SuperVision

By Scott Libin

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I can't count the number of times participants in Poynter leadership and management seminars have drawn a parallel between being a parent and being a boss. It often makes me a little uneasy, because treating people like children is not my favorite way to run a newsroom.

After all, words like patronizing and paternalistic grew from the Latin root pater, meaning father. And, although seminar participants often talk about their fathers and mothers when we ask them about important leaders in their lives, I haven't heard anybody yet say, "I find it very effective when my boss talks down to me."

There's no escaping certain similarities between the way grownups interact with kids and the way superiors interact with subordinates. It's just as important to examine the differences.

Nobody I know ever outgrows the need for clear expectations and consistent consequences. Children need to know the rules, especially when they are too young to make good decisions for themselves. Mom and Dad determine what's right and wrong. Authority provides security. If the rules change from day to day, a child's world becomes confusing and frightening.

Adults aren't entirely immune to those same insecurities. If what earns praise one day provokes punishment the next, people don't know what to expect or how to act. If expectations are unclear, children and adults alike tend to test the rules to see how they really work. Even a parent who is unreasonably but consistently strict provides a stronger sense of security than one who is unpredictable and erratic. Working journalists say similar things about bosses. "Tough but fair" is one succinct way they put it. "Keep your nose clean, do your job and you'll be just fine" is another.

On the other hand, "I don't know what he wants from me" and "We're never sure which version of the boss will show up on any given day" are typical complaints of stressed staffs. Such sentiments are often among the last things unhappy workers say before becoming former employees. Unlike children who can't safely run away from home, employees who feel unfairly treated can quit, and do -- sometimes not just the job, but journalism as a career.

"Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't go over well with kids, and it's no more popular with grownups, who have a word for it: hypocrisy. Bosses who don't practice what they preach pay the price in credibility, which is as essential to leadership as it is to journalism. In their newsrooms, healthy skepticism sickens into cynicism -- a tough condition to cure, once it takes hold.

Parenting experts, a group of people who share a title but sometimes seem to share very few beliefs about bringing up children, seem generally to agree on one thing: Effective parents eventually work themselves out of a job. Their greatest success is to render their services unnecessary, to turn needy children into independent adults who function fully on their own. Few managers aspire to non-essential status. Especially in an era when any unnecessary expense is a tempting target for budget-cutting, it would be a highly questionable career tactic for an editor or news director to brag to a publisher or editor about being uninvolved in the newsroom.

I don't recommend it.

I do, however, believe the best leaders empower others and enable them to build decision-making skills, even if it involves making some mistakes along the way -- just as caring parents know their children need more and more room to figure things out on their own, even though it's sure to mean an occasional scraped knee, bruised ego or bad grade. Smothering mothers and fathers indulge themselves at the expense of their sons and daughters. Needy micromanagers insist on immersing themselves in every detail -- and then sometimes complain about newsrooms that can't seem to do a thing without the boss's hands-on involvement.

Effective leaders groom their successors without feeling threatened that they will be prematurely replaced. Successful parents prepare their children to become mothers and fathers themselves. I suppose there's a parallel there.

But that's about as far as I can comfortably go.

As my colleague, Paul Pohlman, senior member of Poynter's leadership and management faculty, puts it, unconditional love is where the parenting parallel falls apart.

"In the parent-child relationship, the regard is unconditional," Paul says. "In the boss-employee relationship, the regard is conditional upon performance. Parents want their children to perform well, but love them even when they don't."

If a boss's regard for employees is unwavering despite poor performance, the boss probably isn't doing his or her own job.

And Paul says the anguish of adolescence is not an appealing model for the workplace:

"When the employee sees the boss as a parent, the employee might fight for independence and might even become passive-aggressive," according to Paul. "That fight is normal in parenting. Emotionally mature bosses and employees don't have to go through that."

Let's hope not.

So don't discard the important lessons you can learn raising kids. Just remember that one of those lessons is that things aren't often as simple as they seem. Don't spot a similarity or two and assume it's all the same. Accept the uniqueness and embrace the complexity of leading journalists. Your colleagues will be grateful.

And your parents would be proud.