Summary
Most of us spend several years working before becoming parents, and the majority of us continue to work once we have children. At work, we learn all sorts of valuable skills - managing, selling, negotiating and so on - which we can apply in any company we work for. But when we become parents, all those hard-learned skills are useless. Or are they? KIDS & Co explains how your business skills don't have to go out of the window when you walk in through the front door. You may sometimes feel that the kids get the better of you every time, but here is one weapon you have that they don't: all those business skills you are familiar with and they know nothing about. Closing the sale, win/win negotiating, motivational skills, and all the rest of them. All you need to do is learn how to apply them to your children as well as to your customers and your staff. Obviously there is no perfect way to handle our kids so that we never hear a single whinge or tantrum (more's the pity) but there are certainly techniques which make life a whole lot easier. What's more, as we know from our business experience, these techniques work on grown-ups. So they should be effective with children right through to adulthood even when, like customers and staff, they have got wise to the techniques and know what you're up to. KIDS & Co covers a serious subject - the business of parenting - with a light-hearted touch.
Author Notes
Ros Jay is a professional author who writes books on both business and parenting topics, in this case simultaneously. Her books include Fast Thinking Manager's Manual, Build a Great Team and How to Manage Your Boss, all for Prentice Hall, Smart Things to Know about Customers for Capstone, and Baby Sanctuary for Chrysalis Books. She is the mother of three young children and stepmother to another three grown-up ones.
Excerpts
Excerpted from Kids & Co: Winning Business Tactics for Every Family by Ros Jay, Richard Craze. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chapter Four Motivation skills: generate enthusiasm in your children Children can be hugely enthusiastic and positive, and are capable of putting enormous effort into projects. They just have to feel motivated. You won't need to put any effort into motivating your teenage daughter to have her nose pierced, or your four year old to have a go on his new bicycle. However, motivation skills are essential if you want to get your children to do other things such as homework, or cleaning and tidying. Managers need to motivate their staff just as you need to motivate your children. It can be a little tougher with children though. At work, your staff know that they have to put in some effort if they want to keep their jobs, so there is a level of self-motivation even if you need to build on it. At home, your children have no such incentive. You can't fire them, and they know it. Being your child is a job for life. So you sometimes find yourself faced with no motivation at all in your children, which you need to turn into sufficient enthusiasm to embark on a project and see it through. As far as your role as manager is concerned, you need to keep firm control and be seen as a figure of authority and respect - rather than as a wimp - in order to get the performance you want to out of your team members. You need to use carrot rather than stick techniques to encourage your children to co-operate without undermining their confidence. How can you get your children to want to do things they are not initially keen on? It might be cleaning out the rabbit hutch, getting their homework done, or going on holiday to somewhere you chose and they didn't. Or it might be a more long term issue: taking on extra chores, travelling to school on their own in future instead of getting a lift from you, or working harder at getting good grades in biology. Whatever the issue, the selling skills we've already looked at will help. But even if you can sell an idea to your child in the first instance, you still need to keep them keen to pursue it to the end. The truth about bribery One of the best forms of motivation is bribery. It has a bad name among parents - it feels like cheating, but that's only because we associate it with a pathetic attempt at appeasement. It doesn't have to be. There's a world of difference between bribing a child to say yes after they've initially refused, and bribing them before you start. In other words, if you anticipate trouble, you can start out by saying "It's time to go shopping. Come on - if you're good I'll buy you an ice cream on the way home." It's not the same thing at all as begging your shrieking child, as they lie kicking and flailing on the floor of the supermarket, "Please be good, and I'll buy you an ice cream." If you think about it, the first version - offering a bribe before they've done anything wrong - is only what managers do with their staff all the time: "If you're good, I'll give you a Christmas bonus." "If you handle this job well, you'll get more responsibility and a better job title next year." Some of these bribes are spelt out, and some are simply understood, but they are just as much bribes as an ice cream for being good at the shops is to your child. So in future, we can stop calling these temptations bribes, and start calling them by the words we use at work: rewards, incentives, motivating factors. There. Now you don't have to feel guilty any more. You're not bribing your child, you're incentivising them. Just make sure you do it before they've misbehaved or failed to pull their weight. Everyone is motivated by different things, as we'll see in more detail in a moment. But there are certain techniques you can use as a manager of either children or staff, which will help to motivate anyone. There are three key techniques: · Show them how they fit into the big picture · Set clear and realistic targets · Involve them Show them how they fit into the big picture The technique: Let your staff see how their job fits in with the whole organisation. Show them what else goes on and explain how their role meshes with it. Let them see the results of their hard work: if they make wheel bearings for the cars you manufacture, let them drive one of the finished cars. Your child is part of the whole family, and they need to understand their place in it. You might tell them that you can't take them out on Thursday; it may be their school holiday, but you've still got to go to work. But don't just leave it at that. Explain (helpfully, without lecturing) why the whole family benefits from you working. If you can, let them come to work with you for a morning and see what you do. Why not swop jobs with your child for a day? (You might need to modify this approach a little, especially for a small child.) Do it at a weekend when you don't have to go to work, or your boss might be a little surprised to see a smartly dressed six year old rolling up at the office and settling down on your chair, peeping up over the desk. Get your child to cook the dinner, wash the car, do the cleaning or whatever you do, while you do whatever it is they do at the weekend. You should have a pretty easy time of this (you're excused hanging around the shops pointlessly for hours with a large group of 14 year olds). Do their chores for them, though, before you put your feet up. Excerpted from Kids and Co.: Winning Business Tactics for Every Family All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
