Stewart D. Friedman and Alyssa F. Westring* say working parents can benefit from values-driven leadership, in their work life and at home.
Understanding and then communicating your core values is a fundamental aspect of becoming an effective leader.
Leaders who are aware of their values, convey them clearly, and act in alignment with them are engaged, generate high performance, and inspire commitment.
Working parents, who face a significant leadership challenge in raising children, can benefit from value-driven leadership.
Often overwhelmed by the struggle to make smart decisions about when, where, and how to invest our attention, not many of us working parents stop and reflect on our values.
Instead, we tend to internalise the values of our society and people around us, usually unconsciously.
Social media amplifies the impact of social comparisons, making it harder to stay centred, to know ourselves.
When we identify and express our values, we can more readily use what we truly care about as the basis for making decisions.
In our research, we’ve found that people who bring a well-articulated set of core values to all parts of life experience less stress, greater harmony, and better performance.
To spur your thinking as you consider your own values — those you aspire to embody in your career, as a parent, and in the rest of your life — here are a few examples of the application of leadership principles to the art of parenting.
Achievement: A sense of accomplishment or mastery, striving to be the best.
Adventure: New and challenging opportunities, excitement, risk.
Collaboration: Close, cooperative working relationships, being part of a team.
Courage: A willingness to stand up for your beliefs and do the difficult thing.
Generosity: Being known by others as one who gives.
Humour: The ability to laugh at yourself and at life.
Love: That indescribable feeling when your kids run up to give you a hug after work.
Responsibility: Do what you say you will do.
Spirituality: Believing there is something greater than human beings.
As you contemplate, remember that values are relatively stable over time and rather broad, not tied to specific people, places, and times.
They are usually influenced by significant events in your life history.
If you’ve not ever done so, start by thinking about what matters most to you, and why.
Try to come up with about five values and write them down.
If you’re stuck, do an online search for a list of values and pick those that most accurately represent you, and then think about why.
The next step is communicating those values to the people who matter most to you.
Start with your partner(s) in parenting — those with whom you’re raising children.
It’s useful to ask them to do this exercise on their own and to then talk over your distinctive and your common values.
Just as leaders in organisations need to establish shared values, parenting partners must identify the values that inform their lives.
Take Emma and Marcos, who participated in our Parents Who Lead workshop.
Emma is a management consultant and Marcos, a former captain in the army, is an investment manager.
They have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old.
They both listed “career success” as a core value.
But this confused them because they sensed that they held quite different attitudes about their work.
It turned out that career success meant something different to each of them.
Emma remembered a period of her adolescence during which her family struggled to make ends meet after her father was laid off.
She realised career success primarily means having sufficient funds stashed away and enough transferable job skills so she does not have to worry about economic security.
For Marcos, a veteran who embraced the clear hierarchy in the military ranking system, career success meant achieving promotions and seniority.
Marcos cares about economic security, but he does not equate it with success.
Similarly, Emma cares about recognition, but it is not paramount when she thinks of what success means.
Articulating these distinctions helped them better understand the way they each approach their careers.
And when it came to thinking about what they wanted for their future, they were able to envision how they could support each other more carefully and compassionately.
Most people assume their partners know their values.
Yet even people in close long-term relationships are often surprised when they reveal their core values to each other.
Indeed, research has shown that we’re not nearly as accurate as we think when it comes to judging the values, experiences, and goals of those closest to us.
You might be surprised by what you find when you share your deepest-held values.
For Emma and Marcos, discussing their values shed new light on one.
Clarifying and communicating their values was an essential first step in becoming values-driven leaders in all parts of their lives.
From there, they were able to create a vision for the future that incorporated both of their definitions of career success and other shared and unique values they identified.
Mining the ore from the mountain of your experience to identify and then describe your core values to our partners in parenting, and being genuinely curious about what they mean, is a crucial part of becoming a parent who leads.
Your values are the basis for making mindful choices in both the everyday and the momentous decisions we face.
And the foundation on which your children stand is strengthened when you take to heart the leadership challenge of striving to act in a way that’s in accord with what you care about most.
Adapted from Parents Who Lead by Stewart D. Friedman and Alyssa F. Westring.
* Stewart D. Friedman is an organisational psychologist at the Wharton School. He tweets at @StewFriedman. Alyssa F. Westring is the Vincent de Paul Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business. She tweets at @alyssawestring.
This article first appeared at hbr.org.
