· Diogo Silva
Things parenthood teaches you about people
A surprising amount of working well with adults begins with lessons learned from people much smaller than them.
Children are very good at removing the fiction that authority makes you right.
You can be the parent, have more experience, pay the bills, understand the consequences and still handle a moment badly. You can be impatient when patience was needed. You can raise your voice because you are tired. You can answer the question you wish had been asked instead of the one in front of you.
Then you have a choice. You can defend the hierarchy, or you can apologise.
That carries into work more directly than most leadership books admit. An apology without a qualification is one of the fastest ways to protect trust. "I got that wrong" is often stronger than a long explanation of why, under the circumstances, anyone reasonable might have done the same thing.
Children also teach you that trust is easier to spend than to rebuild. If every mistake is met with disproportionate anger, honesty becomes expensive. Eventually the child learns that the safest answer is the answer least likely to cause trouble. Adults learn the same thing in companies.
A team can say it values transparency and still train people not to tell the truth. All it takes is punishing bad news often enough. If the messenger is consistently made to regret speaking, silence becomes rational.
Curiosity works the same way.
A child's questions are often badly timed. Why? Why that? What happens if? Can I do it? They arrive when you are cooking, driving, trying to finish something, or already answering another question. Curiosity has an operational cost.
It is tempting to optimise it away.
The problem is that curiosity is not a switch that children, or adults, reliably turn back on when the convenient moment arrives. If questions are repeatedly treated as interruptions, people eventually stop asking them. That makes the room quieter, but it does not make the people in it better.
Workplaces do this all the time. Someone new asks why a process exists and receives the professional equivalent of "because I said so". A junior person notices something strange and learns that the meeting is not the place to complicate things. A salesperson asks whether the customer should actually buy and discovers that the only acceptable curiosity is curiosity that leads to the forecast.
Short-term efficiency can be bought by reducing questions. The price is usually judgement.
Parenthood has also made me more suspicious of control as a substitute for formation. The goal is not to produce children who obey perfectly when watched. It is to help form people who can make good decisions when you are not there.
That seems like a decent ambition at work too.
Good management, like good parenting, cannot be reduced to getting the desired behaviour in the next five minutes. Sometimes the slower response preserves something more important: trust, honesty, curiosity, the ability to decide.
None of this means employees are children. They are not, and treating them that way is its own management failure. It means people remain people in both places, and some human dynamics are stubbornly consistent.
Apologise when you are wrong. Do not make honesty dangerous. Do not kill curiosity because today it is inconvenient.
Those are useful rules in a house. They are not bad rules for an office either.