Welcome to the Big Careers Small Children Podcast. My name is Verena Hefti. I believe that no one should have to choose between becoming a CEO and enjoying their young children. For much too long, amazing people like I'm sure you listening right now have found themselves stuck on the career ladder when they have children and that leads to gender inequality in senior leadership because those people don't progress to senior leadership and the same stale, often male middle class people leading our organizations. We must change this together and I hope that many of you listening right now will progress to the most senior leadership roles that you like where you can make the decisions that make our world a better place. Outside of the podcast, I am the CEO and founder of the Social enterprise Leaders Plus. We exist to help working parents progress their careers to senior leadership in a way that works for you and for your families. We have free events and resources on leadersplus.org where you can download helpful toolkits such as on returning from maternity leave, shared parental leave, securing a promotion, dealing with workload challenges, or managing as a dual career couple. We also have an award winning fellowship community which is global for working parents who have big dreams for their careers but don't want to sacrifice their family. You'll join an absolutely wonderful group of people, a very tight knit, supportive group of parents who have your back. Together you'll explore what your career aspirations are and you'll get advice from senior leaders who are also working parents about how to achieve those aspirations. You'll get new ideas to combine your hopes for your careers with your hope for your family. And you are supported by people who are experiencing what you're experiencing yourself. I'm really delighted that a larger majority of our fellows have made tangible changes following the program. Be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having better flexible working arrangement, they always impress me so much with the courage that they instill in each other to do what is right for them without apologizing for having a family or apologizing for wanting that top job. Details are on leadersplus.org/Fellowship.

Today I'm chatting to Brigid Schulte, author of the book Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest of a Better Life. The two of us are chatting about how to change the work culture so that there's room for care. I really enjoyed my conversation with Brigid. I hope you do too.

So my name is Brigid Schulte and I'm a longtime journalist, an author, writer and I direct the Better Life Lab at New America, which is a nonpartisan think Tank where we use the power of story and journalism research and to really push for narrative change to bring about work, family justice, gender equality. And we think about that very broadly, not just women in the public sphere, but also equality for men in the private sphere and being able to have time and space and support for care. And we also look at how we can elevate the value of care, both paid and unpaid care, across the life cycle. And so much of my writing and the books I've written, two books now, are really centered on that question of how can we have a good life and how can we make it widely available, equitably available, across race and class and gender? And really, how can we create the public policies, the workplace practices, and the cultural norms that enable us to have meaningful work, time for love and care and connection, and also time for leisure and joy and play. And right now, that's really difficult. And understanding why it's difficult and what needs to change to make that happen. And then you'd asked about my family, and I think that's a lot of what motivates me. I'm. I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm a wife. I have two amazing children. So I'm a mother. It's one of the most important roles, I think, in my life. I'm a friend, I'm a neighbour, I'm a voter. I think that having time for all of these different identities in our lives is really important. I'm a runner, although I'm injured now, you know, so I think it's. But I will be again. Having time and space for having a rich and full life is really what I'm after.

Beautiful.

And I'm going to ask you a question that we ask of all our guests. What did you used to believe to be true about combining a big career with young children that you don't believe to be true anymore?

Well, I think it's really clear. I went through an evolution. So I, you know, I kind of graduated from College in the 1980s, and that was a time when there was this sort of like, you can have it all, you can do it all. You know, you can be anything you want to be. Sort of this lip service. And so I sort of initially believed you could do it all and everything would work fine. Then I got into work and I didn't see how anybody was doing it. I didn't have any role models, and I began to think it wasn't possible. And then I went on this journey to write my first book, trying to understand, well, why does it feel so impossible to combine a big career or a meaningful work really with, you know, the kind of parent you want to be, to have the time and space to. To have not just quality time, but quantity of time too, and not be so stressed. And in my first book I say I just felt totally inadequate at work and completely inadequate at home as well. And I just felt like a huge failure. And I wanted to try to understand why and does it have to be that way? And I suppose that has really changed what I believe it's like, no, it does not have to be that way. And that there's a lot of things that we can do, both small and large at the individual, the organizational, the public policy, the cultural level, to really make a change. And we need to, and we should, because it should not be this hard.

