Paul Sullivan 9/30/25

 Zack:  Please tell us a little bit about yourself and then about your caregiver journey.

Paul:  Sure. So, I live outside New York City… I had two goals as a kid. I never wanted to live in my hometown again, and I wanted to write for the New York Times. And both of those worked out well. I went off to a place called college and never went back to my hometown, so that part was easier. The New York Times, a little bit more challenging. But in 2008, I became a columnist, and it's a dream come true. I got married the year before. Our first daughter was born in 2009. In 2010, my first book came out.  In 2012, my second daughter was born, and things were cruising along.

 And in 2013, my caregiver journey changed. My wife decided … to start her own firm. She works in financial services. And I said, you 100 % have to do this … I want to help you. And she said, “Well, I'll be really busy doing this full on.” And I said, “That's okay, I'll become the lead dad.” And she said, “What in the world does that mean?” And I said, “I got this.“

And what it meant was I was going to step into the role of the logistics of life, carry the mental load for the family. At the Company of Dads, we now define the lead dad as the go-to parent, whether he works full-time, part-time, or devotes all of his time to his family. We say in many cases, he's there to support his spouse or partner in whatever they're doing. We say many because 18% of fathers in the US are divorced, widowed, or otherwise single. And we say, if that lead dad is in an office, he's always an ally to working moms and caregivers.

Now, here's the interesting part. From 2013 until 2020, 2021, when COVID happened, I was an undercover lead dad… I am taking my daughters around, being present. I'm still excelling at work. My second book comes out in 2015. My third daughter was born in 2017. I weasel my way into writing about golf for the New York Times, which is, that's my hobby, that's a passion.

But all along, don't sort of put my hand up in my town and say, I'm the lead dad, because most of the caregivers I see are women or nannies or au pairs. Any dad I see will quickly like open his laptop or, you know, put his phone to his ear. And then at work, I've got lovely editors,most of whom are working parents. And of those working parents, the majority are working moms. But I don't want to say I'm the lead dad because I'm afraid that might jeopardize my career. So, I keep all of this quiet. I keep going.

And then, you know, COVID happens, and like many, the millions of people in the United States who are fortunate enough, privileged enough to be able to work remotely, both my wife and I pivoted to working remotely…  The way I was able to be a lead dad and work full-time was to have my kids in school. And if they weren't in school, they were in summer camp. And if they're neither in school or summer camp, we made plans. My dad would come down, we'd have babysitters, we'd take a family vacation. One of us would take time, and it worked. And now we're in this amorphous time where I don't know when this will ever come back. And that's what sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to… see like how many other men are in this role. And that was the big light bulb moment.

There are 25 million men in the United States who are lead dads… And that's a third of all fathers. And the growth is coming from men in their 30s who want to work and live differently. And if there's one thing I suspected, I was in that second group, you know, guys in their 40s. And I was pretty sure that after having this ability to work from home, and however stressful it was to balance things, it also gave us a lot more time with our families… And so that was really the start of this journey of creating what's become the Company of Dads.

Zack: A lot of our audience are in HR, they're managers, they’re working caregivers. I’ve got to peel back just a little bit on your comment that you were afraid you were going to jeopardize your career. Tell us why you felt that way.

Paul:  I am not saying there's any validity to it … at the time, I think it was insecurity. It was not being sure… I've learned subsequently, there was research being done in the 2010s that looked at the penalty that men faced for raising their hand at work, being fully involved fathers. And they were seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs. They got reported to HR for this. Now every working mom in the world will say, Paul, cry me a river. Have you never heard of the motherhood penalty?... You know, I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago. A famous economist there, Milton Friedman, talked about the business of business. You were supposed to leave your human self at home and come to work as just a worker. So, all parents have been penalized for doing this.

And I look at today, yes, do we do work with companies? Do we work with HR leaders? Yes, but these are the most progressive ones out there who see the benefit of not just creating ERGs for parents, but giving those ERGs a budget so they can bring people in and say, How can we make this system work better? And that's a lot of what we do at the Company of Dads. How can we help you make this better so that your highest performing people don't get burnt out, they don't go to a different company?... Like we save you money in retention costs, but it's a big hurdle. And I'll be honest, it's become more difficult in the past year as HR has had to do a lot more with a lot less.

