~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I have four children, and they’ve taught me more about leading people than most of the management books on my shelf.
Not through anything dramatic. Through the ordinary, daily business of trying to get other human beings to do things — and discovering, repeatedly, that my first instinct was usually wrong.
Don’t assume
The first lesson is the one I relearn most often.
I assume they heard me. I assume they understood what I meant. I assume they know why it matters. I assume that because something is obvious to me, it’s obvious to them.
Very often, none of that is true. They heard something slightly different. They understood the instruction but not the reason. They knew what I wanted but had a perfectly good explanation for why they did something else.
It’s exactly the same at work. One of my most expensive business mistakes came from assuming someone understood the purpose behind a task I’d handed over. She didn’t, because I’d never actually explained it.
So now I ask. “What did you take from that?” “What do you think the point of this is?” It takes ten seconds and it catches most misunderstandings before they cost anything.
Tell them not to, and they will
Every parent learns this one quickly. Tell a child not to do something, and there’s a good chance they’ll do it — or ignore you altogether.
It turns out this isn’t just children being children. Psychologists have studied it for decades. In 1966 Jack Brehm described what he called psychological reactance: when people feel their freedom to choose is being restricted, they’re motivated to push back and reclaim it. A prohibition doesn’t only tell someone what not to do. It makes the forbidden thing more attractive, simply because it’s been forbidden.
Adults do this too. We’re just better at hiding it.
The employee told “don’t contact the client directly” feels a pull to do exactly that. The team told “don’t change the process without asking” starts looking for reasons to change it. A rule delivered as a prohibition, without an explanation, invites resistance.
What works better, with children and adults alike, is explaining the reason and describing what to do instead. Not “don’t contact the client directly” — “send client questions through me for now, because they’re nervous about the project and I want them hearing one consistent voice.” The second version gives people something to do and a reason to do it. There’s much less to push against.
The mom filter
The other thing children do, if you repeat yourself enough, is stop listening entirely.
In our house I call it the uber mom filter. After enough reminders about shoes, homework and wet towels, the words simply stop registering. It isn’t defiance. It’s that everything I say has started to sound the same, so none of it gets through.
Leaders get filtered in exactly the same way. The manager who flags everything as urgent, who comments on every small thing, who sends the same reminder every week — eventually their team tunes them out. And then, when something genuinely important comes up, it gets filtered along with everything else.
The lesson: say less, and mean it more. If everything is a priority, nothing is. Save your emphasis for what actually matters, and people will notice when you use it.
How it changed the way I approach people
These lessons changed how I talk to my children. They also changed how I approach everyone else.
I explain my reasoning more, because people who understand the why make better decisions without me. I ask what someone understood instead of assuming. I describe what I want rather than listing what I don’t. And I try to reserve my strongest words for the things that deserve them.
None of that is complicated. All of it came from being ignored by a teenager and wondering what I could have done differently.
The children didn’t mean to teach me any of this. I suspect they’d find it very funny that they did.
More on why messages get lost between people and being clear about what you actually want.
