Working Backwards: My Daughters #girldad

In this note9 sections

1. 01The scoreboard I can’t see
2. 02They’re watching
3. 03The best argument against me
4. 04The return trip
5. 05What nobody tells the daughter
6. 06Don’t make her guess
7. 07Like their mom
8. 08Where I could be wrong
9. 09The gift

A note before we start. This is the second note in a series I call Working Backwards. The first one, Field Note Nº 17, was about what the dying teach the living. This one is about my daughters. Next will be my team, then my company. Every number is sourced on the page. Most of the research on fathers shows strong links, not proof, and I’ll say where it stops.

01

The scoreboard I can’t see

I’m a CEO, so I run my life on numbers. Census, turnover, survey scores, where we rank against every home health and hospice company in the country. I like a benchmark and I like beating it.

Last week we got one I’ve wanted for a long time. Fortune named HealthView No. 24 on its 2026 Best Workplaces for Women list. I’ll come back to that one, because it means more to me than the others.

Being a dad doesn’t come with a scoreboard. Nobody sends you a quarterly report. You show up every day, you do your best, and you find out how you did about twenty years later.

So I did what I always do and went looking for the numbers.

Last year, dads whose youngest kid was under six spent about an hour and forty minutes a day on childcare. Once the youngest turns six, like mine just did, it drops to about 32 minutes. We do about three times what dads did in 1965, and most of us still say it isn’t enough.

A dad’s childcare time, by age of the youngest

Youngest under 6fathers, minutes a dayabout 1 hr 40 minYoungest 6 to 17fathers, minutes a dayabout 32 min

In a Pew survey, 63 percent of dads said they spend too little time with their kids.

Thirty two minutes a day. That’s the average I’m measured against now, and I don’t want to be average at the one thing I’ll care about most at the end.

Then I did the math that actually keeps me up at night. My oldest has about nine summers left before she’s eighteen. My youngest has about twelve. Twenty one summers total. I can’t buy more of them. All I get to do is decide what goes in them.

Count your summers

How many summers are left?

Kids leave home around eighteen. Every summer before then is one you get to spend on purpose. Put in your kids’ ages.

Child 1 age

Child 2 age

Add a child

21 summers, total. You can’t buy more. You can only decide what goes in them.

Set to my girls, ages 9 and 6. Change the ages to see your own count.

In Working Backwards I wrote that when my daughters have my attention, they have all of it. I meant it. It’s also a lot easier to write that than to live it on a Tuesday night when my phone won’t stop buzzing.

And the research has a warning in it for a dad like me. When kids are little, the raw number of hours with their parents doesn’t predict much. Warmth does. How close a kid feels to her dad matters more than how often she sees him. Once they’re teenagers, the time starts to count, and it shows up in who they become. My girls are about to walk into those years. The hours that matter most are still ahead of me, and I can’t spend them at the office.

02

They’re watching

There’s a picture of the three of us walking through a tunnel on the way to the beach. I’m a few steps ahead and the girls are right behind me.

I love that picture. The beach is our favorite place together. I know one day we’ll walk down that same tunnel and I won’t be Daddy anymore, just Dad, because they grew up. We’ll still love going to the beach together. Anytime I’m near an ocean, anywhere, I think about my girls.

Right now they’re still a few steps behind me, following wherever I go. Which means they’re watching everything I do.

In 2014, psychologists at the University of British Columbia asked kids seven to thirteen what they wanted to be when they grew up, then looked at what happened at home. Daughters whose dads did more of the housework aimed wider. They named jobs nobody had put in a box for them. What the dad actually did around the house predicted his daughter’s ambitions better than what he said he believed.

She wasn’t listening to his speech. She was watching him do the dishes.

That stopped me, because it’s what I preach about companies. In our manifesto, Culture Is Not a Values Poster, I wrote that people don’t follow what you hang on the wall. They follow what they watch you do when it costs you something. I just never pictured the proof standing at my own kitchen sink.

When Korn Ferry interviewed women who became CEOs, a lot of them grew up in the same kind of house. Boys and girls had the same chores. Everybody got a voice at the dinner table. Nobody made a speech about it, that’s just how the house ran.

My daughters are running that study on me every day, and I’ll never get to read their notes.

03

The best argument against me

The pushback I hear most, sometimes from my own head, is that you can’t build a fast-growing company and be a present dad. Something gives.

