Surprising Similarity Between Parenting And Leadership Grooming.
Edition #131
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Are You a Micromanager or Too Hands-Off?
A recent article in HBR by Carol Ann Penny discusses one of the challenges most people face: How to strike the right balance between too much micro-management and being completely hands-off.
Here are some key takeaways:
Many managers focus on how they come across as leaders, and the fear of their reputational risk drives such behaviour. This leads to anxiety and insecurity. Having a sense of purpose and staying true to it is vital.
Too much control over the output done by their team leads to such problems. It is vital to take time to set clear expectations and reaffirm with them their understanding of what needs to be done. When expectations are unclear, it leads to micro-management behaviour.
Managers get uncomfortable when deadlines are missed frequently. Hence, from being hands-off, they move the other side completely to micro-manage everything. Having an open-ended discussion will create more opportunities for discussion and resolving issues. Many managers are not trained to have discussions by asking open-ended questions. Working on that is vital.
Read the entire article here( It may be behind a paywall)
Parenting - Helping Our Children Play To Their Potential.
Surprisingly, parenting does not have a structured training program! Most parents stumble along the way as they experiment, learn from their own experiences, make mistakes, and keep incrementally improving their hypothesis on what they believe are the key factors that play a role in developing and grooming their children. Deepak Jayaraman, leadership coach and curator of the Play to Potential Podcast, does a phenomenal job of providing a context and framework for parenting.
Here are some of his ideas and thoughts that you can think and reflect on:
Remember, parenting is more about the parents themselves rather than the children!
When it comes to parenting, Deepak discusses three things to consider: identity, time, and prioritization. How we understand and manage these three are fundamental building blocks to good parenting.
Identity defines what kind of person you want to be in that domain in your life.
Redefine how you see and approach time. Just seeing time as a means of making money will have a negative impact. Learning to spend time without a mental hard stop in your head and an open agenda can create inexplicable moments and conversations with your kids.
Prioritizing where and how you want to spend your time is essential to good parenting. Being self-aware of your priorities is vital for effective parenting.
“Children pay more attention to what we are doing and who we are being than what we are telling them.”- an amazing point to remember always.
Federer’s parents focused on raising a good human being, not just a great sportsperson!
It is essential to raise grounded kids with empathy.
Involving kids in philanthropic activities can make a difference in their perspective and thinking.
Acknowledging your kid’s emotions is as important as acknowledging their reality.
Look at the 2x2 matrix—low-to-high levels of love and low-to-high levels of authority. It is an excellent framework for determining which quadrant you fall into. The parenting analogy from Sound of Music is simply vivid and beautiful.
Today, kids have an abundance of options to pursue any career. The link between education and professional choice has become increasingly tenuous. Therefore, allow your kids to explore.
You can also listen to the entire episode here:
The Bill Gates 1991 Interview.
It’s always great learning to watch interviews that were done with trendsetters, legends and achievers many decades ago. This is an interview with Bill Gates in 1991 -33 years ago! When you look at this interview with Bill Gates, this gives us good insights into the mind of the man and his work:
Here are some interesting thoughts that were shared during the conversation:
It is important to nurture interest, curiosity, and passion early in life rather than just attending school or college.
There is no substitute for intense hard work when you are starting early. If you are not doing it, take a step back and consider the long-term impact it will have on your career.
There will be critical moments in your career that you need to seize by seeing what others cannot see - For Bill Gates, it was IBM asking him to write the software for the personal computer. The Operating System then became a standard not just for the IBM PC but for all PCs worldwide! IBM could not see it!
How Bill Gates approaches the question of defending his installed base reveals his mindset and thinking very well. Rather than being paranoid, he approaches the problem from a position of strength while acknowledging the need to keep improving.
How technology transforms skills needed, and people need to get themselves ready for such changes by upskilling themselves.
It is vital to listen to customers when it comes to developing and making products better. Bill Gates listened to and analysed customer feedback to take it to product group meetings.
When a new industry gets shaped like the PC industry, the players themselves don’t envisage the disruptions it can cause to their own businesses, society and the business environment. The need to keenly observe these trends, usage and how the ecosystems change is vital to adapting and changing to stay relevant.
You can watch the entire video by clicking on the above link.
Surprising Similarity Between Parenting And Leadership Grooming.
It’s a well-known fact that parenting is a long, patient journey that requires clarity of purpose, a significant investment of time, commitment, and sacrifice if you want to make it count on your kids. One interesting thought popped up, which was, “Is leadership grooming any different?”
Like parenting, leadership grooming is also a long, patient and arduous journey. There are no overnight outcomes. In fact, it is a little harder as senior colleagues may not be as emotionally invested in grooming leaders as they are in grooming their kids. Also, kids are locked in with them permanently for life, but individuals in companies are not locked in as they have the option to leave and move on.
When you think hard about this, leadership grooming requires the same intent, focus, time investment, sacrifice and commitment of senior colleagues who are developing a set of leaders under them. However, often, many senior colleagues in companies think it is the role of HR or training programs or the company to do this, and they just work with the individuals or teams to get assigned tasks completed.
Like parenting, senior colleagues are responsible for instilling a sense of purpose in every individual or team they work with. To do this, senior colleagues must have a purpose for themselves rather than look at what they do as a job or work. The statement on parenting resonates so closely with leadership grooming - “Children pay more attention to what we are doing and who we are being than what we are telling them.” Imagine replacing the same statement with “ “Colleagues pay more attention to what senior colleagues are doing and who senior colleagues are being than what senior colleagues are telling them.”
The next one is the time investment senior colleagues need to give to individuals and their teams. This is not just feedback and appraisal meetings done once a year, but regular one-on-ones, helping individuals chart their personal career journey, sharing their experiences, creating micro-platforms to share what they are reading or learning, having no-agenda conversations, sacrificing their time and growth for individuals in their teams etc., which sounds very similar to what is needed in great parenting.
The last one is senior colleagues need to understand the priorities and emotions of the individuals in their teams. Many of them will be in different life stages and may have changing priorities over time, just like parenting, understanding and balancing it is vital for senior leaders. Similarly, senior colleagues must learn to handle the ‘unexpressed’ or ‘suppressed’ emotions of individuals in their teams. Again, this is similar to allowing kids to explore and express themselves, which is crucial to good parenting. So, is the case here as senior colleagues can’t allow their stress or, pressure or emotions to create barriers with potential leaders they are grooming in their teams. Understanding underlying emotions, creating and finding outlets for the individuals in their teams to express themselves can go a long way in grooming better leaders.
If you treat parenting as one more checklist or transaction, it will not have the desired impact on your kids. Leadership grooming seems no different.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Finding the right balance between micro-managing and hands-off management begins with a sense of purpose, aligned values, and setting clear expectations.
Better parenting happens when parents are more aware of themselves and their behaviours.
When you build scale in your company, defend your competitors from a position of strength and strive to keep improving as if there is competition around the corner, even if there is none.
when you see work and life as opposing forces and require constant balance or rigid rules around it, you miss the entire opportunity to identify similarity between parenting and leadership development.