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6 Parenting Lessons you can apply to Business

Guest post by: Julie Lenzer Kirk

Article Overview: Many people believe that you can not be serious about business and be a good parent at the same time. Or if you’re a good parent, you must let things slide at work. This always puzzled me. I love what I do for what some refer to as ‘work’ and could not imagine not doing it. Even though I did quite well when cashing out of my business a few years ago, I could not fathom the thought of retiring (though it did fleetingly cross my mind). I would lose my sanity. At the same time, my children mean the world to me. As they are in the dawn of their teen years, my presence in their lives seems more essential then ever before. How can these two, very demanding roles, coexist?

6 Parenting Lessons you can apply to Business

Many people believe that you can not be serious about business and be a good parent at the same time. Or if you’re a good parent, you must let things slide at work. This always puzzled me. I love what I do for what some refer to as ‘work’ and could not imagine not doing it. Even though I did quite well when cashing out of my business a few years ago, I could not fathom the thought of retiring (though it did fleetingly cross my mind). I would lose my sanity. At the same time, my children mean the world to me. As they are in the dawn of their teen years, my presence in their lives seems more essential then ever before. How can these two, very demanding roles, coexist?

The idea actually hit me when people would constantly inquire as to whether I was planning to have a third child. At the time, I had two children less than two years apart as well as a fledgling business and would quip in response “I have the third child – my business. It keeps me up at night, it takes all my money, and it even sasses me back.” People got that – it made a lot of sense to them. Like seeing the car you’re considering buying where you never saw it before, the parallels between parenting and business began to scream out at me so that I could no longer ignore them. My two toughest jobs - mom and working woman – actually had a lot more in common than I had previously thought.

As I raised my children at the same time as growing my business to multi-millions in revenues and in interviewing serious business people who are also parents for my book, The ParentPreneur Edge: What Parenting Teaches About Building a Successful Business (John Wiley & Sons), I found that it is possible to be serious and successful in both these roles. The secret lies in embracing the many similarities between business and family life. Following are five of the lessons that we can learn from our parenting experience to help us be successful in business.

1. Letting your child make mistakes
At some point as parents, we need to let our children do things on their own. They may not tie their shoe, put away their toys, or make their bed the same way we would, but as long as the task is done we need to let them do it while teaching them better ways. When they make mistakes, they learn a valuable lesson that sticks with them more than if we had simply told them. My daughter learned that a plastic pot burns on the cook top through experience – she won’t ever do that again. The same goes for employees. Delegating tasks to staff members or colleagues helps them to build their competencies and lets us get more done. Allow them to make recoverable mistakes and encourage them to take lessons from it. Make sure, however, that you delegate without abdication. Make plans for checking in at various milestones through the project to ensure it doesn’t completely fail and cost you your job or company in the process.

2. Realizing each child is different
It is inevitable: kids raised in the same house with the same parents and identical rules react differently. No two kids are alike. Discipline that works with one may have no impact on the other. Dealing with employees presents similar challenges. A good manager recognizes that people are motivated by different things. What is a reward to one staff member may not be valued by another. People, and children, must be managed as individuals and not treated as a one-size-fits-all.

3. Communicating effectively
My daughter likes to yell at me across the house when she wants something. Inevitably, I can only hear her scream, and not the words in her message. Yelling back to her only exacerbates the issue. Our unwillingness to communicate effectively has made for more than one frustrating morning. In my business, too, I noticed how many different problems seemed to have their root in ineffective communications. Too many times, e-mail was used and misunderstood or assumptions were made and not verified. The result is a variety of symptomatic fires that can grow into a flaming blaze. Ensuring the core issue is addressed and establishing effectual communication is the only way to build a productive department, division, or business.


4. Embracing “no” as good
Saying no to our children is never fun, but we must provide limits. It is easy to tell a toddler ‘no’ as his hand approaches fire, but things get murkier when your teenager wants to stay out past curfew. You know the verdict won’t be welcome, but are also convinced it is the right things to do. In business, too, we must be prepared to say no. If, for example, we offer the opportunity to telecommute we must realize that not all positions within a company may be suited for working from home. We also have to be prepared to say no to customers if we really have a business strategy. Sometimes work that a customer wants us to do takes us out of our comfort zone and if it leads us in a direction that we were not planning to go, we risk depleting the resources earmarked for our more strategic initiatives. Likewise, not all customers are good customers. It pays to really know where your biggest profit margins are so you can determine which customers are really worth having and keeping and those that you can let go.

5. Combating entitlement early
When doors open for us as we approach and moving stairs effortlessly carry us, how can we not feel a sense of entitlement? By the time children reach their pre-teen years, they need to learn the difference between a right and a privilege to combat that entitlement complex. In our house, anything electronic (Game Boy, the TV, the internet) is a privilege and must be earned. It is not a given. Likewise in business, employees need to know what they receive just for showing up and what privileges they must earn. One example of this is bonuses. If you fail to communicate the criteria through which bonuses are offered, employees will begin to see them as a given. When this happens and a bonus is not provided or it is less than expected, morale can plummet. Not exactly the anticipated result of a bonus, is it?

6. Not worrying about being liked
Many parents worry about whether their children will like the decisions they make. They want to be their child’s friend. The problem is, to be a good parent we must be willing to lose that friendship by making the tough decisions that are not always popular. Business is the same. We all want to be liked, but not at the expense of our business. It is good to be liked as a boss or colleague, but if you let that govern how you make decisions, you risk sacrificing the business and your performance by making the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. I have seen great managers who may not have been best buddies with their employees, but they were respected. Even if they would not have won a popularity contest, they were viewed as fair which benefited the business more than if they had been everybody’s friend. Besides, how willing would you be to fire a friend if it was what the businesses needed? I’ve done it – it isn’t fun.

Allowing the two most important roles in your life to coexist and feed from each other, though they are sometimes in conflict, can be enriching. Embracing the lessons and skills that you have learned as a parent can indeed provide you with an edge in business. Having children at the same time can help you keep you’re your business endeavors in perspective.

Julie Lenzer Kirk is an award-winning entrepreneur and mother of two. She is the Founder of Path Forward International, which offers workshops, consulting, and keynotes to give entrepreneurial companies and individuals a “Boot in the Butt™” to launch new ideas, grow existing ventures, find their work/life balance, and fine-tune their entrepreneurial leadership skills. Her book, “The ParentPreneur Edge: What Parenting Teaches About Building a Successful Business”(John Wiley & Sons) is available online and in bookstores. You can subscribe to her monthly “Boot in the Butt™” newsletter through her website at www.JulieLenzerKirk.com.

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