Ten years ago a groundbreaking cross-generational study revealed that greater freedom and new constraints were leading fewer young people to choose parenthood. In the intervening years, the decision to have a family has not gotten easier.
3031 SH-DH
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Research Interests: leadership development, work/life integration, dynamics of change
Links: CV, Total Leadership, Work and Life Podcast, HBR Digital Articles, LinkedIn, Twitter @StewFriedman, Work/Life Integration Project, MOOC: Leading the Life You Want
Stew Friedman is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been on the faculty since 1984 and since 2019 is emeritus. He worked for five years in the mental health field before earning his PhD from the University of Michigan. In 1991, as founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program (now called the McNulty Leadership Program), he initiated the School’s core leadership courses, including the Learning Teams. A few years later, he launched the Leadership Fellows. More recently, he cofounded Wharton’s P3: Purpose, Passion, Principles — a co-curricular experience run collaboratively by students, faculty, and administrators. He also founded Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project in 1991.
Friedman has been recognized by the biennial Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers repeatedly since 2011. He was honored with its 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award as the world’s #1 expert in talent management and was inducted in its Hall of Fame in 2023. He was listed among HR Magazine’s most influential thought leaders, chosen by Working Mother as one of America’s most influential men who have made life better for working parents, and presented with the Families and Work Institute’s Work Life Legacy Award.
While on leave from Wharton for two-and-a-half years, Friedman ran a 50-person department as the senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company. In partnership with the CEO, he launched a corporate-wide portfolio of initiatives designed to transform Ford’s culture; 2500+ managers per year participated. Near the end of his tenure at Ford, an independent research group (ICEDR) said the Leadership Development Center was a “global benchmark” for companies striving to accelerate the growth of their people. At Ford, he created Total Leadership, which has been a popular Wharton course since 2001 and is used by individuals and companies worldwide, including as a primary intervention in a multi-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health on improving the careers and lives of women in medicine and by 135,000+ students in Friedman’s first MOOC on Coursera. Participants in this program complete an intensive series of challenging exercises that increase their leadership capacity, performance, and well-being in all parts of life, while working in peer-to-peer coaching relationships.
His research is widely cited, including among Harvard Business Review‘s “Ideas that Shaped Management,” and he has written two bestselling books, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life (2008) and Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (2014), now being taught as a MOOC on Coursera. His third Harvard Business Press book was Parents Who Lead: The Leadership Approach You Need to Parent with Purpose, Fuel Your Career, and Create a Richer Life (2020). In 2024, Wharton School Press published a new edition of his landmark study of two generations of Wharton students, Baby Bust, 10th Anniversary Edition: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family. Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? (2000) was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the field’s best books. In Integrating Work and Life: The Wharton Resource Guide (1998) Stew edited the first collection of learning tools for building leadership skills for integrating work and life.
Winner of many teaching awards, he appears regularly in business media (The New York Times cited the “rock star adoration” he inspires in his students). Friedman serves on a number of boards and is an in-demand speaker, consultant, coach, workshop leader, public policy advisor (to the U.S. Departments of Labor and State, the United Nations, and two White House administrations), and advocate for family-supportive policies in the private sector. Follow on Twitter @StewFriedman and LinkedIn, read his 50+ digital articles HBR.org, and tune in to his podcast Work and Life with Stew Friedman (since 2014).
Ten years ago a groundbreaking cross-generational study revealed that greater freedom and new constraints were leading fewer young people to choose parenthood. In the intervening years, the decision to have a family has not gotten easier.
Despite the business world’s obsession with leadership, what it takes to be an effective leader is often not commonly understood nor commonly practiced. In this course, the focus is on growing the student's capacity as a leader. Students will learn practical and customized lessons about how to improve their performance and results at work. We use the evidence from the science of leadership and teams to understand the key tactics and principles that will enable students to better lead others as they strive to attain shared goals. We will cover topics such as leadership effectiveness, adaptive leadership, empowering leadership as well as how to motivate, inspire, and lead teams effectively (e.g., decision making, coordination, coaching). This course offers students the opportunity to learn and practice the skills needed to become better leaders, now and in the future.
More than 20 years ago Stewart D. Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, conducted a search of 900 business professionals and their relationships with their children.
So, in 2018, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, the emeritus practice professor revisited his research to examine how it may have become even more relevant.
Friedman found that factors such as parents’ discretion over work, control over workload, and the psychological interference of employment in family life all correlated with children’s behavior.
“A father’s cognitive interference of work on family and relaxation time—that is, a father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device—was linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems,” Friedman wrote.
The findings went deeper when it came to mothers. The study found that working moms who had authority and discretion around work had mentally healthier children.
However, what she did in her free time at home also impacted her offspring: “Mothers spending time on themselves—on relaxation and self-care—and not so much on housework, was associated with positive outcomes for children.
“It’s not just a matter of mothers being at home versus at work, it’s what they do when they’re at home with their non-work time,” Friedman added.
A new study should reassure parents who work long hours (and worry those who are distracted at home).
Combat burnout by conducting your own stakeholder assessment
Wharton health care management professor reflects on the lessons of COVID-19 and assess future pandemic preparedness.…Read More
Knowledge @ Wharton - 2025/03/12