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Families Also Need Leaders

 FamilyMeeting1

 

“My family comes first” – almost every father I know.
There is a ton of content out there for business leadership, for church leadership, for every type of leadership. There are books, consultants, coaches, blogs, podcast’s and even mastermind groups.  I consume some of this content and I have learned some good stuff.

 

Business and church leaders often work on leadership skills so that they can lead their business or churches more effectively.

 

Most would say that “family comes first”or “my family is the most important thing in my life”, we have careers to support our families. But think about it, how much planning, how much strategy, how many goals and how many meetings do we have about our family lives? I think most of us just allow our family lives to happen as they will.  What if we applied our leadership wisdom, skills and talents to our families? starting now!

 

Families need leadership as much or more than do businesses.  We can shape our children’s lives with our parenting skills. This can effect our children for a lifetime, for good or for bad. The concept of family leadership goes beyond parenting only.  Parenting is just one of subset of family leadership, because not all families raise children.  Family leadership embraces what is unique and special about a family. It doesn’t try to change or manipulate and make a family into something it is not.  It accepts the family for what it is, it helps and guides family decisions and focus for decades and for generations.  Families are the foundation of a civilized society and provide stability, so of course we should strive to lead our families well.

 

There are three things that the leaders of families can do to lead well.
Assumptions: there is a roof over the family’s head, adequate clothing on everyone, enough food to eat and plenty of love in the home.

 

  1. Define the family’s mission.
  2. Create a sense of unity and oneness in your family.
  3. Set specific goals for the family.
A family mission is that one most important thing that your family focuses on in the near-term. Perhaps it is improving relationships with one another, perhaps it is teaching our faith, perhaps it is doing something together like a big vacation, perhaps it is working on a financial struggle.  Don’t spend too much time on this, just pick something you can agree with and go for it, there are no rules and you can change things on the fly.  Is your family just existing, or does it have a unique mission? whatever you think that mission is or should be, start to talk about it, write it down, discuss it with your spouse, tell it to your children until they know it by heart.  I am just beginning this process with my kids and they seem to enjoy the guidance.
Does your family have a sense of unity and oneness, is your family united? do family members suffer alone with problems? Does everyone tend to dump things on mom? or dad? everyone should share the burden of life together, help one another, defend one another and forgive one another.

 

As part of that mission and unity it is a good idea to set yearly goals for your family. Set less than 10 goals and write them out, make them achievable but ambitious and make sure everyone in the family knows them.

 

These all sound great right? But how to begin?  We can start by coming up with a family mission then simply say it out loud often, talk about the goals for the year, start creating that UNITY that ONENESS in your family by teaching unity and expecting it from everyone. This wont happen overnight but with consistency over time we get there.

 

Family life is important, more so than is our careers, our businesses, even more than our churches, so lets strive to lead our families well.  Children are counting on us, our spouse is counting us. When death comes many years from now our family is what will matter to us, not our nest egg.
Don’t continue another day in an unhealthy or toxic family life, make effort to restore and to lead our family well. If necessary get marriage counseling or parenting counseling, there is no shame in that, determine to fix what is broken.

 

The only thing more painful than confronting and uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

 

Most family members will respond to leadership and will freely follow…or will at least tolerate it.

What are some other ways we can lead our families well?

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You Really Expect Me To Behave… LIKE THAT?

How We Behave vs. How We Pretend to Behave

(The content of this post comes mostly from first-hand observations in companies and churches and the teachings of Patrick Lencioni. Leaders communicate how they want followers to behave subconsciously.

Written organizational values are a dime a dozen. Many ignore these values as touchy-feely HR talk, because they observe leadership ignore said values with their behavior.

 

I notice there really are two different value systems in most organizations.  There are the written values or vision statements that all are to aspire to but there are also behavioral values.

 

Behavioral values determine what is acceptable behavior within an organization. Behavioral values are established by two things. One, how leadership behaves; and two, how the employees who are heavily promoted or rewarded behave.

 

Don’t get me wrong, heavily promoted employees often deserve their promotions, they perform well, they fit in the culture well. They may be very loyal to leadership, they may navigate the politics well and they may be very productive.

 

But what leaders sometimes ignore is the other behaviors that they promote when they promote certain people. I could give many examples and it seems for every business example I have an equal church example. I’ve seen similar trends in a variety of types of organizations. So I think that these challenges are common to all hierarchical organizations.

“Behave Like This Guy”

When a leader awards or promotes a high performer they are also inadvertently promoting and encouraging their behavior. Their other behaviors, which may be hidden from the leader, can result in a toxic work culture over time. High performers sometimes don’t work well with others, high performers are sometimes very competitive. They may be liars, they may be hypocritical and hostile to the company goals overall while meeting their personal career objectives.

Most heavily promoted employees directly or indirectly generate revenue for a company but treat their colleagues poorly. They may steal ideas and use their influence for personal advantage at the expense of lower employees. I’ve thought to myself more than once after seeing a promotion or award given to certain (not all) colleagues:

“You really expect me to behave…. like that?”

 

I believe that the behavioral values of a leader and their ‘promotees’ have more of an influence on a culture than any other single thing. The truth is, most leaders I have encountered do not care to try to manage culture. They think it is a nebulous result of things they have little control over. I am convinced that this is a failure in leadership. It is a business mistake that has a direct impact on financial performance.

