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How Working Parents Can Regain Control over Their Lives

by Stewart D. Friedman and Alyssa F. Westring

Quick Takes

Understanding and then communicating your core values is a fundamental aspect of becoming an effective leader. Leaders who are aware of their values, convey them clearly, and act in alignment with them are engaged, generate high performance, and inspire commitment.¹ It pays to value values.

Working parents, who face a significant leadership challenge in raising children, can benefit from value-driven leadership. Often overwhelmed by the struggle to make smart decisions about when, where, and how to invest our attention, not many of us working parents stop and reflect on our values. Instead, we tend to internalize the values of our society and people around us, usually unconsciously. Social media amplify the impact of social comparisons, making it harder to stay centered, to know ourselves. When we lack a clear set of values, or fail to communicate them, we’re rudderless and have no guiding compass.

When we identify and express our values, we can more readily use what we truly care about as the basis for making decisions, large and small. In our research, we’ve found that people who bring a well-articulated set of core values to all parts of life experience less stress, greater harmony, and better performance at home, in their communities, and for themselves personally.

To spur your thinking as you consider your own values—those you aspire to embody in your career, as a parent, and in the rest of your life—here are a few examples listed by working parents in our research on the application of leadership principles to the art of parenting:

Achievement. A sense of accomplishment or mastery, striving to be the best.

Adventure. New and challenging opportunities, excitement, risk.

Collaboration. Close, cooperative working relationships, being part of a team.

Courage. A willingness to stand up for your beliefs and do the difficult thing—despite any fears.

Generosity. Being known by others as one who gives.

Humor. The ability to laugh at yourself and at life.

Love. That indescribable feeling when your kids run up to give you a hug after work.

Responsibility. Doing what you say you will do.

Spirituality. Believing there is something greater than human beings.

As you contemplate, remember that values are relatively stable over time and rather broad, not tied to specific people, places, and times.² They are usually influenced by significant events in your life history.

If you’ve never done so, start by thinking about what matters most to you and why. Try to come up with about five values and write them down. Don’t limit yourself to the examples we listed. If you’re stuck, do an online search for a list of values and pick those that most accurately represent you, and then think about why, with reference to the road you’ve traveled so far. Of course, you can always revise, so allow yourself to be as candid as possible.

The next step is communicating those values to the people who matter most to you. Start with your partner(s) in parenting—those with whom you’re raising children together. This could be a spouse, but it could also be an ex-spouse, a close relative, a life partner, or a dear friend. It’s useful to ask them to do this exercise on their own and to then talk over your distinctive and your common values. Just as leaders in groups and organizations need to establish shared values, parenting partners, too, must identify the values that inform their lives.

Take Emma and Marcos Lopez, from Houston, Texas, who participated in our Parents Who Lead workshop. Emma is a management consultant and Marcos, a former captain in the army, is an investment manager. They have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. They both listed “career success” as a core value.

But this confused them because they sensed that they held quite different attitudes about their work. Looking more deeply, it turned out that career success meant something different to each of them. Emma remembered a period during her adolescence when her family struggled to make ends meet after her father was laid off. She realized that the intense stress her family experienced then played a significant role in forming who she became. That’s why, for Emma, career success primarily means having sufficient funds stashed away and enough transferable job skills so she does not have to worry about economic security.

For Marcos, a veteran who embraced the clear hierarchy in the military ranking system, career success meant achieving promotions and seniority. Certainly Marcos, like Emma, cares about economic security, but he does not equate it with success. Similarly, Emma cares about recognition, but it is not paramount when she thinks of what success means.

Articulating these distinctions helped them better under stand the way they each approach their careers. And when it came to thinking about what they wanted for their future, they were able to envision how they could support each other more carefully and compassionately, not only in their respective careers but also in their roles as mother and father to their kids.

Most people assume their partners know each other’s values. Yet even people who enjoy close long-term relationships are often surprised when they reveal their core values to each other. Indeed, research has shown that we’re not nearly as accurate as we think when it comes to judging the values, experiences, and goals of those closest to us.³ You might be surprised by what you find when you share your deepest-held values.

For Emma and Marcos Lopez, discussing their values shed new light on one another, despite the fact that they’ve known each other for 12 years. Marcos would often get frustrated by Emma’s always-on, 24/7 availability for her consulting work. He’d frequently find her lit by the glow of her laptop in bed after he assumed that she was turning in for the night. It was only after learning more about this aspect of Emma’s family history and the traces it left that both he and Emma came to understand that her work ethic was driven, at least in part, by worries about losing her economic security and a fear that she wouldn’t get placed on future consulting projects if she didn’t perform at a high level on the current one.

For Emma and Marcos, clarifying and communicating their values was an essential first step in becoming values-driven leaders in all parts of their lives. From there, they were able to create a vision for the future that incorporated both of their definitions of career success and other shared and unique values they identified. They were able to strengthen their bonds with the people who matter most to them by communicating these values, and to experiment with a few innovations in how they enact their values in their daily lives.

Mining the ore from the mountain of your experience to identify and then describe your core values to your partners in parenting, and being genuinely curious about what they mean, is a crucial part of becoming a parent who leads. Your values are the basis for making mindful choices in both the everyday and the momentous decisions we face. And the foundation on which your children stand is strengthened when you take to heart the leadership challenge of striving to act in a way that’s in accord with what you care about most.

Adapted from “How Working Parents Can Regain Control Over Their Lives,” on hbr.org, March 5, 2020 (product #H05GJ6).