Very well said. I'm sure a lot of listeners will really agree with that, as do I. You mentioned about culture linked to overwork. Can you say more about that?

So one of the things that I found really driving a lot of that feeling of overwhelm and like sort of never feeling that there's enough time or enough time to do your work, enough time for your family, enough time for much less leisure time, most people feel like that's just a luxury they can't afford. You know, in terms of time, there's this sort of a time scarcity or time pressure that a lot of us feel. And so for this newest book, I really saw that a lot of it originates in our work culture. The way we think about work, the way we organize it, the way we do it. And in many workplaces, what's really happened, and you can trace it in the data and the research over the last 30 or 40 years, that work itself has become what economists call greedy, that your employers will expect more and more and more. I mean, think about it. Give your all, give 150%, go above and beyond that. That's what we reward. And rather than thinking above and beyond and giving 150% is all about kind of the output or the impact that you have, we've tended to measure that by input by how many hours you spend, like sitting at a desk or how many hours you spend at an office or if you're sending late night emails. And that's for sort of the professional, the managerial class. And for shift workers or hourly workers, the expectation is now that they will always be available, sort of on call, drop everything at the drop of a hat and come in when some algorithm says we need you at the store. And then if we send you home without any pay, you know, because the algorithm says, oh, we were wrong, you know, to just put up with that. So there's this greediness affects all workers kind of across the socioeconomic spectrum. And one of the things that really struck me is that we have these narratives that hard work is valuable and hard work pays off. And, you know, I'm a big believer in hard work. I mean, I love what I do and I work hard and I. So this is not anything about like, let's all be slackers. But what's really happened when, again, when you look at the data is that hard work is not paying off. Like it's like we expect it to. For knowledge workers, for desk workers,we expect people to overwork in one job, this ideal worker norm, that the best worker comes in early and stays late. And who's able to do that, that's somebody without any care responsibilities, so that immediately cancels out mainly women who are still primarily responsible for care responsibilities, but also any man who wants to be more involved. Because again, the research shows that men are punished in work cultures for wanting to violate that ideal worker norm. And women, you can work those hours, but if you have children, you are also punished because the expectation is, well, you should be home with your kids. So if you're trying to compete at work, we're going to think you're a bad person and you're not going to get that promotion. So you're sort of, you're hit in a, you know, sort of a double whammy for women, so to speak, for low wage workers. You know, in the United States we have like 44% of the workforce is considered low wage, which I think surprises a lot of people. And the expectation there is, you know, you have to overwork in a series of jobs or a couple side hustles just to make ends meet. So that's sort of. The second book is really looking at how work isn't working for so many people and how it can. There's no reason that we have to organize work this way. You know, this is a result of a series of choices that we've made either in public policy or at the organizational level. And we can make different choices.

There's so much I want to pick up on. We have a community of fellows, so working parents who want to progress their careers and who also want to change the culture of work, although I have never heard them use that word, but I think that's what they're trying to do, trying to shape a different world for the future generations and themselves. But the stories I hear are sometimes quite tough because they might be the only woman with children who will need to leave on time, who will need to try to still do as much as everybody else who comes in at 7:30 leaves at 7:00 if it's in financial services. If you are in that position and you're that lone outlier, do you have a role to change the culture or should you just change your organization?

