Lessons Learned Helping My Kid on a Test
It’s been a bit of a struggle in our household this week. Suffice to say that the first few weeks of school are always tough for parents, whether you’re a single household or as in my case, a two household co-parenting operation. There are schedules to meet, forms to complete, backpacks to stuff and always, it seems, the last minute scramble to find a missing shoe. More often than not, the week’s to-do list is topped with a single objective: homework. We spent most of this week working with my son preparing for a test of the capitals of Midwestern states and their locations on a map. This follows last week’s disastrous first round of Southeastern capitals in which my son, having memorized the names and capitals, had failed to learn where those were to be found.
It’s curious what you do know and don’t when you take the time to test yourself on what you assume to be common knowledge. I mistakenly thought the capital of Michigan was Ann Arbor (yes, I have since learned it’s Detroit. Just kidding, it’s Lansing — I think), I can’t spell Bismark, oops Bismarck, North Dakota correctly to save my life and I as I write this I can’t for the life of me remember the capital of Nebraska unless it is called “Not-Omaha.” What I do know is that the capital of South Dakota is Pierre, it’s pronounced “Peer” not like a French dude’s name and Pierre is second only to Montpelier, Vermont in population of state capitals. Trivially, it is also one of the very few capitals that is not directly connected to an Interstate highway. I don’t know how I know that, I just know it to be true.
We, now feeling fully invested in this exercise, are fully prepared and I’m eager to see how the little man performs on his test. We parked near the school as we always do, and after he and his sister stumbled from the car, my son, as he always does, tore down the sidewalk to get to the morning assembly so he could have a few minutes of free time talking to his friends before class. As he broke into his stride, I called out to him, “Good luck on the test!” He came to a quick stop, spun around on his foot and shouted back, “Dad, it has nothing to do with luck!”
He’s right. So that got me to asking, for the purposes of having some content to kick a new edition of my blog (more on that later): what’s the professional lesson to learn from this week? There are a few actually, if you’re willing to look at it rather plainly. I think often much of what we need in leadership in our professions stems from what we have learned and apply in our everyday lives, where one rarely thinks in terms of leadership qualities per se; in this case, I’m just trying to be a good parent, not trying to organize my household around business goals. Leaders need to inspire, and more often than not that isn’t accomplished by sharing your sage advice, but by finding simple and creative ways of helping people understand how to solve problems right in front of them, by getting to the heart of the problem. I find that’s often built on empathy; like my son, he’s looking first and foremost for the security of knowing that I understand where he is coming from and what is at the heart of what he is trying to accomplish. Which is just passing the test that he previously failed. That’s all.
Here’s a trap I found myself in: don’t assume because you know something others will also. All too often I take for granted that someone automatically knows something just because I do. It’s an easy mistake to make; I often do it to a fault. I’m not speaking only of trivial knowledge (like assuming this is stuff a third-grader knows and in turn insulting my own child’s intelligence), but am thinking here more along the lines of cultural or life experience as it relates to how we interpret and interact with peers and reports. Believing that others have had the same cultural or life experience as you often closes you off to seeing diversity of approach or opinion. And it also can lead you to inadvertently insulting someone’s intelligence. You can also miss the learning moments , where you can more effectively share your experience and knowledge by having a deeper understanding of what people on your team need, rather than what they do or do not know. My son didn’t need me to help him learn the Midwestern states; he is quite capable and was already working hard in his afternoon homework time. And it would be erroneous to assume just because I consider it common knowledge that it’s easy to learn. What he needed was, in fact, the confidence to accept that he didn’t do well the first time, that failure in that case wasn’t an indicator of future failure (even at a young age, the past keeps an iron grip on us) and the security of knowing from me, the boss of all bosses in his life at that moment, that it’s all going to be okay because we’re going to make it okay, by doing the work together. Which is really what smart people want from their leadership.
And ultimately, really, some recognition that little of what comes of our efforts stems from luck.