Some of that is true. I miss things. Some nights I’m on a plane and some nights the work follows me home. I haven’t figured it out and I’m not going to pretend I have.

But it runs both ways. Researchers found that when a CEO has a daughter, his company tends to treat its people better. In Denmark, when a male CEO had his first daughter, the women working for him saw their pay go up. My girls change how I run the company, and how I run the company is part of what they’re learning about the world. I don’t get to be one man at home and another one at work. They see both.

04

The return trip

This is where it connects to hospice, and most families don’t learn this part until they’re in it.

The daughter you raise is very likely the one sitting next to your bed at the end.

In The Yield I wrote about the living rooms where the hardest years actually happen. A father who can’t do the stairs anymore. A daughter running his medications between her own shifts. A recliner that quietly turned into a bed. In our business that’s not a figure of speech. It’s one of the most common homes we walk into.

Daughters give their aging parents about twice the hours of care that sons do. When an older parent lands in the hospital and can’t decide for themselves, close to six in ten of the people deciding for them are daughters.

Who cares for an aging parent

Daughtershours of care a month12.3 hoursSonshours of care a month5.6 hours

Among hospitalized older adults who needed someone to decide for them, 58.9 percent of those deciding were daughters. A hospital study, not hospice.

We see it every week. The one learning the medications. The one up at three in the morning. The one making the hardest phone calls. Very often it’s a daughter.

Monica, who runs operations at HealthView, wrote in her Forbes column about a woman she cared for in hospice. Every visit, the mom apologized to her daughter for needing so much care. Every visit, the daughter said the same thing back.

“Mom, I’m not keeping score.”

I can’t get that line out of my head.

If I do this right, the same little girl I picture on that dance floor might be the one holding my hand at the end. I’ll walk her into her life. One day she might walk me out of mine. I want her to be able to say that line and mean it. And I want to be the kind of dad who never made her feel like anybody was keeping score.

05

What nobody tells the daughter

Most people think hospice is a place you go to die. Most of the time it’s not a place at all. It comes to the house. A nurse, an aide, a social worker, a chaplain, showing up in the same living room where she’s been doing it all by herself.

If her dad is on Medicare and his doctor expects he has six months or less, it’s covered. Medicare also requires a hospice to have nursing available around the clock. So when his breathing changes at three in the morning, she calls, and somebody who knows what that means picks up. A lot of the time that nurse gets in her car and drives over.

This is what breaks my heart. About half of Americans on Medicare who die now use hospice, and half of them get eighteen days or less. Eighteen days. That’s not enough time to say everything you want to say.

It doesn’t end when he dies, either. Medicare requires the hospice to stay with the family through their grief for up to a year. In our world the daughter is part of who we take care of. She doesn’t have to do the last chapter alone, and she doesn’t have to do the year after it alone.

06

Don’t make her guess

Most families have the hardest conversation of their lives in a hospital hallway, with a doctor waiting and nobody sure what Mom or Dad would have wanted.

If you’re a parent, odds are your kid is the one who makes that call. Maybe the daughter you taught to ride a bike.

The kindest thing you can do for her is not make her guess. Pick your person. Tell them out loud what you want and what you don’t. Then write it down. An advance directive is one of the only gifts you can give your kids that keeps working after you’re gone.

If you don’t know where to start, there’s a free tool I point people to called PREPARE for Your Care. It was built at UCSF. It walks you through what to think about and who to pick, and it gives you an easy-to-read advance directive for your state, in English or Spanish. Do it this week. The link is on the page.

Don’t make her guess

Pick your person this week

1. Choose who would make medical decisions for you if you couldn’t.
2. Tell them out loud what you’d want, and what you wouldn’t.
3. Write it down in an advance directive for your state.

Start free at PREPARE for Your Care →

PREPARE was developed at UCSF and tested in two randomized trials. It’s free, in English and Spanish, with an easy-to-read advance directive for every state. About the evidence

My teams see what happens when families skip this. A daughter in a hallway trying to remember a conversation that never happened. I don’t want that for my girls.

And when people get to the end, what do they want? Almost all of them say the same two things. They want to say goodbye to the people they love, and they want to make peace with their family. Nobody’s list has their title on it.

That’s the audit at the end. It’s the only performance review that counts, and you can’t cram for it the night before.