But we really talk to HR leaders and say, this is a benefit to you that allows your employees to be open and honest about what they're doing. It doesn't mean they're going to work any less hard. It's going to mean that they're going to appreciate what you say because every company says, “We believe in family first. We support caregivers.” But if they don't, where the rubber meets the road is when somebody actually has a care emergency. And if those HR leaders don't support those people, that trust bond is broken forever, and you can't fix it. If one of those people is one of your high performers, they're going to find another job, and you've lost them.

Selma: Back when you started your Company of Dads in 2022. You said you started it basically because there were no resources to support men in your role. Has that changed any?

Paul: I've seen a lot more discussion around it. I think we've played a role at the Company of Dads because I brought to this a media background. So, within a couple of months of starting the Company of Dads, the Wall Street Journal wrote about what we're doing. Subsequently, they read about me again and put me on the front page. ABC News, my feature piece on the Company of Dads, was on the Today Show with Craig Melvin over the summer. So, we really push to raise awareness.

There's another group called Equimundo that does a lot of research. There's a sort of academic named Richard Reeves, who wrote a great book called Of Boys and Men. So, there's greater awareness that you need to help girls, but that doesn't mean that you don't help boys as well, because if there's this imbalance, it doesn't work out in the end. The Chamber of Mothers has done a lot of stuff to bring fathers in, because one of the things we talk about is, when you can allow people to be open and honest at work, and you can allow men to be lead dads, that's not one more benefit for men, it's actually a benefit for working moms. Because suddenly the discussion’s around care, the discussion’s about who's going to leave work early, who's going to get the call. It doesn't become a female issue. It doesn't become gendered. It becomes a caregiving issue. And once you're seeing that both men and women are caregivers, that causes companies to shift their perspective because… 90 % of working Americans they're going to have a caregiving emergency in their working career, and they're going to need to tend to that. When we start talking openly and honestly about what needs to be, to get done, that's when other people come together.

Short answer is yes, there's become a lot more awareness around this because it's about, you know, our tagline is helping families fulfill their full potential. We are called the Company of Dads because I'm a dad, but this is really about helping families function better in communities and helping working families function better in the office.

Zack:  What are you seeing as the biggest challenge to getting this mission of yours through to companies for employees to listen and act?

Paul:  The biggest challenge is the budget. We have some great corporate partners… but a lot of companies love the idea of this, but then to get it across the finish line, they don't know where it falls. Like, who is going to pay for this?... And I always tell the story about this friend who worked in financial services. I won't name and shame the company, but the company talked all the time about how much they cared about the whole employee, about employee wellness, about all the benefits. And then what happened was… his mother-in-law had a massive stroke, got airlifted to a hospital, and nearly died. He said, Look, I've got to work from home. I got to be there for the kids. My wife's going to be there with her mom. And the first week it was fine. Of course, … take all the time you want. Second week, Hey, it's all right. Just you know, a couple of people, not me, a couple of people are grumbling at work. Third week, Hey, what's going on?...  By the fourth week, they're saying, Look, you’ve got to get back to work. This is a giant financial services firm on Wall Street… And what happened? He went back to work after four weeks because he didn't have a choice. But six months later, he got another job… They didn't lose just that one employee. They lost 12 years of institutional knowledge because they broke the trust with him.

…  And so, we do two things. We do keynote talks. That's probably 90 % of what we do in companies, but the 10% of what we do is more important in some ways… And that is to do manager training and manager training around messaging because if you tell stories like, boy, we hear this too often, it happens with men and women… If we have these great parental leave programs and we don't teach managers how to message them… they're not going to take advantage of them…. So, that's really what it comes down to, bringing that message into 2025 and not pretending that we're still living in 1985.

Selma:  So based on your example, what changes do you think companies should make to their policies to better support working dads like yourself, as well as working parents in general?

Paul:  So, two things, one on the structural level, helping these managers message correctly. I mean, so many women will tell me the story that I went to my manager, told him I was pregnant, and he said something other than congratulations. Congratulations is the only thing you should ever say when somebody tells you that they're pregnant…. The other part is helping those managers say, Okay, this is our policy…. So, we can take out the randomness, the chance of the manager lottery. That helps the organization.

