Workplace lessons from a 6 month old

I have been in the role of a father for 6 months now and this is the first time I’m doing it, so right now the feeling is exactly the same as the feeling during the first 6 months of working life. Despair, optimism, helplessness, nothingness and sleeplessness all come together to form a deadly concoction that surprisingly enough does lead to some usable thinking. On one of those sleepless nights, not many nights ago, it occurred to me that babies can teach us many lessons that we can take to the workplace in order to become better team players, doers, thinkers, bosses and whatever else your paycheck makes you do. 

In the age of the sharing economy and the veritable power of social media much of this information is supplied to us through self-help books and now status updates and honestly enough I would have run into these corporate lessons myself many a time but in my foreseeable memory, I will credit these learnings to my baby daughter who has delivered these management lessons to me in the most memorable manner.

All cries are not cries for help

Some are in endorsement of the views the couple may be exchanging, some are just for attention (not for help but just like that) and some are just cries that say that ‘I don’t need help right now but if you don’t change the channel immediately I may bring the house down in a few minutes). As YouTube and Facebook have had us believe, babies are really cute. Yes, this is true by and large but at the best of their worst they are not a pretty picture and what works in their favor is that they don’t really know another way to communicate.

We see many such characters at our workplace every day. The ones who do not know another language but the one that cries for attention all the time. The ones who are vocal about their opinion on a faulty coffee machine as passionately as they are on an organizational restructure (none of which probably affect their daily lives in any fathomable way). There are also those who cry on the behalf of others. The mouthpieces of those who want to make a splash but don’t want to wet themselves.

Both of these types are very critical to an organization. Not just leaders but everyone who aspires to play any role in organization building needs to keep their ears to the ground to spot these people when they are vocal. If you ask me, leaders in particular cannot survive without this breed in the organization because they are the conduits to the workforce. Even if these conduits prefer to work one-way, they still give leaders the opportunities to fix things even before they break.

It is ok to fail (because you learn) but don’t tell everyone about it

When your wife leaves you in charge of a 6 month old baby, those 30 odd minutes (yes, nowhere in the world will a mother leave her 6 month old with ‘someone else’ for more than 30 minutes) are the chance of a lifetime to beat the odds and deliver the goods when it really matters. Sure enough one will make plenty of mistakes even in a short span of 30 minutes but a seemingly lost cause can be transformed into rapturous victory if the only the last 5 minutes are spent analyzing the mistakes and deciding which one to own up to and which one to ignore.

Within the bounds of commonly acceptable reason, it is safe to say that only a mistake that adversely affects more than 2 people directly is worth owning up to. If it doesn’t, it will look after itself provided it is not a repetition and has been made inadvertently. So when you’re alone with a baby for 30 minutes and you forgot to change the diaper, didn’t heat the water the baby’s bath and also forgot to fix an appointment with the doctor, pick your battles very smartly because when there are more than 1 big mistakes, 1 X 1 is usually the same as 1 + 1

Multi-tasking is good but always pay 100% fleeting attention

Yes I firmly believe so despite contrary circumstantial evidence on the internet! The other day my daughter was resting peacefully on my shoulder as I walked her to her state of slumber. It was a delicate sound of a blunder that shook me and her as I noticed she had moved and bumped her head on the door. The cry was not for help but just a mix of disdain for me and pity for herself. After the soothing ritual was over I realized that what happened was really because of the fact that I had, just a minute earlier, rested my phone on the table after a bout with the e-mail and hadn’t fully ‘recovered’ before I took her for a walk.

What had happened was something that happens to us every day. We do 10 things at a time – juggle between e-mails, sms and phone calls all in the middle of waiting for lunch.  This, I believe, can be made possible as long as our fleeting attention is always 100% on what we are doing at that very second. As if nothing happened before that and the world will end after that! As I have discovered in very rough circumstances, this is hard to practice but the sheer demand of the day’s lifecycle can make it happen. The easiest way to do this is possibly just to visualize the worst outcome of screwing up the one thing you are doing at a given point in time. In my case it was the bump on my daughter’s head.

There are many other lessons to be learnt from these bundles of joy as they are fondly called. But to me they are just mirrors, sometimes of the rear-view kind and sometime of the kind who will tell you what you are really worth but at the end of the day they will help you visualize your future much better than those inspirational quotes and self-help books.