28 January 2016. 1:53am. This was the moment that my life changed forever. At that exact moment, my wife and I became parents to Jenson, our beautiful baby boy. People often told us that it would be a life changing experience, but as I held all 8lbs 5oz of him in my arms, I never quite realised just how life changing it would turn out to be.
For me, it resulted in me setting up my own business - Allazo Consulting Services - the single biggest (and best) decision I've made in my career to date.
Reflecting on our first year of parenthood, I realise I've learnt a great deal. It can be tremendously hard, yet completely brilliant. It can be hugely frustrating, yet utterly rewarding. Much of what you do is unseen, yet vitally important.
With this in mind, it occurred to me that parenthood actually shares many similarities with business leadership. As a leader, you have responsibility for guiding an organisation and steering it towards success, much like a parent would do with their child. A leader doesn't do all of the work to get the organisation to where it needs to be themselves; success is dependent upon them creating an environment where teams are able and wanting to do their best work. Much like a parent needs to do for their child, in order to give them the best possible opportunity to develop.
Therefore, what I've learned over the past year and a bit is completely applicable in business. In fact, the following 9 lessons are ESSENTIAL if you want to be an effective and well-rounded business leader:
1. Lead by example: behave how you want them to behave
A baby develops much of what they learn through imitation. When they see you take a sip out of your cup, or laugh at a noise, they'll attempt to do the same. They do that because they look up to you as their parent. If I want my little one to be happy and smile a lot, then I have to consistently demonstrate that in the appropriate situations. If I don't, then he won't. It's as simple as that. As a leader, your team is the same. If you're in a position of leadership, the chances are your team hold you in high regard with respect to your knowledge and experience. Therefore, the way you operate will likely be replicated in the actions of your team. If you seek to do the right thing, so will they. If you cut corners, well, they will too.
"A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way." John C. Maxwell
As a result, the values and behaviours to which you hold yourself and your team have a fundamental effect on the way you deliver value to your customers. It creates identity, and often, customers engage more deeply with what a business stands for than what it actually does. The chances are, you have competitors that deliver a product/service very similar to your own for a similar price, and in these instances, this often means that the business purpose/values become the differentiator - who would the customer prefer to be associated with? Whose purpose and modus operandi do they identify with? As a leader of a business, you are fundamental to the embodiment of these values: if you don't lead by example, the chances are they won't be consistently lived within your business, and they won't be conveyed to the customer.
2. Invest your time in them: they will reward you
Development is not quick and easy. It takes focused and deliberate practice. When our little one had learnt to crawl, he discovered that he could make his way to the edge of the sofa and get down… Brilliant, except that his method was to find his way to the edge and dive off face first, resulting in pain and tears! To prevent this happening, the next time he did it, we showed him the correct way. We stopped him, turned him around into a safe position (feet first, facing the sofa) and helped him down onto his feet. We repeated this process every time he tried to climb down until he start doing it himself, and when he did, we positively reinforced the behaviour in ways he was familiar with. He now climbs down safely and never falls off!
Note the importance of the focus on doing the right thing (outcome), rather than the achievement of the result (output). Jenson might have have jumped off the sofa and somehow landed on his feet. However, if we'd celebrated the result, he'd be more likely to try and jump off again. Needless to say, for a baby that's a high risk strategy with a high probability of injury... so rather than reward the result, we rewarded his use of the method we knew would result in the right outcome, even when he didn't quite get it right. And the results followed. The point is, investing time in coaching the correct behaviour paid dividends as he became more capable, safer and more independent more quickly than if we had not done so.
"You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise." Michael Jordan
As a leader, if you put in the time to develop your team and coach them to improve and develop, you will reap the rewards in the long term. Create a safe environment to learn that champions working the right way to achieve results, rather than results in any way at any cost. Nurture their capability, help them to learn from when it doesn't go as planned, and the results will follow.
3. Seek to understand them: learn why they do what they do
Before babies can talk, it's extremely difficult for babies to express how they're feeling. A cry could represent all manner of feelings or needs. When they're hungry, when they're tired, when they're feeling under the weather, even when they're bored. Therefore, as a parent your challenge is to understand the other cues they inadvertently give out in order to figure out what they need. If you don't truly understand them, you'll struggle to effectively meet their needs right away.
"You will never get the best out of anyone professionally unless you understand what motivates and makes them tick personally - as a human being." Rasheed Ogunlaru
As a leader, learning how to manage each member of your team to get the best out of them is vital to creating a high performance culture. By deeply understanding your people, you can more effectively work to their strengths. If you understand what makes them tick, you can tailor your approach. You can identify more quickly if there is something wrong and address the issue before it escalates, or even perhaps use your understanding of your people to prevent it in the first place. Vitally, you can combine the collective skills of the team and utilise them accordingly for maximum effect. More importantly, you deliver an implicit but very clear message to your team when you invest the time to get to know and understand them. It conveys the message that you care and that you're interested in them as a person, helping them to feel safe and secure in their role. The demonstration of the extra effort by you to understand your team can also result in the reciprocation of discretional effort on their part (Check out 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' by Robert Cialdini to learn more about the role of reciprocation in influencing), the value of which will often be demonstrated by an improvement in performance.
4. Let them get it wrong: it can be the best way to learn
Even at just over a year old, our little one clearly disagrees with my view that what he's doing will end up in him falling over, or losing his food to the cat. Sometimes it takes the impact of consequences to teach a more powerful lesson that not doing it in the first place. In this case, the experience of
the physical pain of falling over or the emotional distress of the cat eating his cheese cubes will teach Jenson a lesson that he wouldn’t have learnt if he had done what he was told in the first place. As a result, he’s probably more likely to get it right next time.
