Taking Parental Leave as a CEO

David Jarvis, CEO, Griffin

The last time David Jarvis was on the series, we talked about being a first-time CEO at Griffin, a startup in a highly regulated industry. Since then he had his first child and took some time off to be with his young family. I asked David to talk about his experience taking parental leave as the CEO of a startup. We talked about how the company handled his absence, how becoming a parent changed him as a CEO, and what advice he’d give CEOs considering taking parental leave. 

Hello. Hello. We know each other and you've been on the series before. So if you can just give a quick couple-sentence introduction of yourself.

Hi, I'm David. I am the CEO and co-founder of a company called Griffin, which in spite of my American accent, is based in the UK. We are making a bank that you can build on.

Love it. Love it. So we've talked once before on the podcast. This is our second time, and we're going to talk about something different. So you recently took parental leave and had your first child.

Not so recently at this point.

I guess not so recent. In the last year.

Yeah.

A lot has happened since you've been back. It's been very busy.

Oh my God. Yeah.

To give folks context, can you share where the company was in the life cycle when you took parental leave?

As I mentioned at the start, we're making a bank, which is a little bit peculiar in so far as you end up having to raise a lot of money and build out a business before you can sell any of your products. If you're not a bank and you go and sell bank accounts or offer loans, then the regulators don't really like that and you go to prison.

I think we were about 50 people in terms of headcount. We'd raised about 20 million pounds. We'd been around for a couple of years. The company's life cycle is also interesting. I don't think that this is that unique. We set up the company in 2017. We then basically spent two years treading water and failing to raise money before successfully raising money. So we didn't have any real team until 2019. So all of what we're talking about was happening in the summer of 2020. We'd raised all this money. We were building a core banking system, taking our first product to market, which was an unregulated product, but in the financial crime tooling space. We had submitted our application to become a bank to the Bank of England, which was a major milestone for us. So that's where we were.

What was the internal plan for handling your leave? How did you think about that?

Seven months beforehand when my wife and I discovered that she was pregnant, we had had another company offsite. I took the chair of our board aside after dinner and mentioned, "By the way, we're expecting and this is the kind of timeframe." So he and I and other members of the board had started to talk about, first of all, what was our parental leave policy for me, generally. 

We had a parental leave policy but it was largely just formalizing the legal rights that you have in the UK for parental leave. Although it's better than it is in the US, it's not particularly good per se by itself. 

It's really putting some structure around what we were going to provide in terms of parental leave, and then talking more about more practically how I was going to stay, how close or distant I was going to stay from the business, who was going to be taking over various responsibilities, et cetera. That fed into our decision that Adam Moulson, who's our Chief Commercial Officer, would step up as our interim CEO; me having a conversation with him about whether that was something he'd be interested in, and then us then spending a quarter together leading up to the birth. I mean both messaging that that was the plan to our regulators, to the company, but also giving him a chance to step into that role a little bit and giving me a chance to step back and see how he did things. I think that we approached it with a lot of care and preparation.

Yeah, it sounds like it. How long was the leave, officially?

Three months. Although I found that I had to be quite engaged for the last month. So we ended up extending it by a couple of weeks just because I wasn't actually getting the time off.

Got it. That happens. It's really hard for CEOs to completely step away, I think, from a business at this stage for three months without things having to come up.

I think I was quite good at stepping away in the immediate wake of my son being born because you're just, you're taking this little parent-baby bubble and the volume on the rest of the world goes very quiet. But then as I started to get to the end of my leave, there were a couple of things that I already had scheduled in advance that I couldn't get out of. And there were a couple of things that came up that ended up needing to be dealt with. I don't know that I could necessarily have pushed those off. So the place we ended up with me and the board was like, "Okay, well, look, it's not really fair to say that it's three months. But actually, it's only been two months of proper time off. I'd like to be able to really spend a bit more time home, home with family."

That's great. What boundaries did you set for yourself? Completely unplugged? 

I was for the most part completely unplugged. I was still doing a weekly call with the chair of our board and I was doing a weekly call with Adam and a weekly call with Allen, my co-founder. But that was basically it. So I think I said, "I'm going to be available on Wednesday afternoons," but the rest of the time is me time. I should also note that at the beginning of all of this, my wife was like, "I'm going to take six months off and you're going to take three months off. You're going to take at least three months off." And I was like, "Oh, I am, huh?" I'm going to need to go ask my board, and investors, for permission. I was very on board with that, but it was very clear that the terms were being set for me.

