English 
As anyone with kids knows, it takes years of patience and hard work to raise well-behaved, balanced adults who are ready to take on the responsibilities of everyday life. Effective managers and team leaders can take years to develop the skills of a busy mom trying to balance soccer practice with a ballet recital. While this may seem worlds apart from your business management skills, the truth is that managing a household, family, and kids will prepare you to be an effective business leader in several ways.
7 Ways Managing a Household Makes You an Amazing Business Leader:
1) Leading Teams
Teams are an integral part of modern business management. As any small business owner can tell you, there’s no getting around it—you need to find ways to manage your staff effectively. For one thing, if you don’t have effective teams in place at your business it’s likely that there will be gaps in your overall productivity. If people don’t feel like they belong on their team or aren’t treated well by their leader they may feel disengaged.
The good news is that leadership skills learned within smaller environments translate well into larger ones. If you’re already leading a family, household, or kids then you’re already learning how to lead others!
2) Managing Time
The foundation of being an effective leader is being able to manage your time properly. The best leaders are not necessarily those who work harder than everyone else but are able to remain focused on their goals while delegating projects effectively.
You learn to schedule your day and think about questions like:
- What’s important?
- What needs attention?
- What are your goals for the day?
- What do you need to get accomplished?
- What can wait for another day?
This will help guide you during your day, keeping you focused on key tasks that can move projects forward. Set Priorities – It’s easy to be distracted by urgent issues that crop up throughout the day—but what is urgent isn’t always important. The biggest secret here is getting over yourself.
3) Expanding Patience & Flexibility
Although it may seem like your kids are taking over your life, having them in it is actually one of your most useful management training opportunities. Learning to listen and change directions is vital with family and business efforts. Whether you’re managing toddlers or teenagers, kids require patience and flexible thinking—two essential skills for every business leader.
Like children, employees aren’t afraid to speak their minds when they’re unhappy with something. In some cases, they even have more power than you as an employee or manager. They have their own opinions about what should be done on any given day as well as their preferences about how it should be done. Flexibility will help you manage those demands as well as others from people who don’t work for you directly.
4) Being an Empowering Cheerleader
One of your primary responsibilities as a business leader is empowering others. As an entrepreneur, you are essentially in charge of hiring, training, firing, delegating tasks to—and celebrating with—your team. The best way to get good at empowering others is by following through on these responsibilities at home.
If you’ve got children or pets at home (or both), there are plenty of opportunities for you to practice delegating tasks and giving appropriate credit when things go well. Empowering your spouse may mean encouraging him or her to take an adult education class. The point is that having other humans rely on you at home will make you feel more empowered as a business leader who can now delegate tasks to others with confidence.
Ask yourself:
- How can I best empower them?
- What new skills do they need?
- How will I give them all they need to succeed?
- What empowerment tools can I provide?
When empowering others in your family and personal life, it’s easier for you to start thinking about what it means to empower people at work. You’ll make mistakes while trying new methods of empowerment in different contexts—at work or at home—but remember: it’s OK if some don’t work out right away.
5) Balancing Schedules
When you’re running your own business or working for someone else, managing your time properly is key. While we all like to pretend that we can multi-task like superheroes (and indeed there are some people who can), most of us actually end up doing less work by working on one thing at a time. However, even if you work on one task until it’s done before starting another, you still need good time management skills in order to have everything done in an efficient manner. The best way to manage your time is with balance.
We can’t do everything at once after all! It might feel impossible right now because of how out of control life seems to get sometimes. Take some deep breaths and know that eventually, things will settle down! Having kids – like running a business – doesn’t mean that suddenly your world becomes chaos; just give yourself some time for it all to settle into place so you can adjust accordingly.
6) Prioritizing Deadlines
As leaders in our households, family members need to understand that there are only so many hours in a day. We can’t fit everything into our schedules because things must be prioritized in order of importance. Although your child may have soccer practice on Tuesday evenings, it’s important for them to understand that if their homework is not complete by 6 pm sharp they will not have time with friends after school—and that Thursday night is reserved for parents’ yoga class.
By adhering to your priorities you are showing them how critical deadlines are when starting or running a business. Deadlines are what separate success from failure; they’re what separates winners from losers; they’re what separates an entrepreneur from anyone else who wishes they could do it themselves but never quite makes it happen.
7) Outlining Expectations & Consequences
Much like being a business leader, managing a household is all about setting expectations and then communicating those expectations clearly with everyone involved. In any home or family situation, you’re going to have certain rules that need to be followed. And each person is going to have different responsibilities. Make sure you’re sitting down with your spouse and discussing what responsibilities each of you will have—this is vital for smoothing out relationships in general but also for ensuring that your children are growing up in an environment where there are no surprises as far as what is expected of them from you as parents.
Once that outline is set, make sure you consistently reinforce it. We know first-hand how easy it can be to slip back into old habits if we don’t keep reinforcing why things are done one way instead of another on a regular basis. This same concept applies to helping employees or teams meet the expectations and consequences.
Why Running a Household Amps Up Your Leadership Skills
Remember that leadership starts with you, so take stock of your strengths and weaknesses. Are you good at motivating others? What challenges do you face when it comes to time management? Do you have any gaps in knowledge where you’d like to learn more? Maybe reading books on self-management will help. The more thoughtfully you consider your skills as well as what areas need development, the more effective your leadership strategies will be.
The skills involved in managing a household, family, and kids are remarkably similar to those of business leadership. Even if you’re not currently heading up an organization or team yourself, it’s helpful for your career development as well as life fulfillment to learn how to manage your home environment effectively. We can all benefit from practicing good management strategies – regardless of their domain – and we can all improve ourselves by learning how we can lead ourselves more effectively.
