Here’s what we’ve learned so far:

(1) Men and Women Changing the Culture of Face Time …

On our October Thursday call three employees – two men and one woman – all for very different reasons described how they were able to work remotely. All of them also discussed how their work had improved because of their ability to work remotely. (To listen to the call click here.)

(2) Men and Women Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career …

On our January Thursday call we spoke with three male leaders who run organizations that support an integrated approach from entry level to executive level. Not only can these organizations attract and retain the best employees, click here to listen to the tape of the call to hear each leader discuss how this approach brings unique value to their clients.

(3) Men and Women Revaluing Family Values …

During our March Thursdays with ThirdPath calls we are exploring why men are as interested in rewriting the rules as women.

On Thursday 3/21 you can join us to hear two very different stories from two dads who redesigned their work so they could share in the care of their children.

This call is open to everyone, just click on the below link at 12:30pm on Thursday 3/21 to join us. (The call runs from 12:30 to 1:30pm ET.)

https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/482309717

YES! Let’s create a movement for change and truly become an innovation nation.

Let’s do this by having men and women – especially male and female leaders – model integrated career paths.

“Infants depend on their adult caregivers to meet their basic physical needs and to protect them from harm. Babies also rely on their caregivers for emotional warmth and the social and cognitive stimulation that promotes healthy brain development.”

“Although the responsibility for a baby’s care clearly rests primarily with parents, public policy has a role in ensuring that parents have real choices.”

Nearly 30 years ago, the authors wrote “current U.S. policy supports neither high- quality infant day care nor alternatives such as paid leaves for infant care.” Today, because of the number of employees not covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the absence of wage replacement, and the lack of quality standards for child care, that is still largely true.”

“Given the high cost of infant care and the difficulties in providing safe and healthy care, providing real alternatives, such as a partially paid leave for a portion of the first year of a baby’s life, looks like both a bargain and a wise investment.”

The book makes an excellent case for this important and critically needed change in public policy.

But what if we dreamed even bigger. What if we created integrated solutions, not just for the first year, but across our entire career-lifecycle?  When we asked the members of our Pioneering Leaders group what makes them most proud around their integrated career paths, here’s what they had to say:

Father of two children, ages 16 and 20. “Our ability to keep on adjusting. Everything’s changed from season to season. We’ve created a lot of teamwork as we just keep on adjusting to the latest change.”

Father of two children, ages 16 and 19. “We’ve both been able to have careers, but we’ve also been able to build in a lot of stability in our children’s lives. They are both deeply connected to the community where they grew up.”

Father of two children, ages 6 and 8. “I ask people, ‘Who is behind the door, who is the person you can turn to when you are having one of those horrible days with your children.’ My wife is that person for me.”

Father of two children, ages 34 and 36, and grandfather of two children, ages 7 and 5. “I like that we’ve created a strong network of care. My daughter is going to be traveling for a week, so this week I’ll be doing extra grandpa duty. We’ve created strong relationships with our children.”

Yes, any step to improve public policy in this country will be useful.

But maybe we can also harness the energy of progressive leaders – or the positive energy of the Dad 2.0 conference we just attended – to help us dream even bigger and create a nation that truly promotes an integrated approach to work and the care of our families from birth through elder care.

But what you might not have thought about … is how the different approach these leaders are modeling is also linked to managing a “reasonable” bottom line.

Instead of creating organizations that rely on extreme performance goals to succeed, these leaders are following a very different path.

Clearly we need thriving organizations in order to offer flexibility.  What these leaders also teach us is “enough is enough.” Instead of creating organizations that require excessive work hours in order to meet inflated bottom lines, they have created thriving organizations that support people to be successful at work AND successful in their lives outside of work.

