Leadership Begins at Home, Part 2

If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything
by Ann Crittenden

(Page 2 of 6)

Harold Saunders, the American diplomat who negotiated the peace settlement between Israel and Egypt in 1979, told me he could never have persuaded the two sides to accept a settlement if he hadn't been widowed and left the sole parent of two youngsters, who for years sent him Mother's Day cards. In particular, Saunders said, he never would have understood the Israelis' profound sense of insecurity had he not had the experience of comforting his own children for their loss.

Management gurus, authors of business books, and executive trainers have connected the dots between managing a home and managing an organization. Joshua Ehrlich, an executive trainer with Beam, Pines in New York City, gives all his clients copies of Leadership Effectiveness Training, a sequel to Parent Effectiveness Training, based on the assumption that the same management techniques work at home and in the office. Martha Brest, an executive recruiter in Boston, says her clients see a clear connection between the way they are with their kids and the way they operate in the workplace.

"I have one client, a very senior person in an investment management firm - one of the brightest guys I know - who has had children since I was last in touch with him. He volunteered that he had learned a lot about how to manage his staff from managing his kids. He thought that managing children actually took more raw managerial skill, because there's no protocol, no structure, no real training. I think people are acknowledging these connections."

Stephen R. Covey, bestselling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has written a sequel called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, in which he admits he learned it all at home. "Applying the 7 habits material to the family is an absolute natural," writes the father of nine. "It fits. In fact, it's where it was really learned." (emphasis added).

In still another sign of the growing willingness to credit the leadership capabilities of the person in charge of the home, a majority of employed adults polled recently said their mothers could do just as well or better than their current chief executives. Ajilon Office, a New Jersey recruiting services firm, surveyed 632 people and found that nearly three-fourths thought their mothers would be better or at least as capable at communicating with employees as their CEOs. Two-thirds thought Mom would be just as good or better at resolving employee disputes, and almost two-thirds thought she could handle company finances just as well or better. Not surprisingly, fully 80 percent thought their mothers could teach their CEOs a thing or two about ethics.

When Judy Blades, an executive vice president of The Hartford, was honored in 2002 as Insurance Woman of the Year at a luncheon at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan, she told the assembled insurance executives, speaking off the cuff and from the heart, that she had learned everything she knew from her family, including her children. She later told me that she had never had such positive feedback from any talk she had ever given.

My own "ah-ha!" moment came soon after my son was born in 1982. I was busily devouring baby books, and noticed an uncanny resemblance between the advice found in many books on parenting and the material in books on management that I had read as a business reporter. I wondered if the how-to books aimed at new mothers and the how-to books aimed at aspiring executives could in fact be the same material, packaged differently for different audiences.

I pursued this hunch a few years later by signing up to attend a three-day seminar at Harvard called "Dealing with Difficult People and Difficult Situations." The course was taught by William Ury, co-author of Getting to Yes, the bestselling business book of all time. And, sure enough, the management tips that the assembled business executives and military officers were paying almost two thousand dollars per head to hear were largely the same lessons anyone could read by picking up a ten-dollar paperback on parenting. Ury attributed his advice to such impeccably masculine sources as Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese general and author of The Art of War, and Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military strategist and author of On War. But, over lunch, he good-naturedly confirmed that much of what he taught came straight from Haim Ginott, the humanistic psychologist whose 1956 classic, Between Parent and Child, became a parenting bible. His largely male audience at Harvard, thinking they were learning how to apply the lessons of the battlefield to the modern organization, were in fact learning the lessons of child psychology that mothers had been applying at home for decades.

What are these lessons? What skills do conscientious mothers and fathers learn that cross over and enrich their professional lives? In my conversations with parents, four categories of transferable skills were mentioned over and over again.

The first and most oft-cited is multitasking, the ability to keep a dozen balls in the air at once. Among the elements of multitasking are the ability to establish priorities, to maintain focus in the midst of constant distraction, to manage complexity with efficiency, and to handle crises with a steady hand. As a friend of mine once summed it up, "Life is not a final; it's daily pop quizzes."

Working with children also develops the interpersonal skills that enable people to understand and successfully work with adults. People skills are increasingly understood to be part and parcel of every competent leader's repertoire. They include the ability to handle irrational and immature individuals of every age; understanding the importance of win - win negotiation; the ability to listen to others' concerns; to practice patience; express empathy; and respect individual differences, by learning to appreciate and use the talents of every individual.

A third category of parental skills comes under the heading growing human capabilities. These are the empowering, mentoring techniques that enable a manager or leader to develop others' strengths, and bring out the best in others. They include positive reinforcement; the ability to articulate a vision and to inspire others to join in creating and executing that vision; and the wisdom to let people go, by giving them the freedom to grow and make their own mistakes while still providing enough structure and feedback to keep them from stumbling too badly.

The fourth category of parental strengths comes under the heading of character, or what political scientist Valerie Hudson calls habits of integrity. Good parenting requires the habitual practice of certain, admittedly old-fashioned, virtues. To be done at all well, it demands steadfastness, courage, humility, hope, selflessness, creativity, and a degree of self-mastery that is often at odds with our indulgent culture. No wonder one cultural psychologist has described child-rearing as "routine, unexamined heroism."

Joseph Campbell, the great chronicler of mankind's myths, once defined a hero as someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself. "Losing yourself, giving yourself to another, is part of it," Campbell told Bill Moyers in a television interview. "Heroism involves trials... tests, and ultimately revelations ... it is the soul's high adventure." I can't think of a better description of the child-rearing experience.

The first habit of integrity is simply being there. Most mothers say that the most important thing they can do for their children is to be there for them. By this they mean being that solid someone their child can always count on in all the ways that count. It also means establishing a stable environment, a home base, that predictably meets the needs and expectations of those around you.

Virtually every parent I interviewed also told me that raising kids gave them greater perspective: an ability to distinguish between what's truly important in life and what isn't. Children, like nothing else, set your priorities straight.

Every parent who's ever divided up a birthday cake also knows that children are hard-wired to detect unfairness. The good parent, like the good manager, strives to be fair and impartial.

There is one more lesson children can teach. I believe that all those who have dreams for their children have to have a certain faith in the future. For parents, the future matters. It is hard for us as parents not to think of the time that will come after us, and the legacy we will leave behind. In the end, conscientious child-rearing includes working for a world we would want our children to inherit.

Copyright © 2005 Ann Crittenden

About the Author

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist and the author of three previous books, including The Price of Motherhood, a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other national publications. She lectures before dozens of diverse organizations each year and is on the board of the International Center for Research on Women.