What Parenting Teaches CEOs About Leadership That Business Never Could - CEOWORLD magazine
I’ve built and run a global business for 20+ years. I’ve recruited and promoted people, won and lost major clients, survived recessions and the pandemic, navigated private equity investment and sat through more leadership meetings than is probably healthy. Yet, some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about leadership didn’t come from this. They […]
I’ve built and run a global business for 20+ years. I’ve recruited and promoted people, won and lost major clients, survived recessions and the pandemic, navigated private equity investment and sat through more leadership meetings than is probably healthy. Yet, some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about leadership didn’t come from this. They came from being dad to my two amazing children Lucas and Sophia. Business can teach you strategy, negotiation, financial discipline and how to remain outwardly calm. Parenting teaches you something deeper and very different. It teaches you how to take responsibility for others without controlling them. How to make decisions when there’s no obvious correct answer. How to stay patient. How to keep showing up, even when you are tired, worried or quietly wondering whether you know what you’re doing. In other words, it teaches you to lead. Don’t need to be the smartest in the roomWhen you become a CEO, there can be a temptation to believe you’re expected to know everything. I don’t, and I’d say most people in my business are much smarter, more cerebral, and have more experience. Pretending to know everything is one of the fastest ways to become a poor leader. It stops people challenging you, disguises problems and creates an organisation entirely dependent on one person’s judgement. Children quickly cure you of this illusion. Parenting teaches you leadership isn’t having every answer. It’s being secure enough to say, “I don’t know,” while remaining committed to finding the best way forward. The same is true in business. The strongest CEOs are not those who dominate every conversation. They create the conditions in which the truth can emerge, particularly when the truth is inconvenient. Patience is not passivityI’ve never been blessed with endless patience. I suspect many entrepreneurs are the same. We want things fixing yesterday and often I have temptation to do it myself. That energy can be useful. It can also be exhausting for everyone around you. Children operate according to their own timetable. No matter how often you ask them to switch the TV off, they always have selected hearing. Sometimes I use what I know from sales and NLP training – a ‘double bind’’ – getting what you need without time restriction attached. You cannot accelerate confidence, maturity or emotional development simply because it’s more convenient for you. You can guide, encourage and create boundaries, but you cannot force genuine growth. People in businesses are no different. We often talk about “developing talent” as though employees move along a manufacturing line. Real development is rarely that tidy. People need room to try, fail, reflect and try again. Sometimes the leader’s job is to intervene. Sometimes it is to resist intervening, which can be much harder. Patience doesn’t mean lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. It means understanding sustainable performance is built over time. My son and I love to make Airfix kits. It could be so easy to suggest Lucas watches me do it, yet it’s much more powerful to let him make the screwups: use too much glue and get paint on the table. Allowing them to fail and try again with your support, is more rewarding for them and yourself. People remember how you made them feelA child may forget the detail of what you said, but they rarely forget the feeling surrounding it. They remember whether you listened. Whether you were present. Whether your reaction made them feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time. My daughter Sophia loves to dance, sing and play the piano. Without encouragement instead of criticism, I doubt she’d be so motivated to continue improving her talents. Employees aren’t children, and leaders should be wary of treating them as such. The underlying human truth is the same. People perform better when they feel respected, understood and psychologically safe. That doesn’t mean protecting them from accountability. Love and standards aren’t opposites. You can care deeply about someone and tell them their behaviour isn’t OK. You can support someone while making it clear their work must improve. The skill lies in separating the person from the problem. Many leaders either avoid difficult conversations because they want to be liked, or deliver them with brutality leaving the individual feeling diminished. Parenting teaches you to hold two thoughts at once: “I care about you” and “this needs to change”. Consistency over grand gesturesLeadership is often presented through dramatic moments but in