A conversation with leader Poul Weihrauch about sustainability and profitability.
I spend most days in rooms where four generations argue about the same spreadsheet.
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Even in an age when it is rather common to invite people, including leaders, to “bring their whole self to work”, what is actually rewarded at work is being our best self, in the sense of trying to be at the best of our behaviors, and fulfill as much of our potential as we can, as often as possible.
Importantly, many if not most people still compartmentalize their personal self as something separate from their work persona or professional self, even if both can co-exist as salient, albeit different, dimensions of their self-concept. Indeed, this aligns with the science of self-complexity, which basically shows that we “inhabit multiple selves”, in the sense that our identity is composed of different roles, habits, and adaptations which are activated as the situation demands, in response of each pertinent or particular environmental requirements.
So for instance, even if you adore your boss, it would be unwise to mistake them for your spouse: just because they give you feedback doesn’t mean they want to hear about your weekend argument over who forgot to buy toilet paper, nor should you expect them to give you a gold star for behaving like a functioning adult for eight consecutive hours. Likewise, no matter how warm, empathetic, or inclusive your team may be, your colleagues are unlikely to respond well if you treat a project review like bedtime routine: for example, nobody wants to be tucked in after a PowerPoint or be asked whether they brushed their teeth before updating the CRM.
The science of transilience
And yet, there are actually some pretty clear benefits in applying certain skills or dispositions from one of your identity dimensions to others, and that includes the surprising potential for transferring parent skills to both management and leadership skills. In fact, there is a powerful but largely unknown science of transilience, the process of extrapolating aspects of one of your roles or self-concept dimensions to others.
Recent empirical research validates this intuition with hard data. A study found that leaders who are supportive parents produce measurably better outcomes in their teams: higher employee performance, more voice behavior (employees voluntarily sharing ideas), and greater willingness to cooperate. The mechanism? Experiences of care and emotional support inherently developed in parenting roles transfer directly to leadership effectiveness.
Parenting skills, translated
Here are five ways in which parenting skills may come in handy to boost your leadership effectiveness:
1. Patience as a performance multiplier: Parenting teaches you very quickly that progress rarely unfolds on your preferred timeline. Toddlers don’t walk when you want them to, teenagers don’t reply to messages when you need them to, and nobody in between ever hurries because you said “please.” Good leaders internalize the same logic. Teams learn at different speeds, projects require repetition, and people need space to make mistakes before they improve. In both domains, impatience is the illusion that reality will adjust to your mood; patience is the skill of adjusting your expectations to reality.
Developmental psychology introduces the concept of “scaffolding”: building temporary support structures that help someone achieve just beyond their current level[1]. Good parents instinctively identify their child’s “zone of proximal development” and provide calibrated support. Transformational leaders do the same: they identify where each person is ready to grow, provide coaching without doing the work for them, and gradually step back as competence develops. This requires the same calibrated attunement that parenting demands.
2. Clear boundaries create psychological safety: Parents know that children thrive with consistent expectations and predictable guardrails; ambiguity breeds anxiety and chaos. The same is true at work. Teams feel safer when the rules of engagement are clear, when “no” really means no, and when leaders enforce boundaries reliably rather than arbitrarily. A boundary at home might be a bedtime; a boundary at work might be a deadline. In both settings, structure reduces stress, and consistency builds trust.
Our own research in attachment theory predicts that both parents and transformational leaders fulfill two critical functions: they provide a “secure base” from which people can explore confidently, and a “safe haven” to return to when difficulties arise. This isn’t about creating dependency. Studies show that when people feel psychologically secure – knowing support is available if needed – they actually become more autonomous, creative, and willing to take risks. The leader’s availability enables independence, not dependence.
3. Listening beats lecturing: Every parent has learned the hard way that lecturing a child rarely produces enlightenment; it mostly produces eye rolls, resistance, or creative reinterpretations of your instructions. Leadership isn’t much different. People follow more readily when they feel heard, understood, and included in the problem-solving process. Just as a good parent listens to what a child is trying to say, a good leader listens to the concerns behind employees’ objections – because you can’t influence what you haven’t first understood.
4. Modeling behavior is more powerful than mandating it: Children copy what you do, not what you say; telling them to “share nicely” while you shout at traffic sends a very different message. Adults are not immune to this principle. Teams take behavioral cues from leaders: if you stay curious under pressure, they will too; if you treat others with dignity, so will they; if you panic, micromanage, or blame, the contagion spreads instantly. Parenting teaches you that you are always on stage; leadership simply gives you a bigger audience.
5. Encouragement fuels growth more than criticism: Parents quickly discover that reinforcing effort — not just outcomes — keeps children motivated and resilient. The same dynamic applies to adults: people double down on behaviors that are noticed and valued. A leader who acknowledges small wins, progress, and perseverance cultivates a culture where people want to stretch themselves. Think of encouragement as the organizational equivalent of the proud “look what you built!” moment with a child – a small gesture that accelerates confidence, capability, and engagement.