So such a good question, you know, and that's a lot of why. In this recent book, I've got an appendix at the end, sort of like, all right, here are 10 things that you can do as an individual. Here's 10 things you can do as a middle manager, or if you're running a team or if you're a leader of an organization. Here's 10 things we should think about in terms of public policy, because we need change on all of those levels. And sometimes as much as we like to argue for big cultural change or even organizational change, it's out of our hands. And so I do want people to feel a sense of agency, like, what can I do tomorrow? What can I do when I go to work today to make things different? And I think that there are a couple things, things that you can do if you're in one of those greedy professions, which are, you know, finance or tech or law, those are some of the most famously greedy- or medicine, the long work hours cultures. One of the first things that I ask people to think about, and this is really something that I learned from looking at a lot of the COVID disruptions, that there were all sorts of experiments that people had to, that organizations had to go through to figure out how to do work in a different way. Really interesting efforts to redesign work before the pandemic. And then also this growing short work hours movement that you see, there's some in the UK, you know, some pilots there, some in the US There are larger kind of across the country, like in Iceland, they've gone, I write about that in one of the chapters. They've gone to a 32 hour work week and given an awful lot of flexibility to different organizations and teams to figure out how to make that happen. And so I think that there's a lot to learn from those effective Covid experiments, from the short work hours from work redesign. And that is really kind of turning that whole overwork question really on its head and really thinking about rather than the long work hours that you put in and trying to compete on the input, really thinking, going through a process of thinking, what's the most valuable work that I can do? You know, what's the most meaningful to me, what creates the most value for my organization or my team and being really clear about that. And then you know, again, as an individual contributor, talking about that with your direct manager, with your team, so that there's a transparency and you get buy in from that. You know, this is what we're trying to do. This is the most important thing. So this is what I'm going to focus on and really define that. And so then work backwards from there. So these are the things that I need to do to make sure that I get to this output. And that doesn't mean coming in at 7 in the morning and leaving at 7 at night. That means being focused on what the value is that I'm creating, being very clear and communicating that. And so that's one of the things that I love about moving to a more flexible work culture where you know, you have a lot more control over the time, the manner and the place of work. Like if you have an output or performance based culture, it doesn't matter how long you're sitting at a desk, it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't matter where that is because you've gone through the process of figuring out what's most important and then how you get there rather than just putting in long hours and sort of what I call performing work. That is often what gets rewarded. And so that part of the issue then is making it clear. I mean, there's research that shows that if guys take smoking breaks with their bosses, they're more likely to be promoted. I mean, that's based on nothing. That's not based on performance, that's based on like you know, kind of bro culture or confirmation bias or hanging out. And I think trying to make so much more of that clear, make that more transparent. And especially if you're a manager, you know, there's so many times, and I've seen this in so many work but workplaces, when it comes to a new assignment or kind of like a growth assignment, it's called hey you tasking. You look up and somebody walks by, it's like, hey you, can you do that? Or maybe it's somebody that's that reminds you of you. And so then you kind of give them more preference. So this is where it's really important to track that, use data. And then, you know, if you're a manager, really use some discretion about how you give out those sort of plum assignments and, and really measure how people are doing rather than just what it looks like. Because I can tell you one of my favorite stories when I was working at the Washington Post, this really large newspaper in the United States, and one editor had, this very top editor had this notion that the best workers were working all the time. And so it was like 11 o'clock at night or some ungodly hour and all these people were still at work. And this editor comes out of his office and you know, he says to a friend of mine who's also there, unfortunately late at night, and he said, I can tell who all the best workers are because they're still here. And my friend looked around and half the people were playing solitaire. You know, they weren't working, they looked like they were working. And I think that's what we need to be much more aware of. That's what we need to shed more light on. And managers, it's easier, it's easier to manage by whose, who's there or hours or who shows up at a meeting. And it's harder to figure out, well, what's the value we're creating and how do we get there? But that's the important work that's going to lead to more value for the company or the organization as well as much more flexibility for you as a person with care responsibilities and honestly create much more equitable systems for who, who's promoted and, and who can rise to the top.

Agreed that word value is very important. Last week we had an event where we brought together some of our alumni and mentors and we looked at how we can design the future of work so that it is more actually that everybody can progress to a senior level and you don't exactly like you're saying you don't have to sacrifice your life. And that point around value came out as a really important one. But then the question was, okay, so it's relatively easy to measure value and to compare productivity when you are a banker. I'm imagining I might be wrong. But how do you do it with a journalist? I mean, it's not about number of words written, I presume. How do you. Or we had one organization in the room was Global Witness, which is a brilliant campaigning organization around making the world a more environmentally friendly place. But that is so hard to measure. How do you do that?

