By John Brandt with Jenny Sherman
When I was as Editor-in-Chief at IndustryWeek (IW) magazine, my kids were toddlers. And as anybody with kids will tell you, toddlers resemble nothing more than tiny, hilarious drunks, but with significantly less common sense. They survive for two reasons: parents who worry obsessively about them, and the fact that they mysteriously bounce, instead of break.
This means that most parents — including me — live through a terrifying stage of life during which we continuously invent endless scenarios of all the ways our lurching progeny might hurt themselves, even as we simultaneously plan schemes to prevent each imagined catastrophe. I, for example, became a magnificent predictor of impending disaster. I could look at a Lego in my son’s hand and immediately see a chain of events that would end in tears or the ER (or both).
Unfortunately for the IW staff, my parental paranoia leaked into my managerial responsibilities. One morning, a colleague stopped by with a question, leaning into the doorframe with his hand poised in a familiar toddler danger position.
“Don’t stick your fingers in the door hinge!” I cried.
My colleague, some 10 or more years my senior, stared in stunned silence.
I wish I could say that was the last time I admonished an employee for a door-hinge misdemeanor, or a walking-with-scissors felony, or any number of other childish scoldings.
Alas, it was not.
Leaving aside the question of my potentially superior (or not) understanding of basic finger and scissor safety, I fully acknowledge that no one wants to be parented by her or his boss. Or pretty much anyone other than their actual parents (which is still a stretch). I similarly allocute to the fact that my toddler-disaster prevention skills likely — probably? certainly? — made things awkward for the delightful people with whom I worked.
Former colleagues (now old friends): I am sorry. If I could go back in time, I would stuff a doughnut into my supercilious piehole.
But: In my (admittedly weak) defense, the tendency to transfer skills and behaviors from a family role to a work role is a well-documented phenomenon. Parents are likely to bring ideas, behaviors, and resources they develop at home into the workplace, a dynamic known as “work-family enrichment.”1 Research suggests that the more invested a person is in their role as a parent, the more they bring their parental identity to work.2 Unfortunately, the literature has little — nothing? — to say about how to do this in a less-than-annoying way.
Oy.
Yet there’s also good news: other research on incorporating parenting skills at work is encouraging. Because while studies suggest that employees are less devoted to work when they become parents, they also show that parenting confers new benefits that can enhance the workplace.
For example, a 2017 study found that people who strongly identified with their family roles were rated more highly on leadership behaviors by supervisors than people who didn’t.3 The study’s authors suggest that parenting skills overlap with leadership skills: developing others, inspiring a shared vision, setting a good example, and rewarding successes —all skills valued in both domains. In fact, parents often report celebrating peers’ successes at work after encouraging similar behaviors in their growing children. Workers also report an uptick in planning abilities after becoming accustomed to thinking ten steps ahead as parents.
At IW, I experienced some of the same parental spinoff benefits. My ridiculous ability to sense toddler danger a mile away also supported the scenario planning and risk assessment I needed to perform as part of the magazine’s turnaround.
Let’s also remember that being a parent is just one of many roles and identities — familial, social, gender, cultural, etc. — that can enhance the resources, skills, and perspectives we individually and collectively bring to the workplace; all can be potent (and prone to pitfalls). Whichever identity you feel strongly invested in, ask yourself three questions:
- What do I like about this role? How does it make me a better human being?
- How can I bring that way of doing things to work? How can it make life better for me and others?
- And perhaps most important: What do I not like about how I am in this role or identity? How can I avoid bringing that to work?”
All of which brings me to my conclusion: I have tried to parent multiple people over the course of my life. For two of them (my children), I am proud of having done so. To everyone else, I apologize.
But, please, for the love of God, get your damn fingers out of the door.
Credits
Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik.
1. Greenhaus, J.H. and G.N. Powell. “When Work and Family are Allies: A Theory of Work-Family Enrichment.” Academy of Management Review. 2006, Vol. 31, No. 1. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.19379625
2. Dumas, T.L. and T.L. Stanko. “Married with Children”: How Family Role Identification Shapes Leadership Behaviors at Work.” Personnel Psychology. 2017, 70, 597–633. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12182
3. Dumas, T.L. and T.L. Stanko, 2017.
