Are you a parent? You’re a project manager!
Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash
I might be telling you something you already know, but I think it needs to be said: parents are the original project managers. Helping someone else become a person- if that doesn’t scream project, I don’t know what does. And I’m here to say that the skills you learn in raising a person are 100% applicable to your work, and specifically, in project management.
One thing I love about this idea is that I’m not even a parent and it’s patently clear to me that parents around me are project managing every day of their lives. Take the example of planning out summer camps- this is an activity I see my close friends doing every year, and it includes finding all the information on camps in the area, sorting through what is of interest to their child or children, plotting out which camps happen at which times, figuring out when and if a family vacation can get sandwiched in there somewhere, completing all of the paperwork for registration across the board, and then figuring out how to get each child to each place every day of the whole season... Each and every part of that process is project management- think about it: you’ve got massive stakeholder management with your children, especially considering that each of them have their own requirements and interests for camp; and putting together the summer plan is one of the biggest scheduling endeavors I’ve ever seen someone do outside of a work setting. Then you’ve all the logistics of making sure you can get your child from home to camp and back again every single day of the summer. HOLY PROJECT MANAGEMENT, BATMAN!
And that’s just one thing parents have to take care of, right? Social and emotional intelligence are recognized expertise areas in project management, and the same is true in parenting. You’ve got to listen, support your kids, manage your own feelings while dealing with theirs, and there’s a whole extra level of it when you’re talking about tiny people who can’t express themselves or articulate what’s going on with them, or even manage their own upset yet. Being able to take care of and help others manage their emotions is something parents are challenged with every day, and is something I think gets undervalued or not even noticed in the workforce sometimes. Managing people is the biggest component of managing projects, and if we understood exactly how skilled parents are at doing that, I think we could all benefit from leveraging their natural talents in project management (and other disciplines).
One last skill that I want to discuss is negotiation… Anyone who has dined with a picky eater can tell you that negotiation is an essential parenting skill. The same thing goes for project management - it’s not so much “Try one bite of your broccoli and then you can have dessert,” but it’s absolutely about finding tradeoffs, figuring out what can be done now versus later, and ensuring that the outcome is acceptable to all parties. Parents are doing this all day, every day, and if we found a way to tap into these innate skills at work, I think we would be blown away by the project management potential lying hidden within every parent.
As I’ve been making the case in my blogs the past few weeks, the way we talk about and frame project management is very limited in today’s business world. We talk about KPIs and status reports and preventing scope creep, but we rarely mention how crucial it is to be able to negotiate and think on your feet under pressure. If we spent more time talking about the social-emotional intelligence and flexibility required to lead a project, or the amount of caring and support you need to provide to your team members, I think we could tap into a whole new set of ideas and ways of approaching work that could benefit project management as a discipline. And, the more people start to see themselves in project management, the greater ability we’ll have to spread the familiar best practices, and methods needed to get us all working in more efficient and fulfilling ways. If we can open up a space for more parents to see the direct connection between what they do every day as parents and how those skills translate directly into project management, imagine the gains we could make!
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Are you a parent? Do you know any parents? Do you consider them to be project managers? How would you approach project management differently if you knew that every parent you work with was a project manager? Leave me a comment or a DM with your thoughts! I’d love to hear from you!