Though the pandemic has definitely blurred the line between work and home for millions of people, many of us still believe in maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
And while that can mean something different for everyone – no email after 6pm, for instance, or no work until the kids are in bed – one thing that seems pretty obvious is to not treat your family like you treat your employees.
Unless… maybe we should?
“People know what good leadership looks like: it’s clarifying your values, it’s having conversations with stakeholders about what’s important, it’s having a vision,” says Alyssa Westring, co-author of Parents Who Lead. “All of that stuff makes a good parent, and there’s no reason to leave it in the workplace.”
Westring and her co-author Stewart Friedman argue that many of us spend a lot of time thinking about how to be a good leader at work, and not enough time thinking about how to be good leaders of our family.
But as they recently explained to the Harvard Business Review, the good news is that the two types of leadership actually involve many of the same strategies:
