Norway, and Sweden, where men had more always.

00;17;45;27 - 00;17;50;15
Paul Sullivan
It's always a Scandinavian. Yeah. That's looked bad. They all. Yeah.

00;17;50;18 - 00;18;13;02
Eric Arthrell
And so in those countries men do take a larger share of parental leave overall. And what you see in those countries is also it's correlation not necessarily causation, but the correlation is wage gaps are smaller. Gender equality index is more equal. More women and stayed employed full time. Having myself taken six plus months of leave for both my children.

00;18;13;02 - 00;18;35;22
Eric Arthrell
So it's two times over. My answer to your question, more specifically, is that there is a set of core skills that you learn and those early years of your child's life, simple things like, you know, if your child's going down for a nap after lunch and it's 11 a.m., what is the chain of events to get your child to that?

00;18;35;22 - 00;18;41;04
Eric Arthrell
Not lunch, lunchtimes, changing diapers, you know, doing whatever else needs to be done.

00;18;41;04 - 00;18;45;01
Paul Sullivan
Is operation management. That's what it is. Exactly. Yeah. It's corporate.

00;18;45;01 - 00;19;06;15
Eric Arthrell
Yeah, exactly. And so there's this this multitasking. This is the buzz of the mental load. I like to call it as well, the all these things that go on inside your head when you're alone at home with the kid in your in your wife is out at or your partner, I should say is out, you know, and their career and and by personal experience, other people can disagree with me and that's totally fine.

00;19;06;15 - 00;19;26;20
Eric Arthrell
And my personal experience a minimum of about three months at home with your, you know, one year old or one and a half year old was what it took for me to sort of feel like I could run at the same speed that my partner could. She had spent the first year at home with her child. I had spent, you know, months 12 to 18 at home with our child.

00;19;26;22 - 00;19;45;04
Eric Arthrell
And it wasn't until I'd gone through about three months of that on my own where I was like, okay, I feel like I've got a handle on it now. And here we are when our kids are two and four years old and and I think we can more, fluidly hand off different responsibilities. My wife has gone this weekend for, you know, a girls trip.

00;19;45;04 - 00;20;07;06
Eric Arthrell
So I've got the kids, you know, from, you know, when I pick them up at an hour until Monday morning. No problem. Yes. But for a lot of couples, that might be a problem. Heterosexual couples, where men and women take different roles. So my answer to your question, and I know that I'm biased in this, and I come from a country where men do have a lot of access to parental leave.

00;20;07;08 - 00;20;24;27
Eric Arthrell
Is that it is about parental leave, because that's when the foundations around who's responsible for what get established. And if you as a, as a dad take on some of that, you're creating a more equal environment where you're where your partner can succeed in their careers and you can succeed in your career.

00;20;24;29 - 00;21;12;23
Paul Sullivan
I don't disagree, with what you said, but I am going to challenge you. Sure. Just as being a little further along, in the parenting journey. And, you know, when I look back on those early years, in comparison, they were easy. And they were easy because they're predictable for the most part. And a child has, a schedule and a child, you know, has, certain hours of the day where she is, in school, a certain hours a day when she is napping and, you know, come the weekend, if you and your wife are there together, you know, unless you totally screw this up, you're going to get a couple

00;21;12;23 - 00;21;28;10
Paul Sullivan
of hours break in the middle of the day because the kids are going to be napping. And I think what throws a wrench in it, and which is why I'm, you know, obviously, I'm, you know, who who the hell be and paternity leave. I mean, that's ridiculous and pro paternity leave, but I think it doesn't tell the whole story.

00;21;28;10 - 00;21;42;16
Paul Sullivan
It's a start, particularly in a country like the United States. It's a necessary start. And we have an average of men take, on average, one day a week, one day of paternity leave, which is absurd because I took four weeks and so that really skewed it. So how many are taking zero to have one be the, the average?

00;21;42;16 - 00;22;02;29
Paul Sullivan
This is research from this this professor Kristen Shockley at the University of Georgia. Insane. But when your kids get older, the variability gets inserted into there. And like, as a, as a lead dad who worked full time for, you know, 25 years as a journalist, you know, the majority at the New York Times, my wife had her own company.

00;22;03;02 - 00;22;28;10
Paul Sullivan
Certainty is easy to parent around. Variability is impossible. Sometimes you get lucky, you know, it's kind of like going to a casino. Sometimes you pull the handle and I look at you just 100 bucks. But most of the time it's. It's unpredictable. And this is why I wonder, you know, what companies can do to help, you know, workers with ten year olds, with 13 year olds with 70 year olds.

00;22;28;12 - 00;22;55;28
Paul Sullivan
I mean, the problems just change. You know, the there's a phrase here in the States, you know, little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems. And, you know, I did an early podcast with Doctor Dana Suskind, who wrote a book called Parent Nation. And we talked about we've gotten to the stage in society where we can put in our calendar, preschool graduation or, ballet recital or, baseball game, and everybody got to tell you, got to go to that man.

