Tip: 3 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Mom

Our first and most influential teachers are often our parents. I am no exception here. I am very fortunate to have parents that invested in my sisters and me and taught me key lessons that I’ve taken with me throughout my life. As we approach Mother’s Day in the United States, I thought I’d share three leadership lessons I learned from my Mom that have shaped me and become a core part of my identity as a leader.

1) People Will Rise Or Fall To The Level Of Expectations Put Upon Them.
My Mom is a student of Adlerian* psychology and practiced many of these child-rearing techniques in our home. One of the core principles in this practice is the belief that if you treat a child with the same respect and similarly high expectations as you would any adult, the child will rise to the level of this expectation. If, however, you expect the worst from your child, they will pick up on your lack of trust in their abilities and reward you with the bad behavior you feared.

I believe that this dynamic is true with most human beings, not just most children. In much the same way that my Mom engaged with my siblings and me, I now strive to set expectations clearly with my team for what great behavior looks like and what is expected of them. As a result, much like my Mom did years ago, I have found it unnecessary to set restrictive rules that constrain employees’ autonomous decision-making. I have found that by giving trust freely to employees and communicating to them my belief in their ability to perform at the highest level, I am often rewarded with their trust and their excellent performance in return.


2) Act With The Courage Of Your Convictions.
My Mom was never one to sit back and stay silent when she saw something she didn’t agree with. So, when our public school district began to cut programs in the early 1980s due to funding problems, she spent more than a year mobilizing other parents, teachers, and local politicians to pass a measure that would increase funding for our schools by raising taxes locally. I watched as an elementary school student as my Mom hosted evening meetings, walked the neighborhood rallying votes door- to-door, and ultimately passed the measure successfully. She never faltered in her conviction and as a result, hundreds of kids – including me -- were exposed to a more compelling public school education than we otherwise would have been. From her example, I learned to stand up for what I believe in and to mobilize others towards a vision that I hold with deep conviction.


3) Offer Coaching Instead of Problem-solving.
As a leader, I’m constantly looking for ways that I can move up the value chain from problem-solving to coaching. Coaching provides a learning opportunity that will build skills and enable an employee to solve his/her own problems in the future, while problem-solving simply takes care of the immediate issue. This is a fundamental practice in leadership that is not unique to me. What may be more unique is that I didn’t learn this in a book, or in school, but rather, I learned this from watching my Mom handle the normal conflicts that arose in our house (often between my sisters and me).

In much the same way as professionals can disagree about resource allocation, my sisters and I argued about our own scarce resources -- like who would pick out the bedtime story, which TV show we’d watch, or who would get the window seat in the car. Sound familiar? When we brought these issues to my Mom, she would say, “I’m not going to solve that problem for you because I bet you three can work that out yourselves.” Then, if we hit an impasse, she’d offer some general frameworks for solving problems like these vs. solving this particular problem for us. With these frameworks, we’d go off and reach a resolution that worked for the three of us and were less likely to need to return to her for future resolution. Now, as an adult and as a leader of a large team, I can see that she was empowering us to learn to solve our own problems and giving us the coaching and tools to get there. That’s exactly what I aspire to do with my teams and I’m hopeful that I will do it as well as she did.

Mom -- Thanks for providing such a great set of leadership examples on which I could model my behavior. You’ve had a direct impact on the lives of thousands of our employees around the world, and through them, on millions of our members.