reality, people judge through hundreds of smaller interactions. One of my podcast (theprodcast. com) guests Card Addy said it brilliantly: “It takes a lot of ‘oohs’ to make an ‘ahhh’. ”Parenting makes this clear. You can’t give a speech about honesty and then behave dishonestly. Children watch what you do far more closely than they listen to what you say. There’s no point telling children to get off their phones if they see you constantly on yours. So do teams. Culture isn’t created by values on the office wall. It’s created by the behaviour leaders repeatedly demonstrate, reward and tolerate. People as kids do watch you. If you’re not setting the example, they can’t model a behaviour that is expected. Prepare people to succeedYou spend years protecting, teaching and supporting your children so one day they can make their own decisions and live their own lives. Leadership should work in the same way. A CEO’s job is not to be indispensable. It’s to build an organisation that can succeed without their constant involvement, and if you get run over by a bus, the business still functions. Many founders, myself included, find this difficult. The business begins as an extension of you. You know every client, employee, risk and creaking floorboard. Letting other people take responsibility can feel like losing control. But if every decision comes back to the founder, the organisation has not genuinely scaled. It’s simply added more people around the bottleneck. Making that transition can also happen too quickly – it can’t be an overnight switch. Parenting teaches you trust is built by gradually handing over responsibility. You let people make age-appropriate decisions, then increasingly important ones. You remain available, but you stop solving every problem. In business, this means giving talented people authority, not just titles. Allowing them to make decisions differently from how you’d have made them and accepting occasionally they’ll get things wrong. Long-term thinking changes today’s decisionsBusinesses live by annual plans, quarterly results and monthly targets. All are necessary. None is sufficient. Parenting forces you to think in decades. You begin to understand today’s easiest decision may not create tomorrow’s strongest person. Giving in can stop an argument now while creating a much larger problem later. Equally, applying relentless pressure may produce a short-term result but damage confidence in the process as well. CEOs face similar trade-offs. You can cut training and squeeze suppliers to make this year’s numbers look better. You can avoid addressing an underperforming leader because the conversation will be uncomfortable. But leadership is not merely the achievement of a result. It’s how that result is achieved and what remains afterwards. The best decisions strengthen the organisation’s ability to succeed in the future. They build capability, confidence and trust rather than simply extracting another quarter of performance. You’ll get it wrongNo parent gets everything right. The fantasy of the flawless parent is as unhelpful as the fantasy of the flawless CEO. What matters is whether you admit your mistakes and course correct. A genuine apology from a leader is incredibly powerful. This doesn’t weaken authority. It strengthens trust. People don’t expect leaders to be perfect. They do expect honesty. Some of the best leaders demonstrate this and it cultivates an environment of ‘in it together’. Parenting strips away the performance of leadership and exposes the person. It reminds you authority isn’t the same as respect, listening isn’t the same as agreeing and strength isn’t the absence of vulnerability. Create conditions for others to flourishWhether you’re raising a family or building a company, leadership is an act of stewardship. You don’t own people, you actually work for them. Your responsibility is to create the environment in which they can become more confident, capable and independent. I’ve learned a great deal from two decades in business, and a lot longer in the advertising industry as a whole. But parenting has taught me what sits underneath it all. Leadership isn’t about being the boss, it’s not a position or a title or a perfectly polished strategy. It’s showing up consistently. Carrying responsibility when it’s uncomfortable. Making decisions for the long term. Helping other people become stronger, even when that eventually means they need you less. On my epitaph, I’d like it to say I was the best dad in the world. If your epitaph was being written by your employees, what would you like that to say?No MBA can really teach you that. Although an MBA does involve significantly fewer arguments about screen time. Written byPatrick Murphy. Have you read?World’s Largest Gold Producing Countries. Ranking: Countries With the Lowest Obesity Rates. World’s Best Business Schools 2026: Global MBA & Management Rankings. World’s Best Fashion Schools 2026: Top Fashion Design & Business Rankings. World’s Best Hospitality & Hotel Management Schools 2026 Rankings.