As a parent you watch your children go through various milestones in their lives. I had the honor of watching my eldest daughter graduate from Villanova recently, and no matter how you prepare for it, you end up with a wave of emotions. What is visible is an incredibly happy person walking across the stage, but what is not visible is the effort it took them to get there.  

I joke about how much money I will save, but there is something less tangible that happens with each step my children take. It parallels employees that have worked for me. I leveraged often lessons as a manager to parent, as well as parenting to manage. As managers the closest you get to a milestone like this is a promotion, but it is not the same. But there are clear smaller steps and lessons you hope remain with them. As I come back to continuously edit this post, I may make this into a mini-series like the one on team building. 

The first week of each year I layout the expectations I have of them (from my team buidling blog series). One of those is to seek help when needed.  This is also something I stress on my kids. One of the hardest things to do is not to help them but allow them to step out and ask for help from teachers, other students, even a tutor. Help is only useful if done the right way. If a parent authors the essay for a child, the child may get a good grade, but the long term of teaching is lost. If every time someone comes to you, and in frustration you just do it yourself, the person will learn not to do work, that you will do it for them. There is this notion of the right way. 

In the movie Finding Forrester there is a scene where Forrestor has the teen Jamal start typing the first sentence or two of one of his old articles and says the rhythm of typing will often get you started. I have not done this to write but use this technique often. I will ask open ended questions to get my kids to produce an answer to get them started. When developers are stuck with a production issue, I give them hints to look at, often a stackoverflow section to peruse to help them get started. The key is to stir the mind into thinking and learning the process.  

I learned this technique by accident. In High School, a friend of mine struggled in Physics. You need to take yourself back to a time when Khan Academy did not exist, the world wide web did not exist, so help was more a phone call to someone you knew. I would get a call, and my friend would say ‘Could you help me?’ My first response was often ‘Read me the problem you are working on.’ While he was reading it, I would stop at certain points asking him to break down what he just read, and what formula or concept that part had. To me it was a stalling technique, as by now I knew I was going to get the call nightly and stopped bringing my book home knowing my friend would read me the problems and I could just do the homework as he read it to me. The book was heavy. 

As I questioned him and he started to answer, he was able to learn what he was doing. I could have just given him the answers, but my friend did not want that. He was more interested in learning. This was the first time I was ever tutoring someone, and it is an insight that I still leverage today. It is the classic story of giving someone a fish versus teaching them to fish. As a parent or a manager, the goal should always be teaching them to fish when possible. There are situations where doing something is needed, and wisdom teaches you when.  

Back to my daughter as one of her last projects was in a circuits class. This is not in her sweet spot, and the teacher happens to be someone I know. The final project was to create a service in azure to receive data from a pulse oximeter they built in the class already. I could have easily leveraged my account and put something up in seconds. Instead, I gave her a link to a good tutorial including a video on how to do it and let her do it herself. She will never need this again in her life, but the reinforcing that when it is something I believe she can do, she can ask for help, and the help I will give is guidance not doing it for her is one lesson I hope she carries throughout her life. 

There is the other side to what to do when someone asks for help, but that can be saved for another time.  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback; but it is moderated. 

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images were taken by me.