David McElroy

Some men are better grandfathers than they were fathers. That puzzled me for a long time, but I finally figured it out.

These are men who adore cute little children in their lives. They’re full of warmth and love for their grandchildren. They’re eager to see them. When you see men such as these you assume they must have been great fathers, but I’ve found that’s not always true.

Did these men just get more mature with age? No. There’s a joke you hear sometimes that’s not really a joke. Grandparents often seem to love children more than their own parents do, because grandparents can enjoy children for a little while — and then send them home to their parents.

What I’ve realized over the last year or so is that a lot of men act the same way with their own children. They want the cuteness. They want to be adored. They like being god-like figures in their children’s eyes. But when it matters, that sort of man is absent, at least emotionally and often physically.

I call these men “faux fathers.”

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Maybe I’ve always wanted to be needed. I’m not sure. I just know I wasn’t aware of it until the last few years.

For the past two days, I’ve been stuck on this idea of being needed. Almost three years ago, I wrote about how the best relationships are centered around mutual need and “mutual rescue.”

But this thing that’s been nagging at me is different. It left me feeling down, because it emphasized how much I miss being needed. Feeling that made it hard to make it through work Friday, because I was feeling lost — as though I no longer had any direction or motivation.

On the way home Friday evening, I snapped this photo of myself in the car. I had spent the day pretending to care what others had to say — talking to them about the expensive house we were looking at — and I knew that my fake smile had been pasted on too long.

As I drove home, I realized how little I cared about any of it. None of it mattered to me. What was the point without feeling needed by a family who I loved?

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I’m never going to be a leader, at least not the kind the “leadership books” teach you to be. And I’m finally OK with that.

When I was still in my “empire-builder” stage of my 20s, I read every business book I could find. I studied the ideas of popular writers such as Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and W. Edwards Deming. There were many more. The books often seemed profound as I read them, but I slowly realized something.

The concepts and management tips in the books turned out to be useless in the small companies I managed. No matter how brilliant the concepts seemed — and no matter how well they worked for the people in the small companies described — my employees looked at me blankly when I tried the ideas.

This left me confused about myself. Was I just a terrible leader? Was I doing something wrong? If so, why did people in organizations naturally turn to me when work needed to be done?

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