Twinning Strategy welcomed Doris Jackson-Shazier, author of Raising Justice: Lessons Learned from Motherhood and founder at Shazier Coaching and Consulting this Friday (6/15) to discuss the interaction of parenting, leadership and corporate culture. While not everyone is a parent in the corporate world, we can all learn something from parenting and for those of us who are parents, we can learn from best practices in business leadership. We also have a duty as stewards of business culture to make sure, as Doris states, that we are seeing our colleagues, bosses and reports as whole people. This phenomenon is not limited to parenting. We all know people who are taking care of sick spouses, their own parents, or are struggling themselves with physical and mental health issues. I hear Doris's statement that we need to see people as "whole people" as being an imperative change that our courageous (and possibly fed up) millennials and GenZ co-workers have been leading. To quote someone (I forget who, or in what format) once noted, we should treat alll our colleagues as if there is something in their lives that they are dealing with that we are not privy to. Because whether it is our kids and the pressures of balancing our children's best interests and our jobs or our own health, empathy is warranted and deserved by all.
While there is a fine line between patronizing and learning from parenting that I will acknowledge, in the right spirit we learn a lot in the exchange between these two roles of parent and leader. I have reminded myself many times, that the job of my teen/pre-teen children is to learn to be autonomous, including making their own mistakes, knowing when to ask for help, and navigating complex relationships of those around them in their families and at school. I think it becomes harder for us to see the parallel 'job' for ourselves, our reports and our co-workers in the business world. As leaderships with direct supervision over our teams, we are in exactly that position that our goal is not to clone ourselves with robotic precision, but rather that we develop the skills in our team that allow our reports to grow into the autonomy of performing their job. Sometimes this means getting out of the way, other times it means asking probing questions to help guide those we are coaching, and occasionally it means grabbing the wheel to prevent a disaster that our team is not quite ready for. At our best, we get this with our kids. Doris says that 'offense' is a choice we make, and that we can choose to see our children and our colleagues pushing back as disrespect OR we can choose to see it as communication that there needs to be an adjustment in how we work together. I understand this approach as espousing a far less authoritarian/dominance driven leadership style, and creating a development focused relationship, built on trust, and built on the foundation that people have lives, feelings, and goals that transcend the momentary needs of the corporate strategy.
In the other direction, Doris explains that as parents we can learn some valuable lessons from our interactions at work. She describes the heart-breaking realization she has had with some people in the past, that no one has ever provided the the positive reinforcement to them, i.e. Doris herself was the first to tell some of her reports that she was 'proud' of their work. We come into the corporate world with the baggage of how our parents, teachers and former bosses have treated us. Doris points to this observation as a reminder that we need to bring that validation back home to our children. We are not just steering our children away from the dangers of the world, nor are we 'just' trying to fix our own problems through our children (ideally none of us are, but in reality it likely applies all parents) , we in fact are the foundation for their feelings of self worth and confidence that they will take with them to their lives outside of the family home.
Beyond the exchange of lessons though, we also need companies to continue the process, in some ways accelerated during the pandemic and in some ways sliding back, to develop a corporate approach that aligns the goals of mothers, fathers, care-givers, human-beings with the activity that often takes the lion-share of our waking hours.