Barack Obama shares the leadership lesson he's learned from parenting



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  • Former President Barack Obama talked Wednesday about raising his daughters at an event held in San Francisco by the company Splunk Data Analysis.
  • Obama says that his daughters Malia and Sasha have different temperaments, so he had to adopt different strategies to raise them.
  • Similarly, in any business or organization, Obama says leaders can take different approaches to dealing with different personalities, while allowing people the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.
  • Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

Former President Barack Obama said that he had learned a lesson in leadership by raising his daughters.

The two daughters of Obama, Malia and Sasha, are now in college. Obama talked about what he learned from parenting at an event held Wednesday in San Francisco by the Splunk Data Analysis Company.

Raising children is similar to growing plants, Obama said.

"They are bamboo or oak or chestnut," Obama said on stage. "They all need water, sunlight, a bit of freshness, but how they grow and how fast, when the branches grow, when they bloom at some point, it's a good thing. is simply different, so our girls were different they became identifiable. "

Obama said Malia, now 21, has a calm temper, while Sasha, who is now 18, looks more like his wife, Michelle.

"What that meant was that in the parenting role, the idea of ​​doing exactly the same thing with every child in the same way does not make sense," Obama said. . "There has to be fairness and justice for women to achieve the same results, but we had to adopt different strategies with our girls for certain things."

This principle, he says, is "actually a good lesson in leadership" that can be applied in the workplace.

"What I found with my staff is that there are people with whom I could be more direct and others, I have to be a bit more, as the girls call it," sandwiches to compliments "reviews where you are like," You are wonderful, it was a terrible memo, I love you. " There is a bit of that. "

(The management experts might disagree with the former president, here: what he calls the "compliment sandwich" has also been called the "st sandwich" or the "cp sandwich", and is considered by many to be an erroneous approach to feedback.)

Now that his daughters are out of college, Obama says he must remember not to call them permanently and give them their privacy. With his daughters, the goal is to get them to make the right decisions, and he had to learn to balance their desire to help them and let them make their own mistakes.

Read more:Barack Obama says any president should avoid television and social media when he makes a decision – that "blurs your judgment"

"It's a useful leadership tool that applies to businesses as well as organizations," Obama said. "You have to give people enough room and property to be able to solve the problem, which means they'll make mistakes, that's part of that development process."

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