Looking For The Best Leadership Advice? Try Parenting Books.

In 2017, our co-founders were two years into running a company together. Dustin was a couple years into his parenting journey and Erik nearly a decade. In an exchange that sparked this article, Erik remarked to Dustin that some of the best leadership books he’d ever read were parenting books. It was a remark that seems glib at best and condescending at worst. But here’s the central point: Parenting books make the best leadership books not because your employees are children, but because children are human.

At the time they were reading How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (Farber & Mazlish). Fast forward a year and their executive team was reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Reading these two books contemporaneously reinforced the point. Both offer some basic, obvious, and widely underutilized insights about humans — the most important (and challenging) parts of your home and business.

Key insights that cross parenting and leadership books

• Focus on behaviors. It’s the behaviors that are good and bad, not personality traits or people themselves.

• Be clear about what you want. Be clear about your expectations (as both a parent and an organizational leader. This is harder than it sounds).

• Be consistent and persistent in your practices. You don’t need to be perfect. Just own when you miss the mark and recommit to providing clear, consistent feedback and expectations.

• Hold the following paradox in mind: all people (like children) are unique, but we all have the same basic needs. The most important of these needs in creating a workplace culture that outperforms are:

  • connection (feel a part of something),

  • autonomy (have some ability to influence how I work), and

  • competency (the ability to feel good about my work).

Just as some people confuse mindful parenting with being overly permissive, or “soft”, many organizational leaders still think that some of these practices are simply for HR. As we outline in our blog Culture Is How Energy Moves Through an Organization, successful companies leverage these insights and weave them into the fabric of their operations.

Practical tips for organizational leaders

If you aren’t currently raising young kids, you don’t have to rush out and buy the latest parenting books (but if you want to, we’ve included some leadership and parenting book recommendations below). These are the tangible practices you can put in place quickly to improve your organizational leadership:

• Train your people on how to give feedback (both positive and corrective). It’s crucial for managers, but important for all humans working together. The concepts are relatively simple, but take practice to reinforce. Focus on naming specific behaviors,actions, and their impact. Instead of saying “Cindy is just so good with customers” (which makes it sound like she was simply born with it and others can’t learn what she does), say “When Cindy is on calls with customers she listens so attentively and asks the most thoughtful questions; it seems to really draw customers in.” This gives the opportunity for others to learn from those who are doing what you want done.

• Just listen (at least sometimes). As consummate problem solvers, we love to jump to solutions when people are describing an issue. The better version of us remembers sage parenting advice. When your child is in distress, ask which of the 3 Hs they want: to be heard, to be helped, or to be hugged? Be careful when offering hugs in the workplace(!), but know that the same sentiment applies. Sometimes employees want to be helped, but sometimes they want to be heard or supported in another way. Ask them.

• Give people a place (ideally multiple places) to vent productively. 1:1s are an essential place to start. Ensure all employees have regularly scheduled 1:1s with their managers and train both parties on why to have them with some guidelines for how to conduct them. We all need to vent (that kids don’t usually do it at scheduled intervals makes them a bit more challenging) – bottling it up or making the only option to complain to colleagues will drain productive energy from your organization.

• Be consistent and persistent. When you’re implementing something new (or raising a kid), know that you’re going to make mistakes. Acknowledge it, don’t dwell, and focus on doing it better next time. This is true in learning to give feedback, in conducting 1:1s, just as it is in parenting. Nobody’s to blame…but we’re all responsible.

We’ll end this blog with one final thought on being explicit with your expectations. In a February 2023 episode of his Re: Thinking podcast, the Wharton Organizational Psychologist and prolific author Adam Grant hosted the parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy (author of Good Inside). Sharing insights across developmental and organizational psychology, Dr. Kennedy at one point remarked: “I think we both agree that as a leader, if you don't have clarity in what your job is, you cannot do your job well. And it's actually an absurd thing to think about anyone going to their first day in the office and being told, ‘Hey, do your job well, but you don't have a job description.’”

Job descriptions for managers are often written around the administering of a function. What companies (and parents) could benefit from is being explicit about the broader assignment of being an organizational leader (or parent). Check out our blog on The Management Commitment for more on how to use this framework to set clearer expectations for managers and employees – which can lead to improved morale and reduce unwanted employee turnover.

Some suggested readings related to this topic: Drive (Daniel Pink); Radical Candor (Kim Scott), Primed to Perform (Doshi & McGregor), Good Inside (Dr. Becky Kennedy), The Whole Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson), How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (Faber & Mazlish).