Yeah, no, that's a really important question and I think it is hard. And it's going to be different for every different organization for different sectors. It's even going to be different over time, you know, as the world changes, which it always is. And there are good ways to try to come up with measurements and there's bad ways. And I can tell you, having been at, you know, in journalism for most of my career, there are lots of bad ways to do it. And at one point they were doing byline counts. So you could do like a really short story about some break in maybe three paragraphs and that counted the same as like maybe a huge project that you took three months on. So that's an example of a bad way of trying to measure value. It's not like there's a silver bullet or a blue pill from the matrix that we can take that makes it all better and that we can figure it out. It is hard work. And it's up to each organization, each team, to figure out what that value is that you create. What's the most important thing that you do? You can tie it to your mission statement. You can tie it to, you know, whatever creates the most value. It is up to each organization to figure out what that is. But it's not impossible. Andrew Barnes, who started the, you know, kind of kicked off this global four day workweek movement, he's in the financial services business client facing where they had had a lot of rewarding long hours and, you know, and they figured out how to create that sense of value and create the systems that then lead to that value. And a lot one of the things that you do find in some of these work redesigns and shorter work hours movements is they really interrogate. Do we really need all these meetings? You know, there's heavy meeting culture. Is there a different way to communicate? Could we use communication more effectively? Because when you look at how technology has changed work already and it will continue to change it, there's a lot of layering on and making work more complex. So now you have email and slack and instant message and you have internal and external ways of communicating. And you've got the meetings, and now you've got zoom meetings or virtual meetings. And so it really requires going back and asking, do you need all of this? And recognizing if you have five people coming into a meeting, a weekly meeting for an hour, that's a lot of time that they could be doing something else. So is that the highest and best use of everyone's time? And those are, those are. And some weeks it is and some weeks it isn't. And so it really requires being very intentional about thinking through two things, time and attention. Where do we spend our time and where do we put our attention?

Exactly. And I think what you're talking about is there are skills. If we want to have society, a culture, a work culture where we don't have overwork, where we can have caring responsibilities and be the CEOs, we need different skills. And I think that skills of identifying what is actually really important and what is not, and when do you need. To meet and when do you not.Those are important skills, and I don't Think anybody is teaching them.And not many people have them innate because it's so much easier just to be present and turn. I mean, sometimes it's quite relaxing to be at a meeting because it's a break from doing actual work.

Yeah, right. How many meetings have you been to where everybody's sort of secretly answering their emails and then at the end of the. The end of the meeting, nobody's really quite sure what you've done during the meeting. And your emails aren't even all that good because you're not really paying attention. You know, you're sort of splitting your attention. I think that you're absolutely right. And you bring up a really important point, which is , these are all about skills and developing skills. And when you think about it, who do we promote into management? We promote sort of individual contributors who are really good at what they do. And then we think, oh, let's put you into management, and then we give you no training and we just turn you loose. Managing is really hard. It is an incredible skill. It's an art and a science, and it's hard enough to do in sort of like the factory model that we have, which is the walking around. And, you know, you must be working because I can see you, you know, which is really what you have a lot of. And you saw that even in the pandemic, those are sort of cultures that don't trust their workers. And if I can't see you, then I'm going to buy all this surveillance equipment and surveil you electronically. You saw just a spike in surveillance equipment. And I think what's important for managers to recognize is in those surveillance cultures, they don't perform as well as cultures of high trust. The morale is lower, the productivity is lower. People feel less loyalty or motivation to be engaged in those kinds of work environments. So developing skills and creating cultures of trust are incredibly important. As we move into a new era of work, you know, we talk about the future of work. Well, it's already here, you know, you know, AI, you know, so, so much of technology is already changing, and it's going to continue to change. And so where do we have our most value is in our humanity. And a huge part of our humanity is our desire and need to care, care for ourselves and care for other people that we're not robots. And so we need work to change to make room for that care.

I completely agree. Let's talk about the difficult stuff, which is how to actually change from a culture of overwork. So even someone is listening and they think they have actually got a chance to influence their employer because they're in quite a senior position and the employee listens to them practically. What experiments could they suggest to change the work culture?

