Editorial Team
Parenting and leadership have much in common, and there are invaluable leadership skills to put on LinkedIn that are learned from being a good parent.
Dr. Dharius Daniels, an emotional intelligence expert, author of Relational Intelligence: The People Skills You Need For The Life Of Purpose You Want and Your Purpose is Calling: Your Difference is Your Destiny (launching this September), and former professor at Princeton University, identifies 5 crucial parenting skills that can be applied to the workplace and specifically, that can be added to LinkedIn to attract recruiters and employers.
#1 Leadership Skills to Put on LinkedIn: Your ability to coach others
In all different stages of a child’s life, but specifically, when it comes to teenage and adult children, there is coaching. Coaching is the use of inquiry to bring about self-discovery that will hopefully bring about a change in a person’s behavior. Parents do this a lot, especially with teenagers, questioning their behavior and decision-making processes throughout. While this happens in parenting, it is also seen in good leaders, who also understand the importance of coaching. Even if they are not doing this intentionally, great leaders do this sometimes subconsciously/unconsciously with their team members.
#2 Leadership Skills to Put on LinkedIn: Your ability to clearly communicate
“This is the ability to clearly articulate your thoughts, your expectations, and your emotions and to do so in a way that is contextually appropriate. By context, I don’t mean geographics, but demographics that consider a person’s personality, make-up, and type. If a parent has multiple children, they know that they have to communicate in different ways, according to the individual child. Communication has to be tapered according to demographics,” says Dr. Daniels. Leaders recognize the very same thing about communicating and communicating contextually with both their clients and their employees.
Related: How to Explain a Career Gap on a Resume of a Stay-at-Home Mom
#3 Leadership Skills to Put on LinkedIn: Your ability to course-correct
This is when a child does something that is not in the best interest of themselves or others, and that behavior needs to be identified and corrected. In the leadership space, the very same thing is true. There will be times when a certain employee’s behavior is not good for themselves, the team, or the company, and that behavior needs to be corrected.
#4 Leadership Skills to Put on LinkedIn: Your ability to comfort
No matter how well-intended people are, occasionally they will miss the mark. They are going to recognize that they have missed the mark and will need to be encouraged and comforted as a result. Children do this often and require their parents’ reassurance and comfort.
The same applies in the leadership space and it is equally important there. You don’t want a person in the business space to have failures that are emotionally fatal to them, and those failures start creating limiting beliefs and those limiting beliefs limit a person’s productivity. This has a negative impact on their ability to produce and optimize. Comforting is important in the business space.
Related: Why do working moms matter?
#5 Leadership Skills to Put on LinkedIn: Your ability to challenge others
“Growing up, my father based on which child he was dealing with, in regards to grades and/or school and/or personality, allowed me to determine what challenge looked like to him. So the same standard can not be applied across the board for everybody because everybody does not have the same interests or capacity. Parents recognize this and challenge their children to do their best, in varying degrees and ways,” Dr. Daniels explains. Great leaders do the very same thing, recognizing the nuances in their team.
Related: Why should employers care about working moms?