 

Leaders who say one thing and promote another cause resentment and cause a company’s culture to decay. What an organization needs is clarity at the top, clarity of vision, clarity of behavioral norms.

 

What is needed is strong ownership of a company’s culture at the very top. Organizational values should be formulated, communicated and enforced by senior leaders. Don’t delegate this to HR or lower layers of managers, if so, it will be a culture in perpetual flux. Over time the worst behavior will dominate and become reinforced. Sort of like a survival of the fittest (or fiercest) culture.

Delegation of behavioral values to HR is a bad idea because employees look to leadership for behavior guidance, not HR. Behavior determines culture which has a huge impact on financial performance long-term. Trying to manage financial performance while ignoring culture is a mistake.

The following three culture principles, if embraced by its leaders, can begin to repair any hierarchy based organization. From high-tech companies, to building contractors, to even hierarchy-based churches.

  1. Communicate and reward people for the behavior you want, not those you feel morally obligated to broadcast.
  2. Do not delegate communication of behavior values to lower managers or to HR, own it and back it up financially.
  3. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Use extreme caution when promoting and/or awarding people. Understand the message that rewards and promotions send.

If you liked this post you will like this: How Enablers Affect Company Culture

What other ways can leaders repair company culture?

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enablers
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How Enablers Affect Organizational Culture

Watch Out for the Enablers

Enablers are people who enable or help others to engage in dysfunctional or destructive behavior. Enablers make bad behavior easier and more comfortable to engage in.

‘Enabling’ is a term often used in the context of a relationship with an addict. It might be a drug addict or alcoholic, a gambler, or a compulsive over-eater or even a bi-polar or schizophrenic individual. Enablers, rather than addicts, suffer the effects of the addict’s behavior. Enabling is removing the natural consequences to the addict of his or her behavior.” Psychcentral.com post by Darlene Lancer

Recently someone made it clear to me that she was being an enabler. She essentially protected a person from incarceration with no consequences to their actions.

This prompted me to research enabling from a mental health perspective. I learned that the majority of addicts have at least one enabler in their life. Enablers shield a person from the consequences of their behavior protecting them from the natural consequences.

Antonym of Enabler

In a word the antonym of enabler is a disciplinarian. To prepare those we lead by making artificial consequences which results in changes of behavior.

Good parenting, does the opposite of enabling, a loving parent creates artificial consequences to a child’s bad behavior. Particularly to those actions which are likely to bring future negative consequences in adulthood. Healthy parents provide consequences to prepare children to function in society on their own. This is otherwise known as discipline; of course punishment can be taken too far and can become abusive. But a loving parent provides discipline to a child, it would be unkind for them not to.

Enabling and Organizational Culture?

I find the difference between the behavior of start-up business employees and employees in large corporations fascinating.

  • When an employee is heavily promoted despite behavior that would cause loss of business in an open market. They might be experiencing enabling.
  • When a lazy or unproductive employee is not made to show up and work hard every day. They might be experiencing enabling.
  • When unions save the job of negligent or toxic employees in knee-jerk reactions against management, they might be enablers.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. – Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar)

Talent is a skill and is recruited in technology corporations typically based on education. But, hard work is a behavioral issue and is subject to personal will-power. Enablers notoriously overlook bad behavior and even can promote it. Teams of highly talented and educated employees can become very ineffective through a culture that enables bad behavior. This type of corporate culture is often created over years of enabling. Enabling is a major mechanism which hinders the work of hundreds of talented employees.

When an entrepreneur pivots her strategy and creates products to serve her market the new sales themselves is the discipline. Unless the government is meddling, there is no enabler present in the market to shield her. She must pivot her strategy… or not eat.

Organizations do no favor to employees or their customers when they enable bad behavior internally. Enabling cripples people emotionally, over the long term it destroys self-esteem and enslaves people emotionally.

The Free Market Typically Has No (or less) Enablers

It has been said that pursuing entrepreneurship is the best personal development activity available. In creating a profitable business there is rarely artificial shields for the entrepreneur. The free market does not care who you are, (or who you’re not). The free market does not pay your bills because you are accustomed to getting handouts. Serving the free-market well requires hustle, it requires good ideas and it requires self-discipline. It is a survival of the fittest environment and it more closely mirrors reality.

Mental health and addiction professionals warn against enabling. Evidence has shown that an addict experiencing the damaging life-consequences of his addiction provides the most incentive to change. Often this is when the addict “hits bottom” – a term commonly referred to in Alcoholics Anonymous.

How to Help Enablers

Wise leaders give their people incentive to change and do not enable based on the arbitrary, it is bad for business and it is bad for people.

It seems to stop enabling a leader must start with the following:

  1. Accept the fact that we may be enabling bad behavior; the most difficult part of changing.
  2. Think what is best for the culture I am leading and pursue that for those we lead.
  3. Display courage to correct people when they need it (or at least don’t promote bad actors). Great people developers are willing to correct, willing to call a person out when they need to change their behavior.

How else can enabling impact culture?

For more on this topic check this out> You Really Expect Me to Behave … Like That?

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