07

Like their mom

Both of my girls have told me they want to be nurses, like their mom.

When their mom gets home from a hospital shift, they ask about the patients she saw that day. She tells them what she can, the HIPAA-appropriate version. I see the curiosity in their eyes, especially my oldest.

My youngest is more interested in me. She wants to know who my actual boss is, and how she could get to be the one in charge. I’m pretty sure that’s because she’s also the one who doesn’t like having a lot of rules.

So I tell her the truth. Your boss is your customer. For me that’s the government and the people we serve. If we don’t stay compliant and take good care of patients, we don’t have a business. And my team is my boss too, because a company is just a group of people going after the same goal. No team, no mission.

The nurse part gets me, because I know exactly where nurses work. Last week’s field note was about getting nurses off the wall and into the chair where decisions get made. I didn’t say it then, but I was thinking about my girls the whole time.

Almost nine out of ten nurses in this country are women. When I look at HealthView, I’m looking at a team made up mostly of women. Every one of them is somebody’s daughter. A lot of them are somebody’s mom.

So when I work backwards from the place I’d want my daughters to walk into someday, I already know what I’m supposed to be building. A place where a nurse is trusted. Where her manager picks up the phone. Where she has a real path into the leadership room and never has to choose between her patients and her own kids.

At HealthView, nurses get promoted into running the business. They learn the business part on the job. What’s different is they already know the actual job. If we want care companies to stop looking and feeling the same, more of them have to be run by people who’ve done the work. I’m doing my part by starting one and building a platform for it, and I hope more companies follow.

We’re all going to be a customer of death someday. Think about it that way and you want someone running the place who knows how care actually gets delivered.

That’s why the Fortune list means the most to me. We’ve been named one of the Best Small Workplaces in America two years running, and 98 percent of our team says it’s a great place to work. At a typical American company, it’s 57. I’m proud of all of it. But No. 24 on Best Workplaces for Women is the receipt. There are 150 companies on that list this year. We’re the only home health and hospice company among the 50 small and medium ones, and one of only two in home health and hospice on the whole thing. It’s other people’s daughters telling a stranger, in an anonymous survey, that the road we’re paving is real. A hundred percent of our team says management is approachable. A hundred percent say they make a difference here, and a hundred percent are proud to tell people where they work. One of them wrote that leadership “genuinely listens to feedback,” and that when someone on the team made a suggestion in a meeting, management put it in place within a week.

I came from a family with no business people, which I wrote about in My Why. I heard no so many times I almost thought it was my middle name. Nobody paved a road for me. I’m paving one for my girls, and for every daughter who walks through our door. Maybe one day it leads my youngest to the chair she keeps asking me about.

08

Where I could be wrong

Most of the research on dads shows links, not proof. Good dads tend to come with other good things, like steadier homes and more money, and it’s hard to pull those apart. I’m using it as a benchmark, not a law.

I could be wrong that my girls become nurses. They’re six and nine. They might want to be swimmers, or singers, or something nobody’s invented yet. That’s fine with me.

And I could be wrong about the balance. Ask me in nine summers.

09

The gift

What I really want for them is what I got lucky enough to find. The gift God gave them, and the courage to use it for good.

My gift is being naive enough to keep walking a path after everybody tells me no, because I believe I can make a change in this world. My mission is to create a positive living experience for the planet and everyone on it, and to help people discover their human potential. That’s how I found mine.

In the bulldog note I said I’m planting for my two daughters. I want them to see a man who’s steady and consistent, who gives them the safety to be whoever they want to be.

So if you’re a dad listening, do one thing this week. Do the dishes where they can see you.

I still haven’t picked the song. I’ve got time. Not as much as I think.

Girls, if you ever listen to this one day, this part is for you.

You don’t have to become nurses. Nurse or not, I’ll be the proudest dad in the room. Just find your gift. There’s one inside each of you. You might not see it yet, but it’ll show itself as you get older, and whatever it turns out to be, I’ll be proud of you.

You can go after anything you want. The world is more malleable than people will tell you. You can build things, and more than that, you can build yourself. Show up every day. Don’t run from the hard stuff. That’s how you get there.

And most important of all, there is a God, and He loves you. Just like I always will.

Love you, my silly gooses.

When I’m in my last room, I already know what I’ll be thinking about.

Our beach days.

Next week, Working Backwards: My Team.