Bruno Bettelheim’s book, A Good Enough Parent, was originally published in 1987. The book deals with the proposition that too much parenting, or not enough, are both less than ideal if the intention is to create the conditions for the development of healthy and happy adults.
Just as there is a "goldilocks zone" for parenting, the same applies to the management and development of your team members. Aim to be a good-enough leader.
Just as good enough parents do not strive to be perfect parents and do not expect perfection from their children so to do good enough leaders.
Perfection is not within the grasp of ordinary human beings. Efforts to attain it typically interfere with that lenient response to the imperfections of others, including those of one’s child, which alone make good human relations possible.”
One of the problems with the expectation of perfection is that every blemish, including those that one can do nothing about, becomes magnified. Impossible standards make happiness unattainable for kids and engagement and job satisfaction impossible for employees.
Good enough parents respect their children and try to understand them for who they are and good enough leaders respect their team members and deal with them on their individual merits.
Good enough parents do not think of themselves as the producers, creators, or shapers of their children. They see their children as complete human beings right now, and they see their job as that of getting to know those beings. They understand that the parent-child relationship goes both ways, but not entirely. It is a relationship between equals in the sense that the two parties are equally important, equally deserving of happiness, equally deserving of the opportunity to create their own goals and strive to achieve them (as long as such striving does not harm others). In another sense, though, it is an unequal relationship.
The same is true for employee development. The Manager needs to lead it and engage in a way that creates safety and development and respect - a focus on the uniqueness of each team member.
Good enough parents are more concerned for the child’s experience of childhood than with the child’s future as an adult and good enough leaders should work with team members on where they are right now, in the moment.
It’s natural for all parents to have some concern about their children’s futures. We all want our children to grow up to be kind, moral, happy, healthy adults who can provide and care for themselves and others. But good enough parents know that the child’s future is the child’s responsibility, not the parent’s. It is the child, not the parent, who must determine his or her goals in life and route toward achieving them. The parent's job is to assure that the child has a satisfying childhood.
Good enough leaders must also understand that the employees are responsible for their own behaviour and career and development. The mindset for the good enough leader is as a catalyst.
Good enough parents provide the help that their children need and want, but not more than they need or want. The good enough leader encourages and allows personal responsibility and maximises goal setting, reflection and learning.
Children come into the world designed by nature to want to do as much for themselves as they can. That is how they move continuously toward adulthood. Good enough parents understand this intuitively, so they allow their children the freedom to take risks and to do for themselves what they can. Good enough parents allow their children to make mistakes and to fail, because they know that mistakes and failures are inevitable components of learning.
The good enough leader likewise is a coach and a facilitator of learning. This involves allowing employees to set their own goals, to take appropriate risks and to reflect and learn.
The primary tools of good enough parenting are empathy conscious reflection, and maturity.
To know how to best support their children, good enough parents strive to understand them, and the main tools for doing so are conscious reflection, maturity (which includes patience), and empathy.
We know that the best leaders get to be the best because of their emotional quotient - empathy, goal focus, interpersonal effectiveness, self-management and self-awareness. This it where good enough leaders dwell.
Good enough parents are confident that their good enough parenting is good enough. Similarly good enough leaders are confident in themselves and are able to have great conversations that are all about the other.
Parents who feel confident about their parenting will be more calm and patient, less anxious in their parenting, and will thereby provide a greater source of security for their children, than parents who don’t feel so confident. If we are good enough parents, we don’t take much credit, nor much blame.
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