One of the most inspiring things my boss does is leave.

I joke! Well, on one level I joke. Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge, is a phenomenal leader and when she’s at the helm of our organization, she is immensely valuable to our team and the field we serve. But here’s the way I really mean it: Gali is currently taking a three-month parental leave from Leading Edge, since she and her wife welcomed their second child, Gavi! 

Speaking both as a father and as one of her employees, Gali taking parental leave means an enormous amount to me. How much? Well, it’s one of the reasons I work at Leading Edge in the first place. 

I’m a full-time-working father, with three young kids at home (ages 7, 5, and 2, kenenahora—pictured at the top of this post!) and a wife who also works full-time. Fatherhood is not something incidental to me, it’s central. I try to do a good job at work, but my family comes before my work—and that’s not a close call. I’m glad to say that every nonprofit I’ve ever worked for has been accommodating of that stance to some degree or another, though of course some workplaces have been more flexible than others. 

So when, in 2019, I happened to read that Gali Cooks, CEO of Leading Edge, would be taking three months off for parental leave, I took note. (This was when Gali’s first child, her daughter Ami, was born.) At the time, I didn’t work for Leading Edge yet, but I knew some of the team and was already a fan of the organization’s work, and saw the notice in an email newsletter.

“Wow,” I thought. “A CEO taking a significant parental leave. That’s unusual. And that must be a family-friendly organization.”

Was I right to think that a CEO taking leave was unusual? Empirically I don’t really know—I can’t seem to find any overall data on how many CEOs take family leave, either in the nonprofit or business sectors. (Email me if you know any good data on this.) But it certainly doesn’t feel usual to me. It’s not something I see frequently, and when high-profile CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Parag Agrawal take parental leave, it makes the news.

Whether it’s as rare as it seems or whether it’s more common than I think, a top leader taking leave—and publicizing it—is a powerful signal. At least, it was to me when I saw it from the outside in 2019. Later the same year, I heard that a communications opportunity was opening up at Leading Edge, and I was instantly interested. I had multiple reasons for wanting to work here (and to be clear, my previous organization was also a family-friendly one), but having seen Gali take parental leave gave me high confidence that among other ways it would be a great place to work, Leading Edge would certainly be a family-supportive employer. (And, for the record, I was right.)

So that’s my own experience. But this kind of signal from the top might be important for reasons beyond individual perspectives. Last year, Leading Edge released The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View. That report identified five “keystones” for addressing the gender gap in top leadership in Jewish organizations, and one of them was this: “There is a perception that you cannot be both a top leader and a primary caregiver.” To address that problem, the report says, “Community members can work actively to shift our cultural assumptions about the capacity to be a leader and a primary caregiver at the same time.”

How can we “shift cultural assumptions”? What does it take to change the default stories we tell? There may be many answers to that question, but as Jonathan Larson wrote, “Don’t say the answer—actions speak louder than words.” (Or, if the Golden Age of musical theatre is more to your taste, “Show me!”) There are lots of ways to change minds, but it’s hard to beat walking the walk.

What if it were normal to see all our leaders being caregivers? And let’s be clear, they are caregivers already, whether we see it or not. Our leaders have families and communities. Some of them have children; some have elderly relatives; some have a friend or neighbor they help. The people we know by titles like “Boss,” “CEO,” or “board chair” leave the office and go home to places where they’re known by titles like “Mommy,” “Zeidy,” “my niece,” or “my nice neighbor who drives me to the doctor”. What if every leader made it a point to let their employees know about those other parts of their lives—not to erase their family’s privacy or make a reality show of their personal lives, but simply to let the existence and the extent of their participation in caregiving be better known? What kind of permission would that give to the people who work for them to think of ourselves as potential leaders, even as we have roles like “Daddy” that we value even more?

Speaking as a Daddy and a professional (in that order), that’s the kind of workplace and the kind of community where I want to be.