- What’s a Parent’s Role?
- Take our Authoritative Parenting Test
- Find a family counsellor near me
Key points
- Industrial/organizational psychology considers how best to provide support within organizational parameters.
- We must know how bias and heuristics affect decision-making, how people learn, and what motivates performance.
- We must listen in order to develop our families, as much to earn collective buy-in and surface new insights.
“This organization is like a family” is among the most hypocritical statements in the corporate lexicon. Unless, of course, your family lets go of underperformers
But while an organization is notyour family, your family isan organization. So, what can be gleaned from the traditional pillars of the field? Quite a lot, actually
Selection
Industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology teaches that a) structured interviews improve hiring decisions by up to 300 percent by countering bias,1 and b) no one ever does structured interviews, because we prefer relying on gut instincts over a laborious process, regardless of efficacy
This is driven by biases and heuristics, which exist to save our mental energy. And while they work in some contexts, they consistently fail in others. Like hiring. More than 50 percent of hiring decisions fail.2
Here’s what that means at home. Without a process, decisions make us. And they seek to minimize effort, which usually means accommodating the most difficult family member
This hits every household decision: activities, friends, meals, routines, rules, media, priorities, and generally, “the way things get done around here” (Deal & Kennedy describing organizational culture)
Like structured interviews, steps can be taken at home to prevent bias from overtaking decision-making. For family activities, rotate decision-making or offer options and vote. If you want your kid to take piano lessons, make sure they get to choose an equivalent activity to balance out the decision-making. Or, you can use counter-programming questions before deciding. “What theoretical evidence would suggest we should not make this decision?”
Training
Training begins with motivation. If our kids don’t want to learn something, that’s the problem to solve. Since the only way to change an attitude is to change a belief, we have to find ways to convey to our children why it matters
Next comes cognitive load. Human beings can hold about four concepts in working memory,3 and most training programs blow past that in the first five minutes. If we want training to be effective, we must make it short and frequent, because that’s how the brain works
The next consideration is training transfer. We can’t just “teach” our kids. We have to create space and support for them to practice
And the classic instructional design acronym “A.D.D.I.E.” works perfectly in our homes: assess the need, design the learning, develop the content, implement the teaching, and evaluate the effectiveness
Performance Management
There are two primary reasons that corporate performance management is so widely considered ineffective. Firstly, organizations try to accomplish two things simultaneously that fundamentally undermine each other: evaluation and motivation. It’s like trying to be a referee and a coach at the same time
- What’s a Parent’s Role?
- Take our Authoritative Parenting Test
- Find a family counsellor near me
Secondly, managers have no incentive to provide honest feedback. Lives are much simpler when telling everyone, “Good job,” than when identifying problems for which they themselves will be held accountable to solve
The best performance management approaches separate evaluation and motivation into discrete initiatives. The first is for management to understand its talent, and the second is to get the best performance from the team. They provide clear expectations of evaluative criteria. And they compare people to their past selves rather than to others. Parents should do all three
Leadership
Procedural organizational justice says you must treat everyone the same. Situational leadership theory says you must treat everyone differently. How can both be valid? Context
There are very few hard-and-fast leadership rules that apply in every situation, but there are themes. Transformational leadership shows that inspiring people generally works better than transacting with them (“Do this to keep your job”). Servant leadership demonstrates that a focus on the long-term well-being of followers generally leads to better performance. And we know that referent power (respect, affection, loyalty) generally triggers stronger intrinsic motivation, whereas the opposite is true for positional power.
Parenting Essential Reads
Matrescence Doesn’t End at One Year
This Is Not the Child I Dreamed of Having
As parents, our best focus is on inspiring our kids, not directing them. On demonstrating how our decisions are being made with their long-term interests in mind. And on knowing that they are more likely to follow our lead because of good feelings than “Because I said so.”
Motivation
The relevance of motivation science for parenting could fill a book, so here are some of the greatest hits
Incentives gone wrong are an irresistible subject for many, yet we rarely stop to consider the incentives we provide our children. Do we pay more attention to them when they misbehave? Then we are incentivizing them to misbehave
Expectancy theory identifies three prerequisites to motivation: A) the person believes they can do it, B) the person wants the reward, and C) the person believes they’ll actually get the reward. Managers, like parents, usually assume all three, a costly mistake in both instances
Self-determination theory says three fundamental needs create intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and connection. For parents, that means letting our kids figure out for themselves how to accomplish their goals on their own, creating opportunities and recognition for demonstrating talent, and making sure they feel a strong sense of connection with us and our communities
Organizational Development
Successful organizational development strategies keep two fundamental ideas perpetually top of mind. Firstly, change is constant. Secondly, you have to listen to know what to do
Here’s something non-obvious about organizational listening: interviews, focus groups, surveys, or 360s. They also communicate: “If we’re asking about this, you know it’s important.”
As parents, we can’t just jump in with our own ideas on how to develop the family. We have to listen first, as much to surface insight as to generate buy-in and to convey priorities
And since every home needs a good model for change, let’s use Kurt Lewin’s, who said change happens in three stages symbolized by water. Stage 1 is unfreezing the ice. Stage 2 is reshaping the water. Stage 3 is refreezing ice in a new shape
The reason why most organizational efforts fail4 is that they skip Stage 1 and begin at Stage 2. Until people are unfrozen, however, change simply is not possible. With change, we must undo before we can do. The same is true for our families
Much of I/O psychology exists to mitigate our worst tendencies. Seems like a pretty worthwhile goal for home, too
[1]https://www.ou.edu/russell/pdf/Interview.pdf
[2]https://drjohnsullivan.com/articles/hr-retention/ouch-50-new-hires-fail…
[3]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11515286/
[4]https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-perform…