Well, you know, and I think that's what's exciting is that when you look at how change happens, it can happen in a lot of different ways. One key thing that I found in my book is how important leadership mindset is. What leaders believe tends to be the culture that they create. When you look at all of these return to office fights all over the world, a lot of it is not based on data or evidence. In fact, the data and evidence are absolutely completely different. Hybrid work is much shorter, people are much more productive, people are happier, healthier, much more well being, the profitability is better. And yet we have all of these sort of fights from on High because CEOs or top leaders, they worked, you know, and became successful in those overwork cultures. And so they have that firm belief that it's. That overrides the data. And so I think that's an important thing to understand is the power of leadership belief. But if you have the ear of someone like that, if you are in a position where you can influence someone, recognize that there have been changes, people have changed their mind. I was at a roundtable discussion and there were some quite senior leaders who said, yeah, and after the pandemic sort of eased, I wanted everybody back in the office. And then my team came and showed me the data and I had to really rethink. Okay, well, maybe I'm not comfortable with this, but maybe let's give it a try. So to kind of move from a hard no to an experimental mindset, I think that's really important. It really goes back to a lot of what I was saying about the COVID disruptions and the short work hours, movement and successful work redesigns is really taking that experimental mindset, talking to the people closest to the work and not only figuring out what are their pain points, you know, people with care responsibilities, what do you need? What would Work better. How could we reorganize things so that you had time for the most important work and you also felt supported and you had time and space for your care, for your life. And so design with people. You know, so many of the COVID disruptions or the work redesigns that fail, are these top down sort of edicts from on high. This is how you do things. And then people are like, what? You didn't ask me anything. This doesn't reflect my life life. This is not what I'm struggling with. Or this is a really dumb idea. Who came up with this? And so the most successful ones sort of share power, if you will. It's really all about power when it comes down to it. You really try to understand both the challenge on the one hand and the, and sort of the vision on the other, what would work better? And then how can we get from here to there and then run experiments? It's like, you know, let's gather data, let's run it as a, let's run it as a pilot. Let's start small, gather the data, kind of get the, get the buy in from the leadership of like, let's just try this, let's see if this works better. And I think that so much of that was happening during the pandemic under such trying situations. I mean, think about it. Childcare facilities were closed, schools were closed. People were incredibly productive while they were trying to, you know, homeschool their children. I mean, unbelievable difficulties. I mean, going to the grocery store was fun. You know, you're taking your life into your hands and people not only managed, but thrived in that. And so much of that was because they, they felt even if they were putting in longer hours, they had more control over it. And you could still have, you know, time to take your children to the park or have dinner with the family. And so there was a, there was a sense of payoff. It's like, okay, I'll work really hard, but then I, I get to have my life too. And so that's a lot of what the return to office is sort of like people feel kind of a sense of betrayal. Like, look, I showed you it could work. You know, why don't you trust me? Why don't you believe me anymore? And now you want to take away... Sometimes some of the workers that I talk to, they talk about sacred time, this sacred time with my family. And so I think that's what I would say to people who have some kind of power, middle managers, people with an ear to leaders, just Keep pushing and start small.

You must have seen in an incredibly number of organizations as part of your research for the book over transforming the daily grind into the quest for a better life. And I'm interested, are there any innovations at the moment that you're really excited about? Any experiments that you've seen that give you butterflies in the stomach?