I think people might have the perspective, "Well you're the CEO. Can't you just decide that you just want to take off without really having to ask anybody?" And the reality is, that's not exactly true.

Yeah. I'm not my own boss. I answer to a board. The board can fire me. My investors can fire me. I have good relationships with them, and I'd like to keep it that way!

Yeah, exactly. How well were you able to unplug from work? Did it drift into your mind or were you able? I know probably in the beginning maybe, like you said, the dial on the rest of the world went really quiet. How mentally and emotionally was that for you?

I think my wife and I both went on a very similar journey. She's also a tech executive. At the beginning as a new parent, you're just completely overwhelmed and reactive to what's happening. I think it's probably also worth noting that my wife had a very bad andtraumatic birth experience. So we were in the hospital for quite a bit of time longer than we had originally hoped or wanted to be. 

I think we were very much living in the moment. Partly her out of trauma, me out of the immediacy of supporting her and being a new parent. And then as all of that started to fade into the rearview mirror, it's not that work itself necessarily intruded as much as we were just like, "We need to have our brains assigned to something.” By the end of our leave, I think we were starting to get bored and going a little stir-crazy and wanting the social interaction that comes from seeing the people that you work with on a regular basis and having good and interesting problems to solve. 

While I was out there were some interpersonal conflicts at the company that... I don't want to say like... It wasn't like I had been keeping a lid on them, but I had been managing some of the relationships involved. With my absence, the friction there started to become more obvious, a bigger issue. That did intrude on my leave. I found that I was often, I don't know, getting... Not reports. That's too formal and scary, but gripe sessions from people who were either involved or affected. We were like, "Oh, this isn't really working." I was like, "Can't Adam fix this?" It's like, "Well no." Because this is a little bit more structural than that.

So those were some of the things that you had to support, that the interim CEO couldn't do?

Yeah. Interestingly, I think he was the one who identified how bad of a problem it was much sooner than I did. I think it's given me a much clearer sense that if Adam flags something as a concern to me, I need to get all over it quickly.

As a CEO and co-founder, it seems like it might be hard to let go. Was it hard for you to let go and give things away to the interim CEO Adam and other folks? How was that?

Letting go wasn’t hard. I had an incredible amount of faith in the team. I had a chance to watch Adam's leadership style. He has a different style from me, but it's a really cool one. I admired the way that I saw him leading the team. I had a lot of confidence that they would be fine.

It was also just, as a CEO, you can do a lot of damage to an organization by doing decision thrashing, where you're like, "I don't know what we should do. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this." For a lot of our business's lifetime, there's been no pressure to do that because it's just been super clear – it's like, okay, cool, there's only one thing for us to do. Everyone knows what we need to do. Let's go do it. And even when there is a decision to be made, I try to avoid thrashing because I want to only have to make the decision once.

So I try to information gather, consider, and plan, and then I don't want to say “decide at the last possible moment”, but if I'm going to steer the ship in a certain direction, I should be doing it with a level of confidence that is commensurate with the fact that I'm shifting such a big thing in that direction. In the period in question, it was just very clear what the priorities were and where we were going. That wasn't likely to change in a particularly big way.

That makes a lot of sense. I want to go back to what you said. Your wife was on leave at the same time. So were there any interesting differences between the two of you and how you handled the time off?

I think that she started to go stir-crazy at a certain point and felt a need to get back engaged with the world, to the degree that she started a new job at month five when she could've just taken six months. I was like, "You have six months fully paid. Why would you start a new job?" And she's just like, "I need this. It's for my brain." My wife is a very intellectually hungry person.

But she also was going through a number of really significant challenges. So the health challenge was immense. Again, what happened was both very traumatic from a health perspective, also really traumatic from a healthcare perspective. We felt really let down by our healthcare providers and by our local hospital. And that, I think, really shattered a lot of trust that we had in the NHS and our supporting healthcare infrastructure. And that was damaging psychologically. At the same time, the company that she had been working for that was giving her this parental leave was struggling in a bunch of different ways. One of which was, struggling to raise funding. So they made her do a round of layoffs while she was on maternity leave. And I'm like, that's complete crap to basically pull someone in off their maternity leave to fire people. 

That's not a great experience.

How was the leave different than you expected or was it as you expected it to be?

