I was at a gathering last night where somebody asked for parenting advice. I’m no parenting expert, and it will be at least a couple decades before we can evaluate how my kids turn out, but I shared my perspective anyway. And as I listened to what I and other parents said, I realized that each piece of advice would also work for my executive coaching clients to improve their leadership.
1. You set the tone. Your family (or your team) will take their emotional cues from you. If you panic, they will panic. If you are calm, they will be calm. If you are anxious, they will be anxious. If you are confident they can do something, they will be confident they can do it.
So before blaming your kids (or your reports) for how they react, check your own emotional state (HALT (Hungry Angry Lonely Tired) is a good checklist to see what you might need to center and ground yourself). Rather than lay into them while emotional (whether angry or anxious), do the self-reflection to get to the heart of the emotional concern and address it consciously and directly. Only by managing your own nervous system can you create change in others.
2. Chill out! You don’t matter as much as you think you do. Your actions will not ruin their life unless you’re actively abusive and toxic. As a parent, it feels like every single little decision we make is life or death; their whole future depends on us. But kids are resilient. They adapt to whatever the situation is. And the majority of their behavior is genetic, rather than a result of your parenting (something that is becoming more apparent with our children, who are very different from each other, even at a young age). So relax! You will probably mess them up more by being anxious about every little moment than if you just accept you don’t have much control and enjoy the moments you have with them.
The same applies to leadership. You don’t have as much control as you think you do. Yes, you can reward or punish people to get the behavior you want, but then you are conditioning people to only do what you want for the reward or to avoid the punishment (extrinsic motivation). To be a great leader (or parent), you need to tap into their intrinsic motivation and find ways to get them to want to do something (I suggest starting with why and then setting clear expectations with accountability). Once you set things up, relax; micromanaging people anxiously will not lead to them doing great work. If you don’t trust them to do the work, show them how you would do it, then shadow them until you trust they will do it the way you want (works with kids too!). Let go of the illusion of control, and accept that things won’t go the way you want and it will be okay – you’ll figure out how to recover.
3. They can do more than you think they can. This is a critical parenting realization for me, especially with my young kids who are growing their capabilities daily. My expectations of what they can handle lags what they can actually do, so my mental model of them is always outdated. I have to constantly remind myself that just because they couldn’t do things last week or last month doesn’t mean they can’t do it now – I have to challenge them (supportively) to try things and they often surprise me. My goal now as a parent is not to be the one holding them back because of my limited expectations; instead, just let them try things, take on more than I think they can handle, and be surprised and delighted by the outcome.
Unsurprisingly, this is great leadership advice as well. Leaders who pride themselves on their capabilities often assume that those under them can’t do the job as well, so they get involved constantly, correcting their work and demoralizing them. And while it might be true that they are better at the work initially, their involvement doesn’t give room for their team to grow their capabilities. It’s a self-fulfilling expectation; if you believe somebody can’t do something, then you won’t give them the chance to do it. The only way to grow your team’s capabilities is to step back and let them take on more. This is important for your own career as well: only by investing in consistently leveling up your team can you take on more scope yourself.
4. Admit that you can’t do it all. I loved Tiffany Dufu’s advice in her book Drop the Ball (excerpted here) where she advises parents to make a list together of who does what, and, more importantly, what won’t get done. It’s better to plan to “drop the ball” on certain things than to try to hold yourself to an unrealistic standard of doing it all which leads to doing everything poorly and letting things slip unintentionally.
I’m feeling the FOMO right now as my kindergartener’s classmates are starting to do more after-school activities, including sports, language classes, martial arts, dance, rock climbing, music lessons, etc. And I want my kid to do all of those things! But trying to do them all would mean he’d be exhausted and we’d be stressed out, so we have to choose thoughtfully and let the others go for now. Our kid will benefit more from doing fewer things better while still having some family quality time than by trying to do everything at once in a stressful way.
Executives suffer from the same FOMO. They feel they “have to” get through the to-do list every day of everything anybody has asked them for, because they don’t want to be blocking anybody. And yet that frantic pace becomes unsustainable when they reach a certain scope. They have to accept they can’t do it all, and choose what they will commit to doing while letting go of everything else, either by delegating or automating or intentionally dropping the ball. Admitting you can’t do it all may seem like giving up, but counterintuitively, focusing on the most important work leads to higher impact. Do fewer things well by raising the threshold of what work is yours to do, and proactively saying no to the rest.
In summary, it’s not surprising that parenting and leadership have such great overlap; in both situations, we are responsible for guiding others who have less experience and knowledge than we do. But what’s interesting to me about the principles above is that it’s less about how to transmit that knowledge and experience, and more about the stance with which we show up in those relationships. If we can accept that we have less control than we’d like, and can deal with the anxiety and fear that comes with that lesser control while still owning the responsibility, then everything works better. So chill out!
What else am I missing? What other advice would you share from your leadership or parenting experiences? What leads to long-term success in these relationships?
