I took my boy to try out for baseball yesterday. He was awful. He wasn’t just awful. He was one of the worst boys trying out for a team.
I chuckled, but then thought to myself that he didn’t remember much about all of the things his dad and I had shown him in the past.
As we were riding home he said to me, “Mom, at least the only thing I can do is improve!”
Later, I kept mulling over what he said and thought about many of the ways he’s changed my perspective.
There is a lot adult leaders can learn from children. I figure most of what we can learn can fit into 1 of these 10 lessons:
- Be open to learning
- Stick to the rules
- Be present
- Use imagination
- Be clear and succinct
- Have enthusiasm
- Practice correctly
- Have resilience
- Be optimistic
- Have fun
I’ll start at the top and work through each one.
1.) Be open to learning
Have you ever noticed that children look at the world and their every-day experiences with their eyes wide open? Every situation is new, or has a slightly different nuance to it. They approach situations with curiosity. They ask a lot of questions, with no pre-determined answers.
What’s going to happen? What should I do?
Every day for my boy starts with a clean slate. He’s naturally curious and excited about learning.
As an adult and a leader of a group, I can learn from that. I can ask questions, and even though experience helps me make better decisions because history often provides probable outcomes, I can still stay open to other possibilities.
2.) Stick to the rules
“That’s not fair!”
If you have kids, you’re probably like me and hear this a lot. If you think about it, it’s their way of stating that there are a set of rules by which they’re playing, and something happened that didn’t fit within the boundaries.
Kids figure out the rules, sometimes even as they go along. They want to know the boundaries and want everyone to stick to them.
The same is true within a team. A team has societal boundaries (social mores), they have company protocol, and then they have departmental and smaller team boundaries. The team operates most comfortably when the members of the team know each of these. They want to be able to “play within the boundaries” just as kids want to.
As a leader of a team, I can ensure my team knows company, department and group expectations.
3.) Be present
Have you ever noticed how kids are deeply in the moment?
All of my children played hard. They always seemed so intent on what they were doing at that very moment, not distracted by things like chores that hadn’t been done or homework that wasn’t finished. They were always so focused on what they were doing at the time that they didn’t waste much time worrying. (That was left for me!)
What a great lesson for leaders! Why give partial attention to anything? If it’s worth attention, it’s worth full attention, even if it’s only for a short time. This is especially true when it comes to giving attention to members of my team. Partial attentiveness to members of my team when they need it cheats them, and it can cheat the relationships that are so crucial to my team’s productivity and health.
4.) Use imagination
Kids have such open imaginations! They live in a world of possibilities. This goes back to the first point about being open to learning. Children are explorers.
Regarding imagination, Einstein may have said it best: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Disney World’s Epcot Center built one of its most recognizable attractions entirely around man’s imagination, taking guests to the attraction out of reality for a while, and into a place dedicated to exploration of possibilities.
As adults, we can allow our minds to get trapped by things such as our daily grind and time pressures, forgetting that creative thinking is what leads to new possibilities.
Steve Jobs, viewed by many as one of the most creative designers in technology, used to love to quote Wayne Gretzky when asked about his thought processes, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
If we want to lead our team to be the most they can be, we have to embrace creativity and opportunities for our team (and for us) to imagine, explore, and be innovative.
5.) Be succinct and clear
Have you ever noticed that kids can be very efficient at communicating?
Truly, this doesn’t happen all of the time. One of my kids can ramble on and on when telling a story, but in general, when any of them ask a question, they’re very efficient, and sometimes blunt. The questions are usually very focused, surrounding a specific problem or query. Most of the time (again, not always) they can be extremely short with their answers when I ask them a question. I usually have to ask a gazillion more questions to get enough color in their answer to move on.
As a leader, that’s a great lesson to learn. Clarity and succinctness are important tools in communicating. With an abundance of potential distractions, keeping messages clear and concise helps ensure the true meaning and potency are received.
6.) Be enthusiastic
What is enthusiasm? Google’s definition is this: “intense and eager enjoyment, interest, or approval.”
At the start of this post, I wrote about my boy’s baseball try outs. He was terrible, but did that stop him? No it didn’t. In fact, he was more pumped than ever to get better. He had observed all of the other boys who had obviously played on teams before. They knew what to do, where to stand, where to send the ball. How to slug the ball with the bat and shoot it by those fielding it. While he had watched them, he didn’t know what to do and was self-conscious.
But he couldn’t wait to get home to practice! He immediately went out to the yard and started throwing the ball up in the air and worked on his catching. We must have practiced for several hours.
Did he get discouraged some? Yes, but that didn’t stop his enthusiasm – his desire to be better and anticipation of the enjoyment that he’ll have when he IS better.