I think I approached it from, in one lens, from the right angle of:“This is not David's personal hobby time.” I paint little wargaming miniatures. There was a lot of joking that I would have a lot of time to do that. But I knew that that was not going to be how it was. This was not, you get three months off to go and paint miniatures. It is, you're taking time off to support your wife while she recovers, to spend time with your child, to baby-proof your house, and learn all of the stuff that you don't know about, like sanitizing milk bottles and all of this. I was really grateful that we were able to have my parents come and stay with us for a couple of weeks right after the birth because that was a huge help.

It sounds like it was mostly the way you expected?

Maybe what I would say is, I knew that I was going into a very new experience. So I had some pretty clear ideas about what it wasn't going to be but I didn't know what it was going to be, and I was prepared for that unknown.

That's great. Being prepared for that unknown. I love that. So how was reentry? You said you were kind of getting bored.

A little stir-crazy.

Yeah, a little stir-crazy. How was reentry? What was that like?

Re-entry was really, really good. I adore the people that I work with. So to get to see them again on a regular basis and talk to them again brought me such energy. So that felt, really, really good. It happened also at a point in time when our investors had also put together two different off-sites. So I was getting just a ton of social interaction and intellectual stimulation and travel. It was really fun for lack of a better term. I think what was interesting about it too was, then navigating the shifting relationship between myself and Adam as I re-emerged. And it's like, "Okay cool. I need the crown back please."

As we were originally preparing for my leave, in the first couple weeks of getting prepared, Adam observed, "You have to absorb a lot of information. You are on top of a lot of context and a lot of expectations that people have of you." I think initially he found that overwhelming and then he figured out how to manage that. Then when it was time to swap back, he was like, "This is cool and I'm keen to not drop all of these relationships that I've been building because I can see there being a lot of value for me in my, quote-unquote, day job and continuing to maintain this level of context."

I think that that's also been cool because what it's meant has been that I can continue to lean on him almost as a deputy CEO at times. It's different from the way I lean on Maria, who is my Chief Operating Officer. Where I'm like, "Maria, I'm going to point you at a problem and I just need you to go and destroy it. I don't care how. Just go do deal with this." Whereas with Adam, I'm like, "I'm going to put you into a conversation with a critical person where there's a strategic nature or a relationship nature to this, and I can be reasonably confident that you will figure out the right strategy or the right way of building this relationship for us as a business that is not quite how I would do it, but which I'm going to be happy with either way." So that's cool 'cause I have to assume that that kind of relationship is super rare.

Did you notice any other changes within the leadership team or the way you interact with the leadership team?

I already alluded to some of the interpersonal frictions that Adam identified. And one of the things that came out of that upon my return was like, "Okay, some of this is going to need to get dealt with head-on." Unfortunately in this case, it meant saying goodbye to someone and then finding someone else who would be better positioned to be successful and be able to manage relationships in the right way. Adam drove both parts of that. Both the, "Hey, I'm noticing that this is a problem, and also, I'm talking to this other person and I think they could be a really good fit here. I'm just going to keep pushing on you to go and have a conversation with this person until you do." It's so funny because Adam ribs me about this all the time. Because when he and I were first introduced, the first thing out of my mouth was, "Look, we've been introduced by so and so, but there's no opening here for you." And then 15 minutes later, I was like, "I have to hire you."

It was something similar here where Adam was like, "I think you really need to spend some time with this guy. I think he could be a really good fit." I was like, "I don't know. There are a lot of good people out there. Do I really have time to take another meeting with this guy?" I think we did a 30-minute call at first and it was friendly. I wanted to push quickly on whether or not I was going to have... on a question that would pretty immediately rule out 90% of... maybe even 99% of the people I would talk to, which is basically just, "Okay, Adam thinks that you are a potential fit for a very senior role here. Prove it to me. What's the future of our space?"

If you're a normal human being, you have no clue what the future of our space is. Like, why would you? Our thing is incredibly niche. What he came back with was not only really sophisticated but also aligned very closely with my thinking about the future of the space. I was like, "Okay, cool. Did not expect you to have that sort of answer. This is really interesting. We should spend more time together." Then we did spend quite a bit more time together. Over the course of those conversations, I got to a point where I was like, "Okay, this is really interesting. Adam was right to push for this because this is someone who will level up the entire company." That ended up with him being brought in and you bring in someone who is at that level. And also very relational - very, very relationally intelligent, emotionally intelligent. It does have this transformational effect on the entire team. So that the kind of journey that we went on there was a team-level shift that was quite material.

How did parental leave change you as a CEO?

I don't know that I would say that parental leave changed me as a CEO. I definitely think being a parent has changed me as a CEO.

In what ways?

People do talk about this a lot. This is not a novel insight. 

