Parenting changes you in unexpected ways. For me, being around kids has shaped my recent approach to leadership and problem-solving, not in grand, philosophical terms, but in small, everyday shifts that make all the difference.
The Sensitivity Factor
The biggest change? There’s a lot more sensitivity involved in problem-solving now. Earlier, when a problem came up, the entire focus was on solving it, fast, efficiently, done. I didn’t think much about how the problem-solving journey was impacting the other person emotionally. How does it land on them? Does the way I’m giving feedback make them shut down forever?
Today, I’m more conscious about the manner in which feedback is given. And let me be clear this doesn’t mean mollycoddling. This is a professional setup, and people get paid to do their jobs but I’ve learned that ‘how you solve a problem’ matters as much as ‘just solving it’. When I am negotiating with my daughter, I still want the best outcome. I don’t want my daughter eating too many chocolates or having excessive screen time. Being softer doesn’t mean letting her get away with it, it means finding ways to manoeuvre without making her feel like I’m short-changing her.
Here’s what translates to work: an irate kid who’s angry with your decision will tell you they’re angry. An irate employee will not. That hidden anger, that inability to say “Dude, I think you’re wrong” or “I don’t agree with you”, it manifests in other ways. Groupism. Withdrawal. Getting into a shell. Understanding that has changed how I navigate problems at work. The outcome still matters, but so does the journey to get there.
Creativity Without Structure
The second thing parenting taught me is to see creativity in a completely new light. We’re all in the creative space, but over time, I think the pattern of creativity has become so structured that what we consider ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ is still happening inside a box.
Kids’ imagination? That’s something else entirely. I’ve seen my daughter marry something she learned in school to a cooking problem at home. She’ll connect something from the playground to a situation where someone’s sick. That level of creative correlation, how something absolutely unrelated comes together to create a story, it’s fantastic. It’s made me look at creativity differently and honestly, it’s made me listen more.
The Value of Taking the Long Route
Kids take forever to get to the point but by the time they do, they’ve travelled through an entire ecosystem of thoughts, tangents, and connections you didn’t see coming. That’s made me a little more patient. Sometimes now, I let people take me through much more than I initially want to listen to just to see where they’re traveling when they’re explaining something. What are they connecting? What’s the story they’re building? It doesn’t happen all the time, I’m not claiming to have now become a saint, but it’s something I’ve noticed in myself, and it’s opened up conversations I might have cut short before.
Authority and Determination
Kids have a lot more authority and determination about what they want to do or say than we often give them credit for. They don’t second-guess themselves the way adults do. They just... say it. Do it. Assert it. There’s something valuable in that especially when I look at younger team members today. They have clarity about what they want, and they’re not afraid to voice it. I think we, as leaders, need to create spaces where that authority and determination isn’t seen as overstepping, but as strength.
Parenting hasn’t made me a softer leader. If anything, it’s made me a more intentional one. The goals haven’t changed, the outcomes still matter. But how we get there, how we make people feel along the way, how we create room for imagination and assertion, that’s evolved.
And maybe that’s the real leadership lesson: it’s not about choosing between being firm and being kind. It’s about being both, at the right time, in the right way.
Just like parenting.