Below is what Tony Doniger had to say on the topic.  He’s one of the leaders who joined the call. This is an excerpt from an article Tony wrote for the Boston Bar Journal, “A Different Measure of Success.” (March/April 2008)

A good deal has been written about contentment, stress, dissatisfaction and disillusion in the legal profession [and other professions as well, ThirdPath would argue!]. For better or for worse, many lawyers and most large and mid-size law firms often measure their success not on a happiness or contentment index but against a monetary standard. Earnings — or “profit per partner” — is the currency with which firms compete for rankings on the all important The American Lawyer charts.

To improve these monetary rankings firms do things that are harmful to the profession and bad for lawyers.

One way to increase profit per partner is to limit the number of partners who count in the equation. However, with fewer people making partner, it is of course harder for diversity milestones to be achieved as there are fewer openings in the partnership ranks for anyone. On the revenue side, the pursuit of ever increasing revenues by definition imposes greater pressures on associates (and all lawyers). The result, of course, is that lawyers have less time for professional and other non-billable activities.

In addition, mergers and acquisitions have increased markedly over the last decade. The cost of these transitional events is not insignificant. Indeed, at the annual Boston Bar Association Leadership Retreat, a large percentage of the attorneys present had personally experienced such an event, finding it stressful and resulting in a solution that was less optimal from the perspective of contentment, though perhaps more profitable.

In the end, we need to ask when enough is enough.

Should we be willing to trade some profit or growth in profit for greater satisfaction? Surely it is okay to make a little less next year (or not make more) and take on some new professional or pro bono activities, or yes, even personal activities (there’s nothing wrong with hiking the Appalachian Trail).

There is much we can do to improve our professional and personal lives, our pro bono and bar work, our efforts to improve access to justice, if only we would emphasize alternative measures of success.

This alternative approach isn’t just for professional workers … Read the excellent New York Times article, “How Costco Became the Anti-Walmart.”  It describes Jim Sinegal’s progressive approach at Costco Wholesale.

Want to learn more? Tune back next month and we’ll have the tape of the call posted on our website.

We talked about how it takes courage to stand up and tell the truth, but when we do this, it benefits everyone involved. You can see this in our story about CJ, a father who changed to a four day work week, and by doing so created a number of more effective processes at work.

Questions and Answers from Our Conversation with Peter Senge:

Question: Creating a vision requires stepping out of the madness and finding a moment for contemplation. Instead people get stuck in “fast forward” mode. What can people do?

More than time, what is needed is giving yourself permission to create the space to do this. It also helps to have others who are willing to think with you, and to encourage you to focus on what’s important as opposed to what’s secondary. In our over stimulated world we can begin to think we don’t have enough time. But actually we have the same 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week and how ever many years we are going to live. That hasn’t changed a bit. What has changed is the mental model and the choices of how we spend our time. Once you realize this, you can make the necessary choices to create a different kind of space – a quiet space. It doesn’t matter if it’s running or yoga, just so long as it isn’t something “externally stimulating” like watching TV or surfing the web. There is nothing wrong with these activities. But in our over stimulated environments we never have enough time. What’s required is a shift in mindset.

Question: I get pulled into meaningless meetings. I negotiated a four day work week, but was told to keep it quiet. How do you live with this greater sense of meaning when faced with a work culture that is so different?

When you are trying to be sane in an insane environment, people will call you crazy. Your action is a contradiction to their assumptions. It’s not because they are bad people, they are just expressing the norms of the work culture, and they see you as contradicting these norms. You are also making them recognize that there is a choice. You are taking a stand for something that matters to you, and it probably matters to them as well, and your actions require them to face that they too have options. Do you want to take a stand for something that you really care about? One person might not be able to make a difference, but you can always take a stand for yourself. It’s also important to not do it out of anger. People will only hear the anger. You need to do it because you feel it’s the right thing to do. You need to be clear in your words and actions, “I’m not doing this to criticize you, I’m doing this because this it is what I need.”

Question: I’m supervising a team and doing the job of 3 persons. How can any of us try and work a 4 day work week when my boss’ answer will be to just get the 5 days of work done in 4?