Well, I've seen some really exciting things, I have to say, you know, and one of the exciting things, there's a company that I profile in the book. It's a company named Blackbaud. And they had been a traditional high tech software firm that had bricks and mortar sort of offices. And then to succeed, to progress up, like many corporations, particularly in the United States, the idea was if you wanted to progress into management, if you wanted to move into the C suite, you had to physically move to a headquarters office. And, you know, again, if you look at the research, a lot of families either are not able to do that, or it tends to be the man who's able to pick up and move and move the whole family and sort of disrupt the whole family. And women tend to be what they call the trailing spouse. Very few, like, when you look at the data and the research, it tends to be very few families who move because the woman has a better opportunity. And so that really, it sort of reinforces traditional gender roles. It reinforces men as breadwinner, sort of prioritizing the man's career. A lot of times, if women don't have kind of like an ability for digital or remote work, then their career often stalls or you find something sort of secondary, you know, so it's just, it's not a good system for the way that so many families live, which are out of necessity, tend to be two income families, you know, just to pay the bills. So I think what was exciting is during the pandemic, Blackbaud went through that very process that I talked about, you know, really working with the people kind of closest to the work. Like, what are your pain points? Where are you suffering? What would work better? And again, really redefining the value. What is it that we're doing? What's most important? What is more important than sitting in an office in some city, you know, what is the real work that we're doing? And then what they did is they found that they were so, so innovative. They weathered the pandemic so well that they actually ended up going into- They call it a remote first, and I like to call it digital, digital first or networked first kind of work environment. And the Reason I like to use words like digital or networked is because if you use the word remote, you're still implying that the real work is done someplace. And if you're going to be a truly digital or a truly networked environment, it doesn't matter. The real work is being done in a lot of different places. And so I think language really matters in that, in that instance. And so what was exciting is when they decided to go digital first, you know, you didn't have to go to a certain bricks and mortar city just to, you know, to get onto a management or leadership track. And what they found is over time their leadership ranks became much more diverse. All sorts of different people could rise because you didn't have to move, you didn't have to be a trailing spouse. You know, there were so many more opportunities open. And I think that that's really exciting to me to see. When you kind of blow up old systems that don't really make any sense, it's better, you know, you get better work for the company, but you also create so much more opportunity for not just workers with care responsibilities, but workers with disabilities, workers of color, all sorts of diversity, which is what you really want. You know, that's going to make your organization better. It's going to be more reflective of the population and that's also how we get to a more equitable society.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about people in positions of real, well, seniority, I guess. So last week we had a day with our group of senior fellows. So they are exec directors, senior directors, even a CEO amongst them. And we talked and they were struggling with overwork as much as everybody and. But they also recognized that it was partly because of the way that they were used to working. But obviously there's no. They don't have a boss apart from the board. But also the work never stops, really doesn't. And the buck does stop with you. So how do you, if you're in that type of situation, how do you change your own working approach from overwork, which is feels safe, sometimes working long hours feels really safe, to stopping, setting boundaries, trying to focus just on value added work, if you know what that is.

Yeah, yeah, it's such a good question. And you know, look, you know, I struggle with overwork as well. You know, I mean, I wrote this book while working full time at the Better Life Lab. That was probably really dumb. That was a lot of work. So recognizing that sometimes there will be what some people call code red, there will just Be times of I will not always be writing a book and working full time. There might, there might be some big project, there might be some deadline, you know, so there will be those periods where it will spike, where it will feel like, this is important, we have to do this now. So I recognize that. I think a lot of it though, is you. It's not always, it doesn't always have to be like that. You know, it's not always a life or death emergency. It's not always like, pitch in for let's work 24/7. And when you look at the data, when you work that way, maybe you can last for about six weeks, but the data shows that after that, working those long hours, you're less productive over time than if you had worked sort of a rational schedule all along. So, you know, yes, code red, fine, I get it. But don't think it's going to last for more than six weeks because then it's going to start being counterproductive. And I think that's an important thing for people to recognize. Is that what the research shows is that the longer you work and you kind of like drive yourself, you know, you're pushing yourself and it's like, ah, the work never ends. I've just. And just one more thing, and one more thing, and one more thing, you get to this point of diminishing returns. Like some people call it the productivity cliff. Like after about 50 hours a week, your productivity just falls. Because what happens? You get tired. We're human beings, we need rest, we need recovery. Your thinking gets fuzzier, you make more mistakes, you have to go back and repeat stuff, you have to redo it because you didn't do it well the first time. And so I think that's the important thing to remember too. It's like it might feel like the work never stops. And I get that. I mean, I understand. And particularly if you work in places where, you know, you're not making a certain number of widgets, you know, a lot of knowledge work, when do you know when you're done? That's hard, you know, and so I think sometimes it just does come down to putting boundaries around setting expectations that aren't too high. You know, sometimes we start the day, it's like, I'm going to do these 70 things and I think we have to pare it back. What's one thing? What are three things? You know, maybe three big things that are the most important that I'm going to work on this week, that I'm going to focus on. You can call them the big rocks or the, you know, the most value, but find a time to schedule them into your calendar. I mean, we did some research, and it was. It was amazing how many people we talked to would say, I've been busy all day long. I've just been flying and running to different meetings and answering emails. And then I get to the end of the day and I haven't even started the most important thing. And so then they take work home and it steals time away from their family. They don't rest or they'll, you know, work over the weekends. And a lot of that is because, you know, if you've got something big to do, you don't put it on your calendar. Well, when are you going to do it? We just sort of assume it's going to happen. There's a real value to being very intentional about creating an intentional schedule based on taking that moment to just stop and pause. What's the one thing, the most important thing, and where am I going to do it? And kind of create that space in your calendar to make it happen and something as simple as that. It's amazing how many people don't do that and just assume the work's going to get done. But I write about sort of thinking about work in three ways. Sort of the work, the real work, that gives you a sense of, you know, fulfillment and meaning, that creates the most value. There's the work around the work, the emails and the meetings that should support that real work, but that oftentimes becomes the work. You know, that's sort of like rushing around. It doesn't really lead you anywhere. And then the third sort of concentric circle that I think of is the performance of work, where that busyness of, like, rushing around and going to meetings makes it look like you're being productive. And so then you kind of get a charge out of it or you get rewarded for it. But it takes you, I mean, it takes you further and further away from the core of what you want to do, where you feel like you could grow, and also what the, What the organization really needs. So we've sort of created these perverse incentives to do the wrong kind of work and spend a lot of time doing it, then robs us of our lives. So that's what I want people to kind of begin to disrupt those cycles and see how you can do it individually. And then in your organizations, especially if you lead a team, you know, even as a middle manager, you have a real opportunity, opportunity to create a completely different Experience for yourself and for your team.

