Leadership Lessons from Your Inner Child

Leadership Lessons from Your Inner Child

This time last month, I found myself chest-deep in a giant ball pit in a dream house pop-up in Paris, racing through Disneyland rides and building Lego family portraits in the flagship store.?

During each of these adventures, I was completely immersed in the pure joy of play; no analysis paralysis, no ROI calculations, just genuine, uninhibited engagement with each moment.

It was a powerful reminder of what we often lose when we forget how to play.

Having children helps me stay connected to this often-forgotten part of myself. Their masterful bedtime negotiations, their ability to find fun in anything and their way of diving into experiences without measuring the gain. These are in fact powerful leadership lessons in disguise.

The Power of Childlike Wonder

Between ages 0 and 5, children master walking, talking, reasoning and complex social interactions, all while maintaining an insatiable curiosity about their world. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, many of us trade this natural learning engine for a more measured, sometimes cynical approach.

Yet this childlike curiosity might be exactly what we need. Pixar have built their entire culture around embracing playful experimentation. Their "plussing" technique, where team members build on each other's ideas without criticism, mirrors children's natural way of collaborative play.

Leadership Lessons from the Playground

Embrace Uninhibited Curiosity?

• Children ask "why" without fear of looking foolish.?
• True engagement means letting go of self-consciousness.?
• Leading innovation requires maintaining wonder in a world of metrics.

Master the Art of Play-Negotiation

• Learn from children's natural ability to negotiate creatively.?
• Build genuine win-win scenarios through imaginative problem-solving.?
• Create environments where innovative ideas can emerge through playful exploration.

Find Joy in the Process?

• The ball pit lesson has to be that sometimes the journey itself, is the reward
• Foster cultures where experimentation is celebrated, not just outcomes.?
• Build teams that can find excitement in the challenge itself.

Real-World Impact

Companies like LEGO have built their transformation strategy around maintaining childlike creativity while scaling operations. Their "Play Well" philosophy extends beyond their products to their leadership approach, encouraging experimentation and embracing failure as part of the learning process.

Gaming company Supercell takes this further, organising their entire structure around small, autonomous teams they call "cells," each empowered to play with ideas like children in a sandbox. Their successes (Clash of Clans, Hay Day) emerged from this playful, experimental culture.

The Business Case for Play

Research shows that companies fostering playful cultures see higher innovation rates and employee engagement. Google's famous "20% time" policy, which gave birth to Gmail and Google Maps, essentially recreated the unstructured play time we all had as children.

Practical Steps for Leaders

Create Play Spaces?

• Designate physical and temporal spaces for unstructured thinking.
• Encourage creative exploration without immediate pressure for results.
• Build psychological safety through playful team activities.

Embrace Messiness?

• Allow for imperfect first attempts.
• Celebrate creative failures as learning opportunities.
• Make room for seemingly "pointless" exploration.

Stay Present?

• Practice full engagement in meetings and interactions.
• Put away devices during key conversations.
• Model the focused attention children naturally bring to play.

The future of work demands leaders who can navigate constant change while maintaining their teams' energy and creativity. Perhaps the best preparation isn't another management course but a reminder of how we naturally learned and grew as children.

Embracing our inner child, curious, playful and unafraid to try new things gives way to leadership capabilities that no amount of conventional training can provide.?

After all, every great innovation, every transformative idea, every leap forward began with someone asking that most childlike of questions: "What if?"

#LeadershipLessons #PlayfulLeadership #Innovation

ABOUT NIKI AVRAAM

A compelling speaker, Niki leads the charge in workforce evolution. Using her extensive background in employment law and legal entrepreneurship, Niki empowers organisations and individuals to exceed their potential and stay ahead, in the future of work. Niki demonstrates how instilling a culture of ownership and adaptability, leads us to unprecedented success.

https://nikiavraam.com/