From Parenting to Management: Why Kirstie Allsopp Got It Right

It has been all over the press lately that Kirstie Allsopp the TV presenter allowed her 15 year old to go interrailing with another 16 year old for 3 weeks on their own. People are generally in two camps, those who are saying ‘Good for her’ and those reporting her to social services for child neglect.

As someone who has been hauled on the TV show ‘Good morning Britain’ a few times to talk about parenting issues myself, people may wonder what camp I am in. I am firmly in the ‘Good for her’ camp. The child’s age is purely academic in this case as he was only a few weeks off his sixteenth birthday and his peers were already sixteen so he was doing sixteen year old things anyway. He was just subjected to the vagaries of our schooling system which can mean that children born in certain months can be up to a whole year younger than their peers.

Putting the age thing aside, this is a wider debate. This is about parents being confident in their children and allowing them to live. I say good on Kirstie for having a 15 year old who is competent and confident enough to plan a multi-city trip with his mate and go and execute it successfully. Confident children do not happen by accident. They happen by a parent showing them what to do and trusting them to get on with it.

There are three types of people, those who micro-manage, those who show you what to do and leave them to get on with it and those who just expect you to get on with it without any guidance. The third group are just irresponsible and need to work on themselves and the first group also need to understand that trusting people allows them to thrive. If you can’t trust people, this says more about you than them.

I think the way people parent is the same way they manage people in the workplace. The issue is not the person being managed but the manager. Some managers simply don’t know what they are doing and inflict their cluelessness on their hapless victims by either micro-managing or leaving them with no direction. Micro-managing someone be it a child or an employee is simply saying I don’t have confidence in your abilities.

This signals to the person being managed that they are not good enough to do the task at hand and it stifles growth. Depending on the personality of the person being managed, if they are not confident, they stay in the situation but if they have got something about them, as soon as they can, they find something else that allows them to show initiative and thrive.

Good managers understand that giving their direct reports autonomy is a win-win. It means that a lot can be taken off the manager’s plate so they don’t get stressed out and the direct reports get to show their managers what they are really capable of.

Children eventually end up in the workplace. If they have not been allowed to flex their growth muscles and perform difficult tasks for themselves without a parent hovering, it affects their confidence and self-esteem. By all means put guard rails in place to support them but when the time comes, you have to allow them to fly.

Confident children are made by confident parents who trust their children to handle the challenges that life throws at them. That trust comes from knowing that they have brought them up properly and equipped them physically and emotionally to handle life.

When these children grow up and enter into the workplace, please let us not stifle their creativity by micro-managing them.

PS. If you want to chat about improving your leadership skills for you or your team grab a chat here.