In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.
Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.
But those same children may have trouble feeling safe and developing trust, said Poulter, a clinical psychologist who also works with adolescents in Los Angeles area schools.
“I’ve seen more people hit their heads on what they call a glass ceiling or a cement wall in their careers, and it’s what I call the father factor,” Poulter said in an interview. “What role did your father have in your life? It’s this unknown variable which has this huge impact because we’re all sons and daughters.”
Styles of fathering can affect whether their children get along with others at work, have an entrepreneurial spirit, worry too much about their career, burn out or become the boss, Poulter writes.
Even absent fathers affect how their children work, he writes, by instilling feelings of rejection and abandonment.