00;22;55;28 - 00;23;30;17
Paul Sullivan
Come on, go to that. Like, okay, you got to do it. Come on, Pat on the back. Go ahead. But if you put in that calendar, you know, mental health break with teenager, walk with, ten year old who's being bullied. I don't think it's looked at the same way. And and I just wonder I don't mean to put you on the spot, and I'm just kind of, you know, for my head, but, I mean, is there any, you know, evidence got a lot of hope, but is there any evidence to back up the hope that companies might realize that it's really it's not even an 18 year journey.

00;23;30;17 - 00;23;43;29
Paul Sullivan
It's a 22 year or 25 year journey. Those kids getting out of college get into any evidence that companies are getting more, aware of those. There's challenges that they persist way beyond, you know, a couple years old.

00;23;44;02 - 00;24;12;10
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. I mean, to answer your question directly, is there any evidence of that? I mean, I can't I can't point to anything right now, but what I again, going back to our design of every day men report, one of our key findings was, you know, how do we better enable men to engage in those types of those types of, like, step like, like childcare, essentially family care activities that you just talked about, like taking a walk with your bully ten year old.

00;24;12;13 - 00;24;37;11
Eric Arthrell
How do we enable men and everyone to to do that more freely? And one of the things that we heard from the men that we interviewed was that they look to the people that are in positions of power, the people that have status within the organization, the CEO, the executives, the people above them. And they say or they look, they see what kind of behaviors are they engaging in if they do it, that I, that I can do it too.

00;24;37;11 - 00;24;59;11
Eric Arthrell
It's very much a role modeling, creating space and allowance for for people to do these types of things. And so what that makes me think about is that, you know, we live in a patriarchal society where men do have a lot of those senior roles within organizations. It's just a fact of the fact of our of our economy.

00;24;59;13 - 00;25;24;26
Eric Arthrell
And so those are the men that that have the power and have the status. I personally would call on them to really engage in those types of behaviors and create space around it. And so it should be it should be the, the, the people with the most amount of power and status within an organization that are saying, you know what, I'm going to take our time this afternoon to take a walk with my 10 or 15 year old because it's important.

00;25;24;29 - 00;25;31;25
Eric Arthrell
And if they can show that that kind of role modeling, you'll see it disseminate down into the rest of the organization.

00;25;31;27 - 00;25;47;29
Paul Sullivan
I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of things, you know, I wanted to touch on, because you talk about four themes in the report are men's experience in business, and three are fairly what I would call individualistic, but it's that one there of which you, you know, you just talked about, you call it the report, show me it's okay.

00;25;47;29 - 00;26;07;20
Paul Sullivan
And essentially it's that, you know, that that modeling. And, I think you, you went for like senior leadership. I, I there's a part of me that's more optimistic with the emerging leaders. Yeah. That kind of, you know, if I had a tagline to be in it, change starts in the middle because we all suffer from sort of that confirmation bias when we've gone to the top.

00;26;07;23 - 00;26;36;09
Paul Sullivan
But when you think about, you know, solutions, you know, you know, one that you offered was for for companies and business leaders to rethink the expectations for, success. You know, where is that going to come from and what's going to drive it is, is a driver going to be what you talked about earlier on the, you know, the very top performers demanding more what's going to drive that that rethinking of the expectations for success.

00;26;36;11 - 00;26;56;03
Eric Arthrell
Yeah I think I think that's, that's you know, what you said is, is exactly what's going to happen. So going back to that, the previous part of our conversation around, you know, some organizations are telling people to come back into the office and go back to sort of our old way of working. Some organizations are allowing, allowing for for more, for more flexibility.

00;26;56;03 - 00;27;11;00
Eric Arthrell
And I think what it's going to take is, another piece of the puzzle for sure is people that are there, those emerging leaders, those those mid-level people that are that are high potential to say, I'm just not going to work in that kind of environment.

00;27;11;01 - 00;27;15;13
Paul Sullivan
Right. And, and said that and said that again. Yeah. Like that's I'm not going to do that. Yeah.

00;27;15;16 - 00;27;38;05
Eric Arthrell
Exactly. And so, I mean, I don't want to speak ill of any of my past, my past, you know, career experiences. But I will say that, you know, management consulting is an incredibly demanding industry. Right? And so there there has to be a point where you ask yourself, like, do I want to keep working at 11 p.m. on a Thursday?

00;27;38;07 - 00;27;54;05
Eric Arthrell
Or do I want to say, you know, at 5 p.m. that's on my computer closes my kid, my kids get picked up from daycare and and we have a family dinner, and I won't get back on line until, you know, 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. the next day. And so you have to draw lines for yourself, I think.

00;27;54;05 - 00;28;14;18
Eric Arthrell
And and for me, I again, I think a lot about, you know, privilege as well. So I'm like highly educated, you know, ten years experience as a management consultant, cisgender, straight white guy. Like, I've got all the things going for me that I could possibly have going for me if it's not people like me sticking their necks out there and saying, hey, I'm not going to do this thing.