A lot of organizations are expecting to do more and more without the necessary resources. I would just encourage you to ask your boss, “What do you think about this? It seems like we are trying to get too much done with the resources we have.” What you will be doing is engaging him or her in a process of inquiry. If you start with a simple assumption, that you and your boss have many common goals, it will help. I can guarantee that when you bring this issue up, your boss will feel just as stuck as you do. And if you can then find ways to engage a team of people to think about this issue, and do it by evoking curiosity, it’s amazing what can be done. I guarantee you, things won’t get worse.

Would you like help creating your own unique “third path” – an integrated approach to work and life?  Look at the “Get Help” section of our website – we’ve got lots of resources for you.

To learn more about this, join our free Thursdays with ThirdPath call on November 29th, with Peter Senge when we discuss how to “end the war between work and family.” Here’s a quick overview of the four different systems and what Peter and Jessica will be discussing.

The organizations we work in – We all know that where we work significantly impacts how successful we are around integrating work and life. Progressive organizations make a tremendous difference in our ability to redefine the arc of a successful career. Our Thursday with ThirdPath calls illustrate this very clearly.

But the speed up of work and a global workplace also impacts our ability to redefine a successful career. To get ahead, professionals have gone from working long hours to working extreme hours. However, our call this spring with Leslie Perlow, author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone, does a great job illustrating how the demands of our 24/7 workplace and the trap of instant responsiveness not only compromises our work/life integration goals, but also our effectiveness at work.

Public policy – Here’s where you have to be careful about being bitten by the other snake heads. Some people believe the role of public policy when addressing career path challenges is creating affordable child care, including full time care for infants and toddlers. But there are many others who would strongly oppose this type of public policy. Instead they believe the best thing for families is to make it affordable for one parent to provide the majority of care – most often the mother. Sadly the role of men and fathers is often completely lost in any of these discussions.

Therefore, to create lasting change and truly redefine the arc of successful careers, we also need to “redesign families.” Our Shared Care families and Whole Life Leaders are actively doing this. Not only are they stepping out of traditional gender roles, they are also experts in pushing back at our 24/7 work place so they have time and energy for their lives outside of work.

What will it look like when we’ve created a unified approach to change that addresses all 4 over lapping systems? I hope it means we will have created a world where men and women feel equally supported to create integrated career paths, male and female leaders model integrated lives, and all families – across the economic spectrum – have access to these solutions as well.

This past week I had an opportunity to accompany my mother on a train trip to visit friends she had made in high school and when she first became a mother. We took a train from Philadelphia to Charlottesville Virginia, stopping in different cities to stay with each friend.

We both knew that I would be using part of our travel time to continue to get my work done. In fact, when we left I was confident I’d get my full week of work done, just in a more flexible way.

Day by day I saw these plans unravel. At the start of the week I’d gotten a little work done, but nothing close to the amount I had planned. By the end of the week I was hoping I would at least get one more solid day of work done on the train ride home. But the brain is a tricky instrument. As we wound our way back to Philadelphia I could tell my concentration was shot and the work I needed to complete would just not get done.

What did I learn from this experience?

Sometimes we’re going to make mistakes, our work/life integration experiments aren’t going to go exactly as planned. In organizations where there is trust and transparency, we can learn from these mistakes. For example, I’ve decided to count last week as 3 days of vacation and 2 days of work, including the work I did the Saturday after the trip.

When trying something new, do your best to anticipate this challenge. As I was getting ready to leave for the trip I think I might have unconsciously guessed that things could go differently then planned. So I got a lot of things organized before I left, and I knew I had a little wiggle room to meet my one important work deadline the weekend I returned.

When things don’t go according to plan, don’t lower your goals, just get smarter around how to achieve them. I clearly miscalculated how much work I could get done. But I also wouldn’t trade anything for the wonderful time I spent with my mom and her lifelong friends. A few years from now, if we make the same trip or some new trip, I’ll now know how to arrange things more effectively as I continue to experiment with meeting both my work and life goals.