The bad parenting connection
Perhaps more obviously, there are some clear parallels between bad leadership and bad parenting. Here are some rather striking similarities:
1. The “Because I said so” manager: Just as authoritarian parents shut down questions with rigid commands, authoritarian leaders mistake obedience for alignment. They confuse compliance with commitment and then wonder why nobody shows initiative.
2. The inconsistent rule-setter: Parents who punish a behavior one day and ignore it the next produce anxious, confused children. Leaders who do the same create cultures where people waste more energy interpreting the boss’s mood than doing their actual job.
3. The distracted, phone-addicted caregiver: A parent who nods absentmindedly while scrolling sends a clear message: “I’m here, but not really.” Leaders who multitask through meetings, check emails while someone speaks, or “listen” with one AirPod in convey the same emotional absenteeism.
4. The praise-inflation expert: Some parents shower children with empty praise to avoid conflict; the workplace equivalent is the leader who never gives honest feedback, inflating performance reviews until they become meaningless. In both scenarios, reality eventually delivers the correction the adult avoided giving.
5. The helicopter micromanager: Just as hovering parents undermine a child’s autonomy and problem-solving skills, micromanaging leaders suffocate initiative. Both end up producing dependency, resentment, and a deep fear of making mistakes, which ironically reinforces the very behavior they complain about.
A rich laboratory
In the end, parenting offers an unusually rich laboratory for understanding human behavior, motivation, and development, precisely the same ingredients that make leadership effective. What parents learn through necessity, leaders can apply with intention: patience, boundaries, attentive listening, behavioral modeling, and encouragement are not “soft skills” but core mechanisms for eliciting growth in others. And the darker sides of parenting (inconsistency, distraction, micromanagement, avoidance) map almost perfectly onto the classic derailers of bad leadership. The parallels aren’t coincidental; they reflect universal principles of how humans respond to authority, structure, and care.
Multiple streams of research now converge on this point. Studies demonstrate that parenting and transformational leadership share core psychological processes: both develop through creating secure bases for exploration, both transfer caregiving orientations across domains, and both produce similar developmental outcomes in their “followers”, whether children or employees. The science is clear: this isn’t metaphor, it’s measured mechanism.
This is why transilience matters: the ability to draw on one dimension of the self to enrich another is a feature, not a flaw, of our complex identities. Rather than pretending our roles exist in sealed compartments, we are better off asking what each role teaches us about being more effective, more humane, and more self-aware in the others. Parenting doesn’t make you a leader, but it can make you a better one — if you’re willing to notice the patterns, learn from the mistakes, and apply the lessons where they matter most: not just at home, and not just at work, but across the full constellation of selves that make you who you are.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the next time you interview for a leadership role you should brag about being a parent, or showcase the number of children you have as evidence of managerial brilliance. Most people are still unaware of transilience and the value of transferring skills from one identity domain to another, so the connection will likely be lost on them. Still, the real advantage lies not in announcing your parental status but in internalizing the lessons it quietly teaches: managing emotions under pressure, nurturing growth, setting boundaries, and modeling the behavior you hope to inspire. These are not résumé lines; they are capabilities that, when consciously activated, enhance your effectiveness as a leader far more than any abstract leadership competency model ever could.
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The hype train on corporate purpose keeps steaming down the tracks. I have written about it before and tried to be positive. But I feel the need to be more constructively critical. If everyone has been convinced that they need to have a corporate purpose, let’s at least have it be a useful one. I try to contribute to that goal in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The hype train
The articles and books on corporate purpose just keep coming. For example, in the past month alone, Harvard Business Review published four pieces on purpose (one, two, three, four). And the books keep coming, whether David Gelles’ Dirtbag Billionaire, Ranjay Gulati’s Deep Purpose, or the somewhat earlier Corporate Purpose: Why It Matters More Than Strategy by Shankar Basu.
There is lots of sensible stuff in the articles and books. However, there is a theme across them that is most explicit in Corporate Purpose: Why It Matters More Than Strategy. It reminds me of the logical problem in my least favorite business book ever—Execution, which argues that execution is more important than strategy and then proceeds to include strategy as a subcomponent of its definition of execution. In this (il-)logical construction, if there is anything useful at all about execution outside of strategy, it will be more important than strategy by tautology.
In similar fashion, if you think corporate purpose—which is clearly one of your strategic choices—matters more than strategy, you have no idea what strategy is.
The general view being put forward in the purpose arena is that having a societally lofty corporate purpose is the most important thing a company can do—and largely guarantees success or at least is strongly correlated with success.
I don’t buy it. I don’t see it as a helpful view.
Integration is the key
The same thing worries me about purpose as worries me generally about the first box of the Strategy Choice Cascade—Winning Aspiration. Visually, it is the first box. And management teams and boards get excited about diving into it first. They often spend massive amounts of time on determining their Winning Aspiration and in due course nail it down and etch it in stone.
But their chosen Winning Aspiration not infrequently lacks integration with the other four questions. That is how you end up with insane aspirations like WeWork’s infamous “to elevate human consciousness.” I don’t know what that has to do with leasing office space, even if it is funky space! A Winning Aspiration of that sort is worse than nothing at all.
