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Having a business isn’t like having a family, but some important lessons apply to both. As a parent, you want to identify and nurture your kids’ natural skills and push them to improve in the areas where they need it most. It’s the same in management.
Many of the lessons I’ve learned from raising my daughters have also guided my thinking at FutureFund — the free fundraising platform for K-12 school groups that I founded over a decade ago. Here are three things I’ve learned from parenting that have also helped me develop talent in the workplace.
Related: 4 Ways Parenting and Leadership Work Together
1. Find the intersection of passion & ability
Parents tend to put their kids in a wide variety of different sports — usually starting with the ones they’re most interested in themselves. But this isn’t just an effort to live vicariously through their offspring; they do it because they’re trying to find out what will stick. It’s natural to start with the familiar and branch out from there.
The way I like to think of it is that you’re trying to find an intersection between two equally important things: their raw talent or ability and their desire or passion to participate.
You might have a teenager who’s 6’4″ and assume they’d be a great basketball player — but having that natural advantage is only half the equation. If it turns out they hate basketball, they probably won’t be motivated to practice, and they might not actually be an asset to their team when game time arrives.
As the parent, you might try them out at basketball to start — but be prepared to shift them over to football if that’s what they’d much rather be playing. If they make the team, great; you’ve found the intersection. If they don’t, you try them at something else until they’re doing something that is both interesting for them and a good match for their skills.
This is much the same when you assign roles in an office setting. Years ago, I managed a young engineer whose performance was sub-optimal. In fact, he was pretty close to getting fired, but when I moved him to a different team, he excelled. He actually ended up leading that team and managing others. Eventually, he became the manager of a horizontal team — a much higher-pressure role than the one in which he originally struggled.
Related: Stop Trying to Manage Employees Without Understanding Them — How to Build Relationships for Leadership Success
2. Don’t give up — find the “why”
Another key lesson to take from the examples above is not to give up on people until you have to. Most parents don’t give up on their children, at least not in obvious ways. However, some do end up subconsciously passing judgment on them too soon in ways that can affect their perceptions of themselves and prevent them from growing in interesting directions. That’s something you want to avoid as a parent and as a leader in the workplace.
When your kid says, “I don’t like basketball,” don’t say, “Okay, don’t play anymore.” Instead, ask them why. Maybe they don’t like all the scrums and pushing — so they’ll excel at softball or something else. Finding the “why” is essential here — you’re looking for the underlying reason that gives them passion or aptitude for some things and not for others.
You do this by asking questions. Getting to know what drives a person helps you give them the support they need. For kids, that might mean moving them to a different sport that works. Maybe your kid doesn’t like basketball, but they’ll love football. Maybe they’re not into golf, but they’ll be thrilled to play tennis.
The engineer I mentioned earlier thrived for years in his new position. If I had assumed he was just a bad worker and fired him, I would have been doing both him and the company a disservice. It wasn’t that he didn’t have value. It was just that we needed to find the right spot for him.
Find the team. Find the chemistry. Find the passion and the talent together. That’s a parent’s job, and a manager’s job. And don’t give up too early.
Related: Why Real Mentors Don’t Just Give Answers — They Ask the Right Questions
3. Move people out of their comfort zone
As a parent or a manager, your job is to bring out the best in people — even if they can’t see their own potential. Not everyone knows where their skills or interests lie, and they can’t always discover those things without your guidance.
My daughter took AP psychology in high school because she thought it would be an easy A — but it turned out she actually loved the course. Her mother and I encouraged her to consider it as a possible direction for her future career. Today, she’s going to grad school for psychology and already has a job offer she loves.
Sometimes, a person discovers where the intersection of their skills and interests lies practically by accident. And as a role model of any kind, part of your job is to help them recognize when that’s happening.
Related: Why You Have to Let People Fail Now So They Can Succeed Later
This is true even at very elite levels of ability. Professional athletes still have coaches, doctors, and nutritionists. Senior employees still follow the advice of consultants and mentors. That’s because it’s wrong to think you can achieve perfection. You’re always improving, and you always need people to point out the things you can’t see for yourself.
Remember: as a parent or business mentor, you always want to push people to do things they didn’t think they were capable of doing. It’s amazing how far a little encouragement can go, in parenting and management.
