Top 5 lessons to learn from children about management and leadership
By: Mansi Chitranshi
Tags: Corporate Culture, Leadership, Management And Leadership, Team Building

Artem Kniaz via Unsplash

This morning, during my run, I heard a yet another intriguing TedTalk podcast by YeYoon Kim (Professional community developer) on ‘What kids can teach adults about asking for help’. YeYoon Kim (a former kindergarten teacher) says it’s a mark of courage to ask for help — lessons of courage that she learnt from her kindergarten kids.

This made me wonder — there’s so much more that you can learn from kids about leadership, management, and communication — lessons you can easily translate into your corporate world as a manager.

Let me be clear: I’m not about to tell you that you need to have kids to be a good manager or leader. I’m also not about to tell you that your employees or colleagues are anything like kids. (If they are, stop reading this article and go take care of that problem first!) Instead, I’m here to reflect on all the ways that being a parent modified, sharpened, and sometimes strengthened my working life as a professional and a manager. Children and work colleagues have a lot more in common than you might think. The lessons I have learnt — are both tangible as well as some are less quantifiable, but here are the lessons that stuck out the most. Here are the top five lessons

Feedback, feedback, and feedback

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just tell our colleagues/peers at work to “do better” and they’d miraculously understand it and get better overnight? Well, that’s not the way reality works, right? I never grasped the importance of explanatory feedback until I had a child. Just saying “no” to a kid does quite nothing. Why “no” they ask, and you cannot reply with ‘because I say so’. What impact did their action have? What can they do better next time to transform it into a yes? Most recently, my 10 year old son, very confidently said to me at the dinner table –‘I’d like to share some feedback with you : you should not be looking into your phone when you’re having dinner, because rules are same for all’ . This left me quite speechless and at loss of words.

Now I draw that on to professional feedback — not sharing feedback and adopting the ‘I’d rather do it myself’ or ‘because I know best’ attitude will not help you solve the problem as a team. Get better through constructive feedback and share it often — both, good and bad.

Learn to Say No — often

I do not believe there is a child on this planet (or any other) whose favorite word is not ‘no’. At times it seems like “no” is their complete vocabulary. Somewhere along our professional lives, we lose this capacity. We find ourselves attending meetings we didn’t want to go to or saying yes to projects that we would rather not do or do not have the capacity to do. Why? Because we often believe it’s easier to say “yes” and not seem like the bad employee. In the long run everyone would have been better off if you’d had the nerves to say “no.” Accepting everything that comes your way, will not only fill your creative capacity, but you will not be able to do justice to all the zillion things you said yes to.

Coach the team you have, not the team you want

My son plays at the local football club and has lost many competitions which was invariably blamed on the team and to the fact that they are not all A-players. In the sports world, we all want to be Barcelona FC and have Suarez, Neymar, and Messi on our front line. However, that is far from reality. In real life, our teams have strong points and weak spots. Our role as a coach or a manger is to comprehend those strengths and weaknesses and do things that amplify the power of the strengths and reduce the risks connected with the weaknesses. It might imply role rotations, providing support for the new or weaker teammates, or changing tactics that allow your top contributors to stand out.

Start afresh with a clean slate

Every time my son has a conflict or argument with me, he wakes up next day with a fresh slate, completely oblivious to the argument last night. As adults, we should do that too. Each ‘tomorrow’ is fundamentally a new day, free of errors and failures. What an extraordinarily redemptive thought! Effective leadership requires you to let go of your baggage today and start each day with afresh.

Dance. Hop. Sing loudly — and badly like no one is watching!

At the early years, kids do not understand humiliation or failure, so they somersault their way through life with joy and fortitude of not knowing any better — or worse. As more contented, naive people, they are inclined to trust more honestly, allowing them to be liked and recognized by others, and be more virtuous than doubting people. This is because kids are easygoing and intrinsically learn to surf the waves of life, rather than going against the tides.

When you reflect upon it, children can teach us adults many more lessons like; how to handle people problems, stay active, look after yourself, don’t forget to have fun, never stop learning, try new things every day, fail and move on, even after you’ve been wronged. So, to all of you I would say, act more like a child today and hold on to these lessons.

I will leave it at a question: Do you have any lessons you have learned from a child?