It turns out there are only 24 hours in the day, and at 5:30, you've got to go pick your kid up at nursery. So, you get really efficient with the time that you have. You also get really concrete about your boundaries. 

You're just like, "Nope, sorry, I don't care that you are on Pacific Standard Time. I'm not going to take a 10:00 AM meeting for you because I have my kid at that point. If you want to get up and do an 8:00 AM meeting with me so that it's at 4:00 PM my time, then I'm happy to do that. But I'm not going to adjust my world for you."

It has allowed me to bond to a surprising degree with other parents, just in the immediate small talk of every conversation. Again, I'm sure that's not surprising to anyone who is a parent. Small talk can sometimes be painful and awkward. When you have two parents who have both been through the young child-baby phase, there's immediately just some natural banter around that. It's very easy. And so much of what I do is, I have to go from “we've never met before” to “I'm building a relationship with you” really fast.

I think the last bit, which is the hardest, is when you're a founder, your company is your child. If you're a founder and you're not a parent, it's your only child. Yes, I have a dog, but that’s different. 

When you have a kid, you do have to find yourself saying, "Is my company more important than my kid in this circumstance?" In some ways, it's black and white. Kid’s got to get picked up at nursery! But a lot of the time, it's much more on a gradient of, what am I spending my time over the weekend doing? How much sleep do I need to get? 

Oh yeah, the other thing that's been super interesting, I've almost completely stopped drinking. I go to bed at eight o'clock and I wake up at 6:00 AM. And those three together would've been unrecognizable from David a year ago, which is interesting.

What advice might you give other founders, and CEOs who are about to have a child and considering parental leave?

I think it's always good to think about succession planning. The X factor and the complicating thing in our case were, when Kate, my wife, became pregnant, our initial assumption was that Rupert, who was our COO, would be our interim CEO. Then Rupert left the company because he was given the CEO job somewhere else, which, fair play to him. Why go interim when you could be perm!? We're like, okay, well we had an assumption about how this would work and that is no longer a play. So what does that mean?

I think there's always a naive temptation to say, "I'm irreplaceable," or even, "It's beneficial that I'm irreplaceable." But it's not really. It's actually really nice to be in a position where you can trust that the company will be fine if you have to step away for a while. 

It helps that I am a very lazy person who does a pretty good job of delegating. So my absence is not felt very much, except it might have been felt if we had needed to fundraise while I was out. I think one of the things that I'm taking away from our most recent fundraise, which I will be factoring into all future life decisions, is that there are certain months of the year when you should fundraise and certain months of the year when you should not fundraise. And if you're going to take a bunch of time off, you want to make sure that you have those windows properly aligned. Even if that means saying, "I want to take three months off, but what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take two months off here and then one month off there."

I think, again, with American companies, it's super weird. But in Europe, it is...well, in Europe, if you're a venture-backed company, the odds are that the partners and the senior folks who invest in you at the VC funds have a ludicrously generous parental leave policy. So if they're going to give you any shit for taking time off, just really beat them for it. In our case, that was not an issue. Our investors were very supportive. But it wasn't lost on us, and it wasn't lost on me. And this is part of why I felt reasonable doing it, was that one of our investors the year prior had taken six months off parental leave. I was like, "That's really cool."

Was there anything else about your experience, about having your first child, or taking parental leave that we haven't covered?

I was given some very male advice by the men in my life who have kids about parental leave, which I would encourage you not to listen to. But the advice I was given was like, "You don't really want to take time off right after the babies come. They just want to be with their moms. They get much more interesting around six months." And it's like, okay. That may be true, but your spouse and partner needs the support. The parental leave is not purely about your entertainment or the baby.

So you're glad you didn't listen to that advice, it sounds like? 

Yeah. Definitely.

You followed your instincts about your relationship. I've not had a child, but I understand that children can change relationships and that those early days could be really important for, not only the child but the relationship.

But again, more than that, my wife was seriously ill in the hospital. If I had not planned on taking parental leave at that time, I would've had to have checked out of work anyways. She took quite a while to get back to being herself. If you're not thinking about that as a big factor in parental leave, I don't know what you're doing, I guess. My son is eight months old now. And I really identify with the comments that the men in my life had, which is like, when they hit six months, they get much more interesting. Yeah, my son is a hell of a lot more fun to be around now. But also, that wasn't the point, right? And I'm still going to get the time with him now, but I needed to be there for my wife at the time.

If this piece resonated with you, please let me know and give the heart button below a tap.