Raising successful kids comes down to a simple question: Do you want to be a leader or a boss? A boss manages things; a leader empowers, inspires, shows the way forward and makes it their business to connect with their employees every day.
Being a successful leader is tough. In the book “Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution,” Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman published the results of a study they undertook of 300,000 business leaders. These development consultants wanted to identify the characteristics and qualities of good leaders. It turns out that good leaders and good parents share quite a number of similar qualities. Here are just a few of them.
1. Great leaders and great parents know that good relationships are built on clear communication.
In a 2015 Interact/Harris survey about the “Top Complaints from Employees About Their Leaders,” 91 percent of the respondents considered their leaders lacking in communication skills. Up to 57 percent of respondents felt that they rarely received clear directions about what was expected of them.
Communication is a key foundation of strong relationships. Zenger and Folkman found that effective leaders communicate clearly and regularly with their employees. The same can be said about effective parents. Several studies suggest that having clear and appropriate (neither too high nor too low) expectations of your child has a large impact on their behavioral and educational outcomes.
Here are five things you can do to improve parent-child communication:
- Clearly identify your expectations and share those with your child.
- Give clear and regular feedback, even when that feedback is negative, but avoid lectures.
- Be up front and honest in your communication with your child.
- Listen more than you talk. Show empathy and put yourself in your child’s shoes.
- Find time to connect every day.
2. Great parents and great leaders inspire.
Research has shown that anxious parents are more likely to raise anxious children, not necessarily because of genetic issues, but because of their display of anxious behavior. In other words, if a child sees their parent react anxiously to a given situation, they are likely to begin reacting anxiously to that situation themselves.
Great leaders inspire and motivate others, and so do great parents. We now know that children learn how to react to different situations by watching us. In other words, modeling the behavior that you want your child to display is the most effective way of inspiring them.
3. Great parents and great leaders are also great cheerleaders.
A great leader knows that their employees’ success is their success. They know that it is important for employees to believe that their leader is on their side. In the Interact/Harris survey on effective leadership mentioned earlier, 63 percent of the employees thought that leaders who did not recognize their achievements were ineffective leaders.
Just as employees need to have their achievements recognized, your child needs to know that you’ve noticed when they are doing a good job, even when — especially when — that progress is slow and painful.
Instead of simply praising your child, let them know exactly what they have done right. For example, “You’ve gotten so much better at reading since you began reading every day,” “You hardly made any mistakes — look how your music practice is paying off.” Over 30 years ago, Carol Dweck coined the term “growth mindset” after studying student attitudes toward failure. As Dweck’s research has shown, your child grows and develops when they feel like they have the power to change the events that happen in their lives. The more they feel capable of success, the higher the chances are that they will make an effort to achieve their goals.
4. Great parents and great leaders focus on building trust in their relationships.
Great leaders and great parents care about building relationships that are based on trust. As a parent, this is not only about being able to trust your child; he or she also needs to know that they can trust you and count on you.
Trust and accountability go together. Your child will make mistakes — all kids do — but allowing them to make amends when those mistakes happen shows your faith in them.
5. Great parents and great leaders never hover.
Great leaders do not micromanage their employees. They do not hover over them, watching their every move and waiting to catch them in the wrong.
In 1996, researchers David Bredehoft, Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson observed more than 3,500 children over several years. They wanted to know if it was possible to “overparent” and how overparenting affected children’s development. The researchers found that overindulgent parents regularly stepped in to solve their children’s problems and failed to hold them accountable for their mistakes. These parents were determined to make life easier for their kids at all costs.
In the book the researchers published, “How Much Is Too Much? Raising Likeable, Responsible, Respectful Children — From Toddlers to Teens — In an Age of Overindulgence,” they explain that doing too much for your children is bad for them. It can:
- Make them less confident in their ability to succeed.
- Decrease the likelihood that they will take up leadership roles and thus hamper them in developing problem-solving skills.
- Prevent them from reaching their full potential. As Bredehoft, Clarke and Dawson note, it can “hinder children from performing their needed developmental tasks, and from learning necessary life lessons.”
Clarke says that there are three types of overindulgence: doing too much for your child or giving them too many things; giving your child too much attention (i.e., you have a constant need to know where they are and what they are doing); and providing a soft structure, meaning that you do for them what they should be doing for themselves. Doing too much for your child harms you and it harms them.
Both great parents and great leaders know that without a strong relationship, none of their other efforts will matter. They know that strong relationships do not develop by themselves; they need nurturing to grow.
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