How Leadership Skills Can Help You Become a Better Parent

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0:56Stewart Friedman:You know, nobody wants to see themselves as the parent that is just nitpicking and totally obsessed with logistics and keeping track of everything. That's not why we had kids, right? We didn't have kids to annoy them all day. People know what good leadership looks like. It's clarifying your values. It's having conversations with stakeholders about what's important. It's having a vision. All of that stuff makes a great parent. and there's no reason to leave it in the workplace. We're trained to be good leaders at work because everybody talks about that and then we go home and we act like these annoying micromanagers that we would never want to work for, bossing our kids and telling them, you have to do this, you have to do this, you're not doing this right.

1:40Alyssa Westring:It's kind of akin to command and control management. Just do what I say and don't question me. That's how a lot of parents treat their kids.

1:50Stewart Friedman:We know that our bosses wouldn't act like that. We wouldn't want our bosses to act like that.

1:55Alyssa Westring:We know now in the modern era that that's not the best leadership model for most situations. You gain a lot more engagement and better results as a leader in the workplace when you help people understand why we're doing what we're doing together, values and vision. And then you hear from your people as to what it is that they want to contribute and what they need to be able to do that well. In other words, you ask and you listen. It's really important to connect with why you became a parent in the first place.

2:29Stewart Friedman:Why did you do this? Right? The planet doesn't necessarily need more people.

2:34Alyssa Westring:Well, now that you are a parent, now why are you a parent? What does it mean for you to be a parent? How does being a parent affect who you are in your work life? How you see yourself in the world? How you see yourself in private? it.

2:48Stewart Friedman:Connecting with those fundamentals of why you became a parent re-centers you because without that sort of mindset, you're still in that mode of micromanagement and logistics and coordination.

3:06Alyssa Westring:Prepare for and undertake what we call stakeholder dialogues, starting with your kids. And of course, it's a very different conversation if your child is three than if she's 30 or 13.

3:18Stewart Friedman:When my kids were much younger, we decided to come up with our family values. And I think we ended up on the words kindness, fairness, and fun. And at that age, fairness means is very simple, right? You get one, your brother gets one. And as my kids are growing older, we're revisiting that concept of fairness. So now at their ages as 8 and 10, we can say fairness doesn't always mean that everybody gets exactly the same thing. And we can use that idea that's been in our sort of repertoire and our vocabulary since they were really little, and it can evolve. But it's not coming to my kids as a shock to know what our family values are.

4:06Stewart Friedman:when you're asking kids what they need it isn't about now they're the boss and you have to do

4:11Alyssa Westring:whatever they want what i need is more screen time and candy and pizza uh well all right let's talk about what that means and how that fits with the kind of the kind of family we're trying to become and why that's a good thing for you as well as for me but it is about them giving them a sense that

4:30Stewart Friedman:they have a voice in the family and that they can have some input. But when they tell you what they need, and let's say they do want, they say, I need more time on TV. What do you say to that? Well, now it's opening a door to you sharing your values and how they might conflict with that, or how you can incorporate TV into your family in a way that matches everyone's values. You know, in my own family, we have time where we watch TV together and we find a show that all of us like and we can bond over it and talk about Survivor as our show. What would you do in this situation? What skills do you need?

5:08Stewart Friedman:How would you have handled this social situation? And that's really different than two kids with headphones on sitting on their tablets.

5:16Alyssa Westring:Kids respond generally pretty well. They want to be heard. They want to have a voice. They want to feel like they're a part of the future together and that they have a sense of being appreciated for the ideas that they have and the needs that they have. There's always a surprise because you discover that the way your kids see you is different than how you thought they see you. and you learn some new things about what they really need.

5:51Stewart Friedman:We had one great family that we worked with. It was a single dad, and he asked his son.

5:57Alyssa Westring:The boy was around six.

5:59Stewart Friedman:What do you need from me? What do you want from me? And he said, I want you to teach me stuff.

6:03Alyssa Westring:His son wanted to learn a new skill.

6:07Stewart Friedman:I want to learn from you. And the dad was like, his mind was blown, and he was like, okay, what do you want to learn? And the son said, I want to learn to vacuum.

6:16Alyssa Westring:That was a surprise. It's something that he'd seen being done, like it was taking care of something in the house. Wow, you want to learn how to vacuum? Okay. Father never thought about that before, but it turned out to be a great project for them to work on that.

6:32Stewart Friedman:It was such a small moment to say, here's what I want our relationship to look like. Here's what I need from you. And in general, the couples that we work with, the people we work with, are really surprised by the answers that they get and how thoughtful they are. I think a lot of us go into this expecting the kids to say, I need more presents, I need more junk food. And the answers are much deeper and much more clear. Things like, I need you to put away your phone when you're talking to me. I need you to be here. I need you to listen to my problems. I need you to give me advice. I need you to support me in this way or not criticize this.

7:09Stewart Friedman:You know, at all age ranges, the answers are pretty profound.

7:14Alyssa Westring:You know, on its surface, it might seem like you're dehumanizing or perhaps objectifying, you know, the work that is family life. But that's not typically what happens. The groundwork is in let's get to know each other better and what we really care about and what we are trying to do here together. and to see where we are not doing as well as we can and to communicate about how we can take our current reality with a clearer view of it and make it better, which is, after all, the work of leadership.

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