Many people believe that family life and careers are not compatible. Many try to keep parenting and business personas separate. There are many advantages to applying the lessons from parenting to the way that you work. This article covers some of the top ways that you can apply these skills and ideas to your organization.
How to Use Parenting in Your Family Business
1 – The Value of Inclusivity and Diversity
As a parent, you learn to understand the emotional value of inclusivity and diversity from the perspective of your child. For instance, your child may be left out of certain activities due to their abilities or their differences. If you wouldn’t want that for your child, why would you promote it within the workplace? Parents try to teach their children diversity and equality to bring them up with an open-minded perspective. This can be applied to the workplace, where inclusivity and diversity will help foster a thriving and creative place to work.
Employing people from all different backgrounds can help to bring new ideas to the table, and can even help you to offer new services. At Global Health Education, they have compiled a list of reasons why diversity in healthcare is so important, and this inclusivity of minorities is as important to any organization, regardless of which sector you operate in.
2 – Empathy and Emotional Maturity
Although you might believe that emotions and personal lives are best left outside of the office space, it is inevitable that at some point, a colleague’s work will be affected by their emotions and what is happening at home. Rather than simply brush off or distribute discipline to this employee, you should learn to have empathy and emotional maturity that can allow you to sort out problems in a humane and understanding way. Luckily, when you are a parent, empathy is one of the first things that you learn as having a child forces you to look at the world from their point of view and to sympathize with them when things go wrong. Not only this but as a parent, you often have to be the adult in a situation, learning to put your emotional needs behind those of your children. You also learn how to stay calm for them, something which you can readily apply to your working life.
3 – Communication
Communication as both a parent and a business leader is paramount. As a parent, you must be easily able to communicate with your child. Listening to any issues they are having, teaching them about the world, and telling them when they are misbehaving. Communication can help you to set clear boundaries and can help them to understand your reasoning behind decisions. Parenting is full of lessons for a family business.
For much the same reasons, communication is also important in business. Communication can help you stay on the same page as your employees while increasing productivity and decreasing errors. Communication at work will help to implement policies, training procedures, and employee reviews.
4 – Planning and Organization
Planning and organization can be dreaded by both parents and business leaders, and especially by those who are both. Juggling being a parent with other commitments takes a lot of planning, from arranging childcare to working around school hours. Not only this but who hasn’t spent months planning birthday surprises and parties for your children’s big day? With parenting, there are mountains of school forms, paperwork, and toys scattered around the home that need organizing. Great organization skills are also needed simply to get the kids ready and at school on time each morning.
The ability to stay organized is also paramount as a business leader and can be applied easily through keeping all of your files under a certain system, installing a vast number of storage facilities in your office, creating a schedule, and using calendar applications to keep track of meetings, and performing tasks in a certain order. Planning is also needed to enable you to create financial forecasts and great business plans that can pave the way for the success of your venture in the future.
5 – Strength of Conviction
As a leader, you also need to be sure of your ideas and be able to stick to your guns against opposition to these. Although you need to be receptive to ideas and queries about your plans, knowing when you are right and being able to have the drive that you need to stand by your opinion is important. As a parent, you will have to have strength of conviction daily, sticking by your opinions and what you believe is best for your child, against opposition by parents, parenting manuals, and even your child themselves. This is both part of a child’s discipline and necessary to keep your child safe.
To increase the strength of your convictions if you do not believe that you have achieved this yet, you should eradicate negative thoughts from your mind, back up your opinion with facts, and ensure that you know yourself what you stand for and your opinion on important matters. These are all skills that you need if you want to make sure that your pitches and business meetings go your way.
6 – Flexibility in Parenting and the Family Business
The need to be flexible may be the bane of every parent’s life. Yet the parenting lessons from this can be a make or break in your family business. Not only will flexibility help you to work around problems but provide you with empathy toward your employees. For instance, you may consider opting for a flexible working week which can cater more to their needs.
Parents need to be flexible for many reasons. From a sudden child illness or a parent's evening that they had completely forgotten about, self-awareness is key. Flexibility allows you to try out new ideas and products, to stay calm, and adapt to any external issues that might affect you.
7 – Negotiation
Have you ever stood for minutes debating with your child whether they can do a certain activity only to come to a compromise or a deal? What may be frustrating and time-consuming as a parent can be invaluable as a business owner. Negotiation can help you conclude that both parties are happy with you and can allow you to get a deal that benefits you, regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.
8 – The Importance of Learning
Parents directly see the value of learning through the growth and curiosity of their children. Learning fosters an independent foundation that helps children understand the world more clearly. Learning is as important for adults and you should make sure that you never stop educating yourself. Look for workshops and tutorials that can help teach new skills. There are many courses and online degrees that could help you to progress. Extend learning opportunities to your employees as they expand their knowledge your business will grow.
9 – Leadership
If there is one thing that being a parent can teach you, it is how to be a leader. Your children look to you to set an example of how they should carry themselves. Similarly, your employees look for a dynamic leader. You'll set the standard for personal care while encouraging them to succeed. Being a great leader can be difficult. The different qualities that are important to leadership are lessons that are often learned naturally as a parent.
10 – Budgeting Lessons for your Family Business
When you have a family, budgeting becomes even more important. It is important to take the needs of your children and the cost of raising a child into account. As a parent, you may have to make financial sacrifices, and this is the same in the business world. For instance, you will need to budget to make sure that you have enough revenue to reinvest in your company. That's after having tge start-up costs that you need for your business to thrive.
There are many ways how to use parenting in your family business. The most important aspect is to foster a supportive environment for growth as a team.