"In order to succeed you must fail, so that you know what not to do the next time." Anthony D’Angelo
The same is true when you are coaching people in your business. Improvement is fundamentally driven by deliberate practice, trying and trying again, getting it wrong and learning from those experiences. As mentioned in point two, we focus on getting the method right, not purely on the outcome. The right method will elicit the right results given deliberate practice, and it ensures that we maintain a consistent standard from which to base ourselves, making it easier to identify and address deviations that may cause problems or even improvements in our performance Where you can provide a controlled and supportive environment to enable people to learn in this way, you’ll reap the benefits.
5. It’s okay to not know the answer: nobody has all of them
Parenthood isn’t a clearly defined art. Everybody has their own views, and there are experts telling you ‘do this’ or ‘do that’. Nobody does it in the same way and especially as a first time parent, there are plenty of occasions where you're faced with an unfamiliar situation and you 'fly by the seat of your pants'! There is no standard parenting blueprint , and you certainly don't always get it right first time, but it's okay - as long as you learn from those situations, then you're better for it. But as far as I see it, if you have a happy, healthy and developing little one, then you're on the right lines.
"To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers." Craig D. Lounsbrough
The reality is that whilst there are some fundamental best practice principles, every business, every team is different, and therefore what to do is not always clear cut. The destination may be the same but there are many ways to get there. As a leader, you're not there to have all the answers. You're there to enable your team to figure them out.
Just like parenthood, if your team is happy, developing, and getting the right results, then it's likely on the right track.
6. Be THE port in the storm: lead the way in hard times
There are times as a parent where everything seems to be working against you. When your baby has colic, and won’t go down at night, meaning you’re up hourly, or worse still, don’t manage to get to bed at all! Default emotion here is extreme frustration, derived from utter tiredness. The catch is, if you let your emotion overwhelm you, the problem is multiplied ten-fold. Not only that, you transmit that frustration to your poorly baby. In times of stress, if you can keep a clear head and maintain your composure, you will be better equipped to deal with the situation. And in turn, you reduce the impact. It is the same in business.
"Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath." Michael Caine
When faced with a tough and stressful situation, your role is to guide the ship calmly across the rough sea, helping your team to focus on the key actions required to navigate the problem. Even if you don't feel calm, you have to maintain your own composure and guide them through. Thanks to Sir Michael Caine, I think of it as the Duck Principle: even if you're paddling frantically underneath the water, above water you make sure you appear serene and calm. Direct your team away from fear or panic by focusing your team on the task of solving the problem. Importantly, this doesn't mean hiding the problem from them. Transparency is important; help them to deeply understand the problem, but help them to see the opportunity it provides. Do this consistently, and your team will be better equipped to calmly and proactively solve problems that arise.
7. Work as a team: Utilise your collective strengths
We quickly realised that as parents, my wife and I were very different. That's actually a great thing - we have different strengths and it actually means we're well equipped to deal with a wide range of situations. We also learn from each other, making us more well rounded parents.
"Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean."Ryunosuke Satoro
As a leader, the self awareness to understand your own strengths and weaknesses and the humility to learn from others are vital skills - how you understand the team around them and utilise the combination of skills for maximum effect, even more fundamental.
8. Find balance in life: this is the key to success
My life changed fundamentally when Jenson was born. I had something that I can only assume resembles an epitome - before, I was focused on career success and when things weren’t going so well, I let it impact the rest of my life by worrying about the challenges I was facing. I worked myself to exhaustion, with little thought to how it was actually compromising my ability to do a good job.
"In all aspects of our lives balance is key. Doing one thing too much can cause upset, like the old saying goes, everything in moderation is the secret!" Catherine Pulsifer
Now, I’ve learnt that true success centres around balance. A great career is useless is you have nobody to share your success with. The happiness of a wonderful family set up is negated if you're overworked, hate your job and spend the vast bulk of your waking hours tired, unfulfilled, and unhappy.
Once each second goes by, we don't get it back - we need to use it wisely. When you're a leader, you have a responsibility to your team, and to serve them effectively, you must be at your best. You can't do that if you're stressed and/or exhausted. You have to ensure that both you and your team have the opportunity to find the balance that suits them. The closer you get to achieving this, the happier your team will be, and this will almost certainly reflect in your team's performance.
"Take time to recharge your batteries. It's hard to see where you're going when your lights are dim." Robert H. Connelly
9. Learn from them: Remember, a baby taught me the lessons written in this post…
Just because you’re their leader doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them. I learn from Jenson every day, even though he doesn’t realise it. That’s how I came to write this post. Whether it be from their knowledge or your interactions with them, if you choose to look, you will find valuable learning. In my experience, every individual I’ve ever worked with has a skill or knowledge that makes them unique, and makes them a valuable source of learning. Whether you seek out that learning, is up to you…
In Summary
Parenthood is a powerful experience, and an incredible opportunity. But so is leadership. You may have noticed that these lessons all have a common theme: a dedicated focus on people.
"People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps." Mary Kay Ash
In fact, the success of both parenthood and leadership is determined by the people for whom one has responsibility. Therefore, the extent to which you invest your time, effort & resources in your people will directly impact the level of success you achieve. by placing significant emphasis on maximising the potential of your people, your business will be better placed to consistently deliver exceptional customer value. Apply the principles of the lessons above and you'll be going a long way towards creating an engaged and fulfilled workforce that are capable of doing great work every day.
But these are just my experiences... What are yours? Leave a comment below and let us know!
Jack is the Managing Consultant at Allazo Consulting Services, experts in Operational Excellence, passionate about all things Business and on a mission to help their clients deliver consistently exceptional value to their customers. Reach him at jack@allazoconsultingservices.com
*http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-hours
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