As a leader, one of the best gifts I can give my team is my enthusiasm. “Intense and eager enjoyment” at work is contagious, and when work is something that has to be done, having enthusiastic people around you can make it bearable… and sometimes even fun.
7.) Practice the right way make you better
As my son and I practiced catching and hitting yesterday afternoon, we worked on one thing at a time, making small corrections to one habit at a time as we went along. He just wanted to catch or to hit without having to make adjustments. He just wanted to play. AND he wanted to be good right there and then.
We conquered his grip on the bat, then his stance. Once he’d made the needed changes, he practiced swinging, first doing some things wrong, but then after making adjustments, he looked better and better. By the end of the afternoon, his swing looked pretty decent.
Sure, he could have gone to the first couple of team practices with the way he started out, watched and learned some, but the best way for him to get better is by practicing a lot, but practicing a lot the right way.
When I was younger and an athlete myself, I remember a coach telling me something. I’ll never forget it, and teach it to my kids and mention it at work on my teams, as well. He said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect if the habits you’re practicing aren’t good. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Tony Robbins says that practice doesn’t make perfect. He says what makes someone realize their potential is practicing the right way with certainty that you will succeed, and then taking action, and getting reinforcement creating even stronger belief in yourself.
I also like this quote about practice by Adam Kirk Smith, an author and motivational speaker: “Everything we do is practice for something greater than where we currently are.”
Of course we can take all of this out of the backyard, or off the court, and apply it as a leader. Not only can we have our team members practice correctly whatever tasks they’re undertaking, but we, as leaders can practice correctly, take action and then get to the point where we do what we do with certainty, reinforcing our own productive behaviors.
8.) Resilience
It is not a mistake that in this post, resilience comes right after practice. To continue to practice, make adjustments and then practice those adjustments until they become habit, takes resilience.
Resilience – the ability to bounce back, to pick yourself up from a fall, dust yourself off, and go back at it again – is certainly demonstrated by children.
Being a child and growing up is all about resilience; I child takes their first step, falls… and then gets back up to try it again. Once that child walks, they learn to run; they may fall, and then they do it again. Why? Well, it’s not because someone is telling them to. They observe, they do, and they can’t until they can. With children learning to walk, the ego is not in play. They’re not really concerned about the last time they tried and failed. They don’t care what others think about their failures.
What can learned about this by leaders in the workplace? Leaders must have resiliency of they expect their department to be. The need to be resilient comes from the need to try—try new ways of accomplishing tasks, different ways of interacting, etc. Bouncing back from a failure is only necessary if you try, and don’t quite hit the mark. But nothing innovative will ever take place without trying new things. And business never grows without new ideas or ways.
(Want to gain some specific skills to help your own resiliency and help your team become more resilient?)
9.) Be optimistic
Children are naturally optimistic. If they are open to learning and enthusiastic, optimism is just naturally part of the mix.
I can say with a bit of certainty, that my son’s visions of what will take place on the baseball field and his role in it all, is optimistic. At his age, he approaches everything with a “why not?” attitude. Will he be good? Maybe. Why not? Will others make fun of him? Possibly, but he’s not thought a thing about that as a possibility. Remember his response after his performance at try outs? “Mom, at least the only thing I can do is improve!”
The optimism of children is a great lesson for anyone in the workplace, especially in light of the alternative. Yet, it’s particularly important for the leaders of a team. Leaders set the stage for their department; the attitudinal climate, at least in part, but often almost in full, is established by the leader.
Optimism and enthusiasm go hand-in-hand as huge gifts that leaders can give their departments. Yet, all too often, the heads of departments allow their own negative attitudes, criticism, and fears to affect the climate, and ultimately potential productivity of their teams.
10.) Have fun
Kids know how to find fun in the strangest ways!
A good example of this comes to mind as think about another son.
This one hates to mow the grass, but it’s one of his chores. What does he do? He makes a game out of mowing the grass in whatever pattern he has in his head at the time. Each time he mows, we get a different design.
The point is, he has to mow and he doesn’t like to do it, but he does what he can to make it fun.
We all know that work is, well… work. Otherwise, it would be called something else. As leaders though, we can do what we can to make it fun.
Silliness has its place. And while silliness is often not appropriate in a professional setting, sometimes it can lighten the air, reduce stress, and make work a more pleasant endeavor.
At what point in becoming adults did we decide that a little fun and professionalism can’t coexist? When did we become so serious?
Summary:
All adults in the workplace are not leaders, but all adults who have children ARE leaders. Adults that have no children shape kids, as well.
Those raising kids have little shadows picking up on skills and forming their own personalities that will eventually make up the workforce moving our society forward. One of the most important roles we have as adults–whether or not you have kids– is in helping to shape that future generation into a new group of leaders. Yet, if we really look at children – how they look at problems, how they interact, and how they approach each day, we as leaders, can learn and be shaped a lot by them!