Very well said. I'm interested in the topic of making time for care and family care through culture.And I think that's quite a.That's quite an important one. When you write in your book how important it is to, well, that we can only be present with our families if we are able to work in a way that allows us to do that. But what can employers do practically? So the board. What do you want on the board's agenda to be? To change things? Ideally, aside from getting them to read your book. But if we had a society where people could do big jobs, but they could also care for family members, for elders, what should board members do?

Yeah, it's so interesting. I'm so glad that you asked that question. I was just reading a story this morning in the Wall Street Journal about looking at all of these family friendly policies and sort of the public policy. And they looked at Norway and they looked at Hungary and they still said, but why is the birth rate falling? You can have all of these public policies and all for that. I think, you know, the more we can do to support families across the life cycle, the better. You know, I think people think of care as parenting and that is intensive and very important. But, you know, we've got aging societies. We need to take care of our, you know, aging parents and loved ones. Many of us have disabled or ill adult children and we ourselves get sick. So we need to think much bigger about what that, you know, that care is that we want to do and that we need to do. So I was just thinking a lot, reading that Wall Street Journal story, like there was puzzled, like, well, why do these public policies, why is this not enough? And it's not enough because we need to change our work cultures as well. And I remember in the first book, I spent some time in Denmark and then talking to some women there, like, well, you've got all these great policies. Why is that not enough? Why are you not at gender parity? And one of the main reasons why is because they haven't done the work to change work. And that was what was so interesting, like going to Iceland. They are beginning to do that. They are trying to figure out what do we need to do to change not just public policy, but work itself. And so that's where I would say, you know, to the board and to the CEOs, you have so much power to make things better for people all across the, you know, all across the life cycle, you know, with care responsibilities across the lifecycle. And it Goes right back down to, you know, figuring out what's most valuable and dispensing with kind of the performance and the busyness culture and rewarding the wrong things. You know, it's interesting. You could make well, being human well being and work life balance performance metrics. That could be one of the things that you, you know, that shows your values. Like, well, you know, yes, you got this big project done, but did everybody quit, you know, or they did everybody, you know, is everybody so burned out, did they not see their children, you know, for five weeks? There are ways that you can infuse equity and care and human wellbeing into the metrics that you use for what makes for a successful company, organization and even country. I mean, I think that's one of the things that's interesting too. We use growth and GDP as ways that we measure the wealth of nations. And what if we turned that on its head and instead started measuring human wellbeing and the quality of life? Because isn't that why we're all here and our brief lives on Earth to make that the opportunity to live a good life much more equitable and available to much more, to many more people.

Beautifully said. I'm going to challenge you.

You've Been challenging me all along.

So I'm.

Going to keep really making me think here.

So.

No, it's awesome. It's great.

