James Ferguson said something on my podcast I keep chewing on. He called himself a girl-dad, and he said becoming a parent made him a better leader. More patience. More empathy. More understanding. Then he added the part I liked best: neither parenting nor leadership gets easier. Both of them grow you.
I nodded along. I'm a dad. I'm a grandad now too. I've led teams in the US Army and in software companies for a long time. Of course parenting made me a better leader. Everybody says so.
Then I went looking for the evidence, and it knocked the smugness right out of me.
The Research Says Parenthood Changes Leaders. Not Always for the Better.
A team of researchers studied male CEOs in Denmark, using national data on all but the smallest Danish firms between 1996 and 2006. They tracked what happened to employee pay after a CEO had a child. Dahl, Dezső and Ross published the results in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2012.
Here's what they found. After a male CEO had a child, he generally paid his employees less generously. He also paid himself more. The researchers read this as a CEO wanting to set aside more resources for his own family.
The story wasn't all bleak. The birth of a daughter hurt wages less than the birth of a son, and a first daughter pushed wages up. Female employees came out better too, especially after the CEO's first child.
A second study points the same direction. Henrik Cronqvist and Frank Yu looked at 416 CEOs from S&P 500 companies. When the CEO had a daughter, the firm's corporate social responsibility rating ran 9.1% higher than the median firm. The rating covers things like diversity, community and employee relations. Cronqvist's explanation: having a daughter opens an executive's eyes to gender issues he wasn't seeing before.
So parenthood changes how leaders lead. Both studies agree on it. But look at how it changes them. Some of the change is empathy. Some of it is a man putting his own kids first and quietly taking a bit more for himself.
Having children didn't hand those CEOs a leadership upgrade. It handed them a new set of loyalties. What they did with those loyalties was up to them.
What Parenting Tried to Teach Me
I don't think becoming a dad made me a better leader overnight. I think it put me in a classroom I never signed up for, and some days I paid attention and some days I didn't.
There was a stretch in my career when I came home short with my wife and distracted with my kids. My body walked through the front door. My head stayed in the office, running the last meeting on a loop. I was a manager at work and a manager at home, and neither place got the best of me.
The lessons were all there. I missed plenty of them the first time around. Here are the ones I finally picked up.
Patience isn't waiting. It's watching.
A small child learning to tie a shoe is slow. Painfully slow. Every instinct says "let me do it." You'll get out the door faster. You'll also raise a kid who waits for you to tie his shoes.
Engineers work the same way. When a junior developer is stuck on a bug I'd fix in five minutes, taking over the keyboard feels efficient. It isn't. The five minutes I save cost them the whole lesson.
The patience parenting asks for isn't passive. You stand close enough to catch the fall and far enough away to let them try.
Behavior is information.
A toddler throwing a tantrum in the supermarket isn't a bad person. He's tired, hungry, or overwhelmed, and he has no words for it yet. The meltdown is the message.
Adults do this too. They're better at hiding it. The engineer who snaps in stand-up. The team lead who goes quiet for two weeks. The person who suddenly misses every deadline after years of hitting them. Something is going on. My job is to get curious before I get cross.
Parenting drilled a question into me I now use at work every week: what's going on for this person right now?
You're always teaching, even when you're not talking.
Kids ignore most of what you say and copy almost everything you do. If I told my kids to be kind and then snapped at a waiter, they learned to snap at waiters.
Teams are no different. They watch how you handle a missed deadline, a bad review, a crisis at 5pm on a Friday. You set the culture by your worst moments, not your best speeches.
Neither One Gets Easier
This is the part of James's point I think most people skip.
We talk about parenting as if you learn it once and then you're done. You aren't. The skills you need for a toddler are useless with a teenager. The skills you need for a teenager are useless with an adult child who's now raising a kid of their own. Every stage asks you to start over.
Leadership works the same way. Leading five engineers is a different job from leading fifty. Leading through growth is a different job from leading through layoffs. The day you think you've cracked it, the job changes on you.
Management researchers have a name for the good version of this. Jeffrey Greenhaus and Gary Powell called it work-family enrichment: the extent to which experiences in one role improve the quality of life in the other. Skills and perspective flow both ways. What you learn at home improves work. What you learn at work improves home.
Notice the word "extent." Enrichment isn't automatic. The Danish CEOs had the same raw material as every other parent. Some of them turned it into generosity toward women on their teams. Some of them turned it into a smaller pay rise for everybody else.
What Made the Difference for Me
Looking back, the biggest change didn't come when my kids were born. It came when I started noticing the overlap. When I caught myself handling a frustrated engineer the way I'd handle a frustrated eight-year-old... with curiosity, a calm voice, and zero condescension... and saw it work.
It came again when I became a grandad. I had a second shot at the patience I didn't always have the first time. Watching my grandson struggle with something, I've learned to fold my arms, bite my tongue and let him figure it out. Every time I manage it, I'm a better boss the next morning.
This matters because bad bosses are everywhere. In our research at Step It Up HR, 99.5% of respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet plenty of those bosses were parents. Parenthood didn't save their teams. Attention would have.
You Don't Need Kids to Learn This
I want to be careful here. I'm not saying parents make better leaders than people without children. The research doesn't say it, and I don't believe it. Plenty of great leaders never had kids. They learned patience from caring for an aging parent, coaching a youth soccer team, training a stubborn dog, or serving in a unit where nobody got left behind.
The lesson isn't "have children." The lesson is: every relationship where you're responsible for someone else's growth is a leadership classroom. Most of us walk through those classrooms without taking notes.
Take the Notes
Here's what I'd ask you to try this week.
- Pick one moment at home where you showed patience. Write down what you did. Then ask where at work you're rushing in when you should stand back.
- Next time someone on your team acts out, ask "what's going on for you right now?" Treat the behavior as information, not insubordination.
- Watch what you model. For one week, notice how you react to bad news. Your team is watching too.
- Check your loyalties. If life has given you new people to protect, ask whether you're protecting them at your team's expense.
James is right. Neither job gets easier. Both of them grow you, but only if you let them.
So here's my question for you. What has someone at home taught you about leading, and are you using it at work yet?