Ep 162. Special Edition: Parents Who Lead
“We wrote this book to bring the science of leadership to the art of parenting.”
Stew Friedman and Alyssa Westring
This is a special edition of the Work and Life show. Stew Friedman’s new book, Parents Who Lead: The Leadership Approach You Need to Parent with Purpose, Fuel Your Career, and Create a Richer Life, co-authored with Alyssa Westring, has just been published, it reached Amazon’s #1 Bestseller in Work Life, and is a nominee for Dan Pink, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Club. This episode features four working parents who were in the Parents Who Lead lab as subjects in the research for the book. They talk about their experience in the workshop and what they took away from it. If you’re a working parent, or know of and care about mothers or fathers who work, you’ll find this evidence-based guide for action to be not only practical, but fun.
Stew’s guests in the first half of the show are Daniel Chen who was Head of Business Development at Quicken, and now leads Business Development at a tech startup called Brightside in San Francisco, and Adrienne Demory, who has spent the last five years working for Cultural Care Au Pair as an Area Coordinator supporting au pairs and families as well as managing a group of Local Childcare Consultants in Southern California. The second half features Jason Collier and his wife, Heidi Hess von Ludewig. Jason is a product manager in Raleigh, NC with a background in software development and design thinking. Heidi is a strategic business consultant and change manager for internal programs at Red Hat software.
In this episode, Stew explores the challenges faced by today’s working fathers and mothers and the ways in which the science of leadership, based on a large body of research, can be fruitfully applied to the art of parenting. His four guests, all working parents, talk candidly about the obstacles they faced in our Parents Who Lead lab and what it takes to lead as a parent and to improve their family and personal lives and their performance at work. They tell compelling stories that illustrate the power of having a collective leadership vision with your partner in parenting; the value of small, smart, and intentional experiments in how you work and live ; and the way that bringing others along by engaging in fresh, meaningful ways, especially with your children, can help make sustainable change that works, for all parts of a working parent’s life.
Listen below or on ApplePodcasts, GooglePlay, Spotify…