Parent: Noun- to be the CEO of your house

As a parent we spend a lot of time as HR managers managing conflict, we have to step up to the CFO role and juggle the bills whilst telling our friends and family that it’s not all bad (marketing): being a parent is like running a business….without training.

Imagine that you are on stage, you have an audience consisting of reporters and important people from around the world, you have a microphone in your hand and it’s clear they want you to speak. You look down at the lectern you’re standing before, there is no script, no teleprompt telling you what to say, and the voice in your head has no idea where to start. What do you do?

If you were put in charge of a company without any training, any guidance or support, you would probably find it pretty hard. Yet, this is the position many of us find ourselves in as parents. We have the memories of our own childhood and many of us are lucky enough to have support from friends and family, but we can still feel like we’re running a company without any idea how the thing really works. After talking to thousands of parents, as well as business owners and successful leaders, there are many ways in which we, as parents, can learn by thinking of our roles as similar to being a CEO.

Step 1: Setting the mission and vision

Sounds obvious that a company needs to have a clear direction and that all the workers should be clear on what they are working towards, but should parents? Yes! So often we muddle along without thinking about the big picture: what kind of person do I want my child to become? Do I value academic success over kindness? Do I want them to be elite at one thing at the expense of having a broader set of experiences? Do I want them to be driven to be the best or do I want them to be content with who they are?

Alternatively, we can be caught looking at the present instead of thinking about the future. For example, we can all agree that the job of a parent is to try to get our child to ‘behave well’, however, we will all have different versions of what this looks like and we will certainly go about behaviour management in a variety of different ways. If we focus too much on controlling the behaviours now, we may be hindering our long-term ambitions (our ‘vision’) for our children, e.g. if we ask them to be quiet in the now, are we going to get confident public speakers in the future? If families can agree on what they want their child to be like in the future, like a good CEO, they will be better able to navigate the path towards that vision.

Step 2: Creating the culture of success

The culture within a company may not be the determining factor for success when things are going well. However, when a crisis occurs, culture may be the difference between the company surviving or going under. The classic case is of Lehman Brothers who filed for bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis after creating a culture where risk was valued too highly. In the same way, the values we live by and the culture of our family will provide the framework with which our children will navigate their own difficulties in the future. Are we, as parent CEOs, building a culture which fosters the ‘failure is not fatal’ Churchilian mantra? Or are we implicitly telling our children that success is final, and that their only route to success is perfection?

Step 3: Valuing people

Although he is not a CEO, Alex Ferguson is pretty close as one of the all-time most successful football managers. One of the reasons for his success was that he knew and valued everyone within Manchester United. He was famous for saying “If the people within your organisation feel they are part of a community that has their interests at heart, they will develop great loyalty.” Are we, as parents, teaching our children the importance of valuing others? Like a CEO recognising that workers at all levels contribute to the company’s success, parents must be role models in how they value people regardless of their perceived status. Whether this is showing them how to treat their parents by how we treat our own or whether it is thanking waiters, teachers, or other people providing a service of some kind, we show our children the value of others through our behaviour.

Although parenting can feel a little like you’ve been asked to stand on stage and present to an audience about a company you know little about, we can learn a lot from CEOs. With a little thought and conversation we can do things with more purpose. Those that want confident young adults might worry less about how much their child is talking at the dinner table. Those that want to foster an original mind might decide that they are going to worry less about their child’s inability to memorise their timetables, and spend more energy praising the way their child came up with their own solution to a problem, or did something in their own way. After all, we can only steer the right course if we know the destination.

So good luck to all the parent CEOs standing in front of the world with no script and no training, the worst you can do is embarrass yourselves.