#001 Teach Helpfulness
One of the best leadership/management books I've ever read is actually a parenting book
Leading and managing teams reminds me a lot of parenting. Not that team members are kids. It's just that it stretches the same muscles. We have this thing we do where we talk about work-life balance, as if work is one thing and life is another, and it's a balancing act where adding to one takes away from the other.
I read Hunt Gather Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff for the first time just after when COVID hit, in March 2020. All of a sudden, the kids were home full-time, and we had to figure out how to live and work, both at the same time. The way that I had designed my life before was no longer manageable (work looks very different when kids are at home instead of in school). I knew there had to be a better way, and I was searching for it.
In the first chapter of the book, Michaeleen tells a story a time when she was hanging out with a family, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Angela, walks out of her bedroom for the first time in the morning, walks right past Michaeleen and the mom, and starts clearing the dishes from breakfast and washing them. No one had to ask her, there was no chore chart. She just did it. Michaeleen asked the mom if this kind of thing happens often, and the mom said, "She doesn't do it every day, but many days."
The way she described the parents interacting with their kids was what I wanted for myself and my family. To be honest, it was what I wanted for my place of work as well. She described a way of relating that wasn't predicated on the amount of control in the relationship ("Am I the boss?" / "Are they the boss?" / "Who's in charge here?"), but instead a way of interacting that helped everyone get along.
In chapter 3, Michaeleen describes a group of kids who have learned "complex tasks, such as cooking meals and caring for siblings without adult supervision". They know when to step in and help. These kids don't just know how to do the tasks. They also pay attention to know when the task needs to be done.
"They're teaching children to be responsible family members. They want children to understand when somebody is in need of help, to be alert to what's happening, and then to help [...] And that skill also means knowing when not to help [...] So you don't interfere with the cohesion of the group or the group's direction. It's a lifelong skill to understand the situation around you and then know what to do [...]"
And that's the crux of it. How do we learn how to really, truly be helpful to the people around us? There is always going to be more work to do. Acquiring the base skill to do something is one thing. Learning when to do it, when to step in, when to let a group keep going in the direction they are currently going in. That's complex.
Tactic: Teach Helpfulness
My usual tactic, designing systems, fails when it comes to teaching helpfulness. In the book, Michaeleen uses the counter-example of the "chore chart" for teaching kids how to be helpful. She suggests that when we give children a list of chores, we are also teaching them that they don't need to keep an eye out for anything else that is going on in the house.
Similarly, at work, I have sometimes fallen back on lengthy job descriptions, roles or titles to define what a person does. Or on big strategy documents or presentations to define what we are going to do. All of this can create more stress for the team (and, well, myself), without actually accomplishing what I want to do: for the person to learn to be helpful to the people around them.
This is where the parents in the book are so brilliant. They don't sit their kids down and have a discussion about what their duties are. They don't even talk with their children about what it means to be helpful. Instead, they accept any and all help, starting with the least helpful people in the house: toddlers.
When toddlers start helping out around the house, our instinct is often to shoo them away. My default thought process is something like this. If you go play with the toys in the living room for fifteen minutes, I can sweep the floor and get the dishes done. If you sweep the floor, it's going to be more messy when you're done than it is now. The problem with this is that it teaches the toddler that their job is to play, to have fun, and stay out of the way. And my job is to do the real work. This is the opposite of what I am actually trying to accomplish over the long term. When the toddler is five or six years old, I want them to actually be helpful around the house.
The solution is to give the child their "Team membership card". When they offer to help (sometimes by grabbing the spoon right out of my hand while I'm trying to cook), I need to let them help. The kid who today is sweeping more dirt all over the kitchen floor will actually be able to sweep it into a pile in a couple years. And more importantly, they won't see it as work. They will see it in its true light: helping out their family.
From a business perspective, this has parallels with the idea of a "shared fate". The idea is that when the business does well, when each of us does well, we all do well. The reality is that many of us spend more time at work than we do with our families, and that work gets a lot of the best time of the day and the best of our energy. Anything we can do to help ourselves and the people around us be more helpful to each other, benefits all of us.
I'm writing this to persuade myself of the need to let people help, as much as I am trying to persuade you. 10 years ago, I was definitely not good at this. Today, I'm better. One day, I hope to be great at letting other people help where they want to help. And of learning to be helpful myself. At letting go of the result, of the need to do the job myself so that it is done "right". Letting go of control, letting go of the outcome, letting other people help builds trust, builds leaders, and enables the organization or the family to grow.
Edited Wednesday, May 31, 2023 (JB): Replaced book cover image with nature photo at the top and as the social media image. Modified SEO description.
Edited Tuesday, May 30, 2023 (JB): Fixed some typos and added the audio track.