00;28;14;18 - 00;28;31;24
Eric Arthrell
I'm going to walk away from this because it's just not right for me and my family. I think it's those types of people that really need to stand up and say, we're not going to do this anymore, and I think, I think we're starting to get there. I mean, and I the millennial dads changing diaper, that's a simple example.

00;28;31;24 - 00;28;53;18
Eric Arthrell
But I think it's indicative of a more a more engaged involvement. And, and parenting. I've seen a lot more, just consciousness around your career is not everything your career as a part of you, for sure. But it's not everything. And so let's not sacrifice everything just for that. Just for that, you know, jump in your career to the next level.

00;28;53;21 - 00;29;21;14
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. You did something twice. That is is pretty impressive. And I know, a lot of dads and moms in the US probably wish they did that. And and one, you took six months off when your first child was was a year old. We we mentioned that at the top. But then, you know, during the pandemic, you took time off from work, to be with your family, you know, to all kind of be in that together.

00;29;21;16 - 00;29;31;14
Paul Sullivan
How did you decide to do that? And and the other side of that, what was it like reentering work after you had done it?

00;29;31;16 - 00;29;54;20
Eric Arthrell
So taking time off during the pandemic? The back story is that, my employer was offering voluntary work reductions to help offset some of the headcount costs that were maintaining through the downturn in the pandemic. And so I put my hand up to take three months off at the time, which just happened to correlate perfectly to when our second child was born.

00;29;54;20 - 00;30;15;11
Eric Arthrell
So it sort of became like a mini parental leave. But also our child was born in May 2020. So a peak pandemic, you weren't allowed to to visit other people. They they say it takes a village to raise a child, right? Our village was gone. It was just my wife and I and our two kids daycare was closed.

00;30;15;11 - 00;30;37;24
Eric Arthrell
So it was to be honest, I would say that, you know, in the spirit of trying to be vulnerable as a man, because a lot of times we're not vulnerable about our emotions. Like incredibly difficult. I would say that, men can have postpartum depression after a child is born as well. That's clinically proven. I would probably put myself in that category.

00;30;37;24 - 00;31;05;21
Eric Arthrell
I would say that there was a degree of clinical depression around around that time, from the pandemic, from. I personally found that with our first child, I was quite involved. I was doing some formula bottle feedings throughout the week. I was we were sort of handing things off. My wife was breastfeeding, so she was taking on the bulk of it, but I was still involved a little bit with our second child, just by default.

00;31;05;21 - 00;31;25;19
Eric Arthrell
I took on more responsibility with the older child that she took more responsibility with the younger child. And so that made me feel like the bond that I was building with my younger child was just more difficult for me to, for me to, to bring together. And so even though it was three months off, it was it was certainly difficult.

00;31;25;19 - 00;31;49;22
Eric Arthrell
And then I took another parental leave later on in the year when my wife went back to work and I added on another 5 or 6 months to, to that parental leave, later on, but coming back into the workplace was really tough because I came back in saying to myself, I only want to work no, 9 to 5, so to speak.

00;31;49;25 - 00;31;58;27
Eric Arthrell
I'll do the job. I'll do it well. But, you know, if they say jump, I'm not going to say how high. I'm going to say, this is how high I'll jump.

00;31;58;29 - 00;32;01;10
Paul Sullivan
Why jump now? I'm perfectly grounded, you know.

00;32;01;10 - 00;32;21;28
Eric Arthrell
Yeah, yeah. And so that was my that was my mindset. And I sort of experimented with, can I work a 9 to 5 in this type of environment? I think the answer was no. And and so it came to a point for me where it was like, all right, I need I need to step away from this. Because I just can't lead the kind.

00;32;22;00 - 00;32;37;19
Eric Arthrell
I can't be the kind of parent that I want to be in this environment. It just doesn't work. And a lot of people, what happens is they get paid caregivers, they'll bring a nanny on or something to help fill that gap. That's perfectly viable solution that people can do. It just wasn't what we wanted to do for our family.

00;32;37;19 - 00;32;55;13
Eric Arthrell
And so, I was very fortunate that I had this startup, Moosh, to, to follow in doing so much. Had kind of been bubbling up on the side for, you know, a year or so at that point. And it was sort of time to take, take a full time jump into entrepreneurship. And, that's obviously meant financial struggles, for sure.

00;32;55;13 - 00;33;15;09
Eric Arthrell
But, it's also provided the ultimate flexibility because, you know, I'm self-employed now, so I can do the 330 pickup. I can do the, the, you know, someone has a call, needs to come home from school. I can go do that pick up. I took them for their Covid shots yesterday. So like it gave me the flexibility to do those kinds of things.

00;33;15;11 - 00;33;22;28
Paul Sullivan
Eric, it's been wonderful. Thank you for joining me on the Company of Dads podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you today.

00;33;23;01 - 00;33;23;29
Eric Arthrell
Yeah. Thank you Paul.