Parenting your way to good leadership
Parenting and leadership share many similarities and overlap in several aspects, as both roles involve guiding and influencing others toward a common goal, whether it’s raising responsible and well-rounded children or leading a team toward success. However, while there are many similarities between parenting and leadership, it is important to note that they also have distinct differences.
Parenting is a lifelong commitment with a deeply personal connection, while leadership often involves managing professional relationships and achieving organisational goals. Nonetheless, the skills and qualities developed in one role can often be applied and transferred to the other.
Talking about how parenting and leadership are closely linked, Subash CV, Executive and Leadership Coach and Founder of Regal Unlimited highlighted key pointers in an interview with HT Lifestyle:
1) Nurturing relationships — Both leaders and parents are authoritarian figures by virtue of their position. Another commonality — you can choose your friends but can’t choose your parents or the leader you work for! However, being an authority figure alone cannot and should not make employees or children listen to us. Command and control might work on a child but just try bulldozing your teenager. World War — III will break out! Authoritarian styles of leadership and parenting aren’t effective anymore. In fact, they adversely impact the leader-employee or parent-child relationship. Then what works? Future-looking leadership and parenting nurture healthy interpersonal relationships based on trust and vulnerability. For this, leaders and parents must create supportive and motivating environments for their charges to thrive. Leaders and parents need to ‘Lead without title,’ as Robin Sharma puts it.
2) Positive communication — “My father never listens to me,” “My boss cuts me off whenever I try to make a point”, these are some common grouses of children and employees alike. As for leaders and parents, I am sure you have faced situations where a well-meant suggestion/feedback came out wrong, creating consequences the opposite of what you had hoped for! We need to change the way we communicate radically. Active and empathetic listening, clear messaging, and timely feedback worded positively can go a long way in developing strong connections that stand the test of adverse circumstances. They also provide much-needed safe space and give children/employees room to grow as individuals and professionals.
3) Role Modelling — Our children are a reflection of us. They unconsciously mimic our speaking style, actions, and values. The same is true for employees, albeit to a lesser degree. Your attitudes, values, and behaviour set the culture at your workplace. We unconsciously pick up some personality elements from our fathers and a few bosses we admire. That’s why it’s so important to ‘walk the talk’ at work and home. Both leadership and parenting are most effective when the authority figure models the values and behavior they want to nurture.
4) Patience over perfection — Enthusiastic leaders typically chase perfection, for that’s their definition of success. No one or nothing can fall short of that standard. It’s the same with many parents. What we fail to realise is that perfection takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all. Enlightened leaders and parents define success as the process of learning and growth. For them, every mistake becomes an opportunity to learn and grow. This relieves employees and children of the pressure of perfection and enables them to become authentic individuals who can discover their potential holistically.
5) Continuous learning — Leadership and parenting are both ‘works in progress.’ No one can start out being a perfect leader or parent. So don’t beat yourself up for faltering. Instead, be open to learning from the mistakes you make and the situations you come across. Also, learn from the people in your life, including your employees/wards.
Insisting that a better parent makes a better leader and vice versa, he said, “Leadership is leading at all levels, personal and professional. We make the mistake of identifying leadership with “work” only but leadership in personal life rubs off onto professional life and vice versa. For example, if a person is disciplined and punctual in their personal life, they tend to be disciplined and punctual in their professional life too. Not otherwise. Else they are faking discipline and punctuality. So, along with improving your leadership skills, also hone your parenting style. Coaching is a great way to develop self-awareness of your limiting beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours as parents/leaders, work on rooting them out and create empowering ones.”
Why coaching?
“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you always wanted to be.” — Tom Landry.
According to Subash CV, coaching is a very personal, personalised holistic exercise that caters to you as a complete person where the coach uses the coaching process to help -
- Acquaint you with your authentic self
- Identify strengths and problem areas
- Decide your goals yourself
- Set actionable steps for yourself
- Be accountable to yourself
Leading/ Parenting for the Present and Future
“My father was strict. I obeyed him implicitly.”
“My boss was no-nonsense and dictatorial.”
Subash CV asserted that your parents’ style would not work for your children and modeling your boss will only backfire with your next-gen employees as millennials and Gen Z do not respond to authoritarian leadership and parenting. The best way to bring out the best in them is:
- The model rather than tell
- Collaborate rather than dictate
- Empathise rather than ignore
- Inspire rather than instill
- Bring out rather than put in
A coaching style of leadership/parenting can do all these. Being a leader is challenging. Being a parent, even more so, but remember that they both have one common denominator — you. Work at being a better you and find yourself doing justice to your roles as parents and leaders.
Originally published at https://www.hindustantimes.com on June 8, 2023.