Men and Women Revaluing Family Values – ThirdPath sees this in the multitude of Shared Care families we’ve collected – whether they flexed or reduced their work hours at the same time, shared roles over the course of the year, or shared different roles at different stages in their family’s development. In each of these stories the parents learned how to maintain their involvement with work while also staying actively involved in the joys and responsibilities of caring for their children.

Men and Women Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career – This is at the core of the work we are doing with ThirdPath’s Pioneering Leaders group. This is a truly inspirational group of male and female leaders who have all “walked the talk.” Now they are working with us to create wider change. Together we are examining the systemic issues that need to be addressed so even more leaders can follow their footsteps.

Men and Women Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness – Whether it is the joy you gain from an amazing vacation (our March 2012 “Thursday” call), or making the most of summer (our May 2011 “Thursday” call) or phasing into retirement (a call planned for this year), this recom-endation gets right to the heart of our mission: to assist individuals, families and organizations in finding new ways to redesign work to create time for family, community and other life priorities.

Men and Women Becoming an Innovation Nation – Right again! Lotte Bailyn discovered this concept over a decade ago when she first introduced the term “dual agenda” – solutions that are good for business and good for you. Today this is central to our work. Just like Lotte Bailyn, we’ve also discovered that when you encourage every employee to do this – from entry level to executive level – they will actually find ways to improve how work is done.

Join our Thursdays with ThirdPath calls to learn more about each mandate and to learn how you can create your own unique “third path” – an integrated approach to work and life.

Parents enjoy spending time after school with their children to get different things done:
o Parents can plan an after school adventure instead of waiting for the weekend
o After school can be a time to schedule appointments and do errands. One father noted, “They didn’t like to go to Home Depot, so I’d make a deal to go someplace fun afterwards.”
o Parents notice the time spent transporting kids to extracurricular activities is a great way to get to know their friends. Car pools also build an extra layer of support for families.
o Most importantly, parents learn something simple like tossing a football becomes meaningful, especially when a child says afterwards, “I really loved doing that with you.”

By making the most of each parent’s flexibility at work, families can also make arrangements for planned and unplanned changes in the school schedule:
o In some families both parents can flex their work for school closings, in others, only one parent can
o In every case, families can create a wider support network of friends, family, and care-givers to help out as needed

Setting up Shared Care for school age children and creating a network of support will also pay big dividends when families balance work and family during the summer months or when children become “too old” for child care. Want some help getting started? Sign up for our Work Family Coaching Calls – over a series of three calls we help you envision both your work and family goals and create a road map to help you achieve them. Learn more on the “Get Help” section of our website.  

• Summers can also provide an opportunity for children to develop independent interests, such as reading and hobbies.

• Over time families often develop a rhythm to summers that can last year after year, some becoming deeply valued memories and “family traditions.”

 Interesting Summer Solutions We’ve heard about …

- Grandparents and extended family can play a great role in summers. Children can spend one or two weeks with them (and sometimes with other cousins as well). This can provide a great opportunity for the two generations to get to know each other and connect.

- A partner in an accounting firm negotiated a “flex year” schedule – working a total of 20 hours during the summer months. This gave her maximum time with her school aged children. Then during her “busy season” – January through April – her husband became the primary parent in charge.

- ThirdPath has also met many families where one parent intentionally became a school teacher as a way to have more flexibility throughout the summers. In one of these families, the other parent negotiated an alternative summer schedule so she could work remotely one day a week.

- Telework can be a great summer solution when caring for teens. It’s also a great option for stretching out limited vacation time. One family planned a two week beach vacation but only used one week of vacation time. They did this by trading off who was working (in the mornings or in the afternoons) while the other parent played with the children at the beach.

 Summertime tip: Write up notes at the end of the summer about what worked well or what could be improved on. Pull these out in February when you start planning for the next summer.