For individuals, we talk to them about being more open and honest about what they need. We have proposed three things, Care Days, Care Shifts, and Care Confabs. Care Confabs are a rebranding of parental ERG, parenting ERG, but giving them more teeth, making sure that if you have a hundred people, making sure it's as close as you can, 50 moms and 50 dads showing up, not 98 moms and two dads.

The second, care days, that's to say like, allowing people to brand when they're taking time off, allow them to brand it. And then it takes away the stigma that this is a personal day or vacation day…  But the most important one is, these care shifts that we talk about, and the care shift allows people to opt into agreeing to work synchronously a certain number of hours a day and doing all the other non-client-facing colleague-facing work asynchronously… an easy way to do this is you work nine to three, and then you fill in the rest of time either before or you keep working through. And the pushback I'll get is like, Well, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard. What types of companies do that? And I say, Well, there's a guy named David Booth, the University of Chicago Business School is named after him. He runs Dimensional Fund Advisors, which is one of the most successful investment companies of the 20th century. And he instituted a version of care shifts a couple of years ago. Why? Because he's soft because he cares? No, because he doesn't want to lose those top employees. And he realizes that if you can have somebody locked in for those six hours, they're going to be grateful. They're not going to leave. And they're still going to get all the other stuff done. They're going to reply to all those emails later on. They're going to do any of their presentations that they need to do later on. But you're treating them like adults. And so those are some of the things that we talk about. That we say, these are small changes that don't cost you tons of money, but they will save you millions of dollars on the back end because you retain your top workers, and you don't have to pay to try to replace them and then get that person up to speed with all that institutional knowledge he or she doesn't have.

Zack:  If you were to go back today with all that, you know, all that you've created, all that you've done, what are three pieces of advice you'd give Paul in the beginning of his journey?

Paul: To be honest, I manage it pretty well. But what advice? How did I manage it pretty well?... Something that really helped me succeed in this is to be absolutely crazy, maniacal, lunatic about my calendar. And that was the family calendar, my work calendar, seeing my wife's work calendar. I can plan to do anything. I just can't plan to be spontaneous. And so having that calendar and having everybody on the same page, to the point now that my 16-year-old, my 13-year-old, do have iPhones. They enter stuff in the calendar. Cause I know if it's not there, it doesn't exist. And that helps us plan our lives better….  

Selma:  As a former undercover dad, what do you think that looks like in the average company out there today? Are there still a lot of undercover working caregivers?

Paul:  Yes, undercover dads, undercover moms. This is a pronounced problem. How do you change it? Literally starts at the top. It literally starts with that manager. And I don't mean like the CEO. That's too much to ask for. But that people manager, that person with 20 employees, 30 employees, 100 employees, that person putting on his calendar, like honest, not for out of office, but putting on his calendar -- I have to leave to take my daughter to swimming. I'll be in the office late today because I'm taking my father to a doctor's appointment. We've done podcasts on this, have tons of examples… The CEO of Bic, the pen company that's since moved on, he's got four daughters. He's very open and honest about what he needs to do. And what does that do? That shows that it's acceptable to be not a parent, not a caregiver, but a human in the workplace. And that is so powerful and pronounced. Without that person who cannot be fired, who cannot be penalized, that person who has had tremendous success, without that person, man or woman saying, I'm going to put this on my calendar and I'm going to talk openly about it, that cascades down…. So, if you are a leader, an HR leader, or a business leader, your example is powerful. And that example that you set is going to determine whether or not you have a workforce that feels open and comfortable and productive for caregivers.

Zack:  Your calendar idea is excellent, and it doesn't cost a dime. So, the budget shouldn't be an issue. Can you tell us where people can find you and why somebody would want to contact you?

Paul: The CompanyofDads.com. And they'd want to find me for two reasons. If they're an individual lead dad, we have a whole section of media, of community events that we give away for free. We have a weekly newsletter called The Dad. It helps people feel included and involved, and to show that they're not alone as lead dads. And the second part is, we have a whole corporate education section. So, if you're an HR leader, like, okay, what this guy's saying is kind of interesting. I think you may be able to help my company; you can go there. So those are the two reasons people would come to the Companyofdads.com.

Zack and Selma:  Thank you!