And that leads to my concern about the corporate purpose hype train. Purpose is just another name for that first box. You can call it vision, mission, purpose or aspiration. It doesn’t really matter to me—though I think having one of those four is better than having multiple ones (which I have argued before). And because of the hype, I fear that the outcomes will be unconnected and unrealistic because companies have been convinced that if they have some lofty save-the-world purpose, they will succeed. So, make it bigger and better!
No. The absolute key is integration. The five choices on the Strategy Choice Cascade need to fit with and reinforce each other. The only way that happens is if each of the five choices is flexible—and customizes to the others. If the five choices independently are inflexibly locked and loaded on, you will have a bad strategy. That means if you start by setting and locking on a lofty purpose, it is unlikely that you will be able to realize that purpose because you won’t be able to make four other choices—Where-to-Play (WTP), How-to-Win (HTW), Must-Have Capabilities (MHC), and Enabling Management Systems (EMS)—that bring the purpose to life. Chances are, your purpose, regardless of how lofty, will end up looking naïve and unrealistic, like WeWork’s.
Instead, you need to toggle back and forth between the five choices to build the fit and reinforcement until such time as you have a purpose on which you can reasonably expect to deliver. If you care about having a lofty purpose and you do the hard thinking work, you should be able to achieve a nicely integrated Strategy Choice Cascade—with a purpose about which you can be proud.
Sustainability is the goal
A critical aspect of any great strategy is sustainability. By this I don’t mean the narrow goal of environmental sustainability. I mean a strategy that is built to last. We like and admire strategies like those of P&G or Lego or Apple because they are successful across generations. That doesn’t mean they are immune to crises—they are demonstrably not—but that they have the strength to get through the crises and renew themselves—like Apple in 1997 and Lego in 2005.
I believe that the only strategies that are sustainable are strategies that are good for all the parties involved. If your strategy requires you to abuse your employees, rip off your customers, hurt the communities in which you operate, and/or skirt society’s laws and regulations—it won’t last. It may be profitable for a time, but in due course, one or more of these constituencies will successfully undermine it.
For sustainability, you need employees who thrive—which I wrote about earlier in this series with Zeynep Ton. You need customers to truly benefit from your existence. You need communities that are delighted to have you as part of them. And you need to make society a better place—which I also wrote about earlier in this series. Any company has the ability, as I termed it in that piece and in a longer Harvard Business Review article earlier, to improve the civil foundation of society through innovation designed to make the world a better place.
If you do these things, it is much less likely that anyone will fight you or undermine you. You will get the benefit of the doubt. Competitors will be inclined to go elsewhere and/or compete differently. And the ecosystem around you will help you evolve positively because the players in it have the desire to see you prosper.
If a corporate purpose integrates seamlessly with the other Strategy Choice Cascade choices, resulting in a high level of fit and reinforcement and it helps the company pursue a sustainable strategy, it is a strong positive feature. And I support that kind of corporate purpose as an integral part of strategy (which I view as fitting into the Winning Aspiration box of the Strategy Choice Cascade).
E.l.f. Beauty example
Wildly successful e.l.f. Beauty provides a great example of a constructive and strategic corporate purpose, which is: To create a different kind of beauty company by building brands that disrupt norms, shape culture, and connect communities through positivity, inclusivity, and accessibility. That Purpose/Winning Aspiration choice is perfectly integrated with its other strategy choices.
Those choices include a WTP focused on millennials and Gen Z, who find the e.l.f purpose highly appealing. It includes a HTW focused on providing premium quality cosmetics and skincare products at extremely affordable prices—to achieve the accessibility purpose. The MHC include low-cost sourcing, and both understanding and supporting the community of e.l.f. enthusiasts. The EMS include management approaches that enable “moving at e.l.f. speed,” in keeping with the needs and demands of the customer community the company serves.
The strategy, including the purpose, shows the hallmarks of sustainability. Employees love working there and being part of the diverse, inclusive community inside the company. Their retail partners love e.l.f.’s focus on their productivity, not just e.l.f.’s own. The customer community loves them, including e.l.f.’s commitment to clean, vegan, and cruelty-free products, and its willingness “to challenge industry norms and shape a more inclusive and positive culture in the beauty world.” Competitors mainly choose to compete elsewhere or in different ways rather than challenge e.l.f. head on.
Sustainability can only ever be proven over the fullness of time. But thus far things are looking positive for this integrated, sustainable approach to strategy and purpose.
Practitioner insights
A corporate purpose won’t help the world just because it is lofty. Purposes would all be loftier than they are today if it was easy. It isn’t. Like all strategy choices, the choice of Purpose (or Winning Aspiration, whichever term you prefer) entails making hard and creative choices.
When making your purpose choice, aim for sustainability through integration. Never consider your purpose choice independently of the other four key choices. Consider multiple draft purpose possibilities and build Strategy Choice Cascades for each of them. Only then choose the purpose and remaining cascade choices that give you the best shot at the holy grail—a sustainable strategy.
If you do it that way, I will applaud your purpose. I won’t fear that you have simply boarded the corporate purpose hype train!
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