So I, I'm going to challenge you. To imagine someone listening to this who thinks, well, my organization just, I'm fighting for the smallest things. I have to put in an appeal just to be allowed to pick up my children an hour earlier. They're definitely not excited about creating a changing the work culture. So I'm interested for that person, what small actionable steps could he or she take today to begin transforming their own daily grind, even if their workplace isn't entirely supportive of change?

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, kind of going back to that, like, what can you control as an individual? Well, first of all, it goes back to really defining what's valuable to you and also recognizing that a career can be long. Just to go back to my own experience, when my daughter was born, my second child, I really just wanted more time. I wanted more time with my kids. I just, you know, as an older mom, I was tired, but I also just, you know, I also had some fertility issues. It wasn't clear that I was ever going to be able to have children. I just really wanted more time with my kids. And so I asked for a four day work week And I was told by the powers that be at the time that if I did, I would ruin my career. And, you know, I remember being so angry with that and I just said, well, you know, that's just a chance I'm going to have to take. So I would, I did not have the support to try to have more time with my kids. And it was so important to me that I'm like, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to take that chance. They're little for such a short period of time. And I remember I would, I still wrote important stories. I still did like big projects. And I remember, I remember there was one editor who kind of like sort of muttered under his breath. It's like, oh, she did that on a four day work week, you know, as if I like, all of a sudden my brain fell out of my brain, you know, out of my head or something, you know, and it was frustrating. I was mommy tracked, no doubt about it. And I saw, you know, my star diminished. You know, I did, I violated the ideal worker norm at my newspaper. And that was hard for a while. That really was hard. But now my kids are in their 20s, you know, I've just written my second book. I didn't ruin my career. It took me on a different path and I'm really glad it did. And I just, I am grateful every moment that I had. I took Mondays off and we called it Mommy Mondays. And we would just do fun, weird things, you know, and that is time that I will never get that back, you know, and so I think that's where, that's where it's important to think, think about the long game. And there are plenty of people who did, who, you know, who didn't work the four day work week, even though if they wanted to. And they're still slogging away. And my husband keeps reminding me of that. It's like, yeah. And you know, how many of them would give their right arm to have just written a second book? It's like, yeah, I'm really, I did what I wanted with my kids and I'm doing what I want with my life right now, even though I didn't play by the rules. And I ended up leaving the Washington Post because it was a super structure, it was super rigid and it didn't work for me. And I worked flexibly when it wasn't, when you weren't supposed to, you know, but I showed that you can, you absolutely can do it. Sometimes you can be transparent about it. Sometimes you have to Be a little stealthy. And I was super stealthy. But then I found a lot of other people were really stealthy. Like guys that, you know, had reputations of being these like monster, you know, ideal workers. And they'd say like, yeah, I'm out on a story. But they'd be at their daughter's soccer game. I love that. And I think that that's what we need to recognize is that you can do big and important stuff and go to your daughter's soccer game and work a four day work week when your kids are little or when it makes sense for you, you know you can do both of those things.

Absolutely. And where can people find out more about you or your book?

So my book has been published by Holt. It's called Overwork, Transforming the Daily Grind and the Quest for a Better Life. And it's available wherever you want to buy books. The first book is called Overwhelmed Work, Love and Play. When no one has the time, it really looks at time pressure and gender roles. I direct the Better Life Lab at New America. So we have a website and a newsletter you can subscribe to where we share our latest research and news about work, family justice and gender equity and care. I have my own website. I am on social media, sort of. I try to be better about that, but I love being in conversation, conversation with people, I love hearing their stories. As a reporter, that's a lot of what I do. And that the book is really a story of. It's a lot of journalism, a lot of other people's stories and I think there's such power in that.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Bridget.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much. And I always love to hear from our listeners. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just go to Verena Hefti and I'd be delighted to hear your feedback and your suggestions or just have you say hi. Likewise, if you do feel passionately about gender equality and you want to support a female led podcast, then please do leave a review and share it with a friend. Just because at the moment podcasting is still a very, very male dominated environment. Most of the top charging podcasts are led by men. I really love all the people who've joined from the podcast, our fellowship program. And if you want to do the same, then please head over to leadersclass.org/Fellowship in order to get access to a community of support to help you combine an ambitious career with young children together with people who have your back. See you next week.