Why bringing your work (culture) home can enhance your family framework
It’s the age-old goal in life: work-life balance, and how to accomplish it. Most lament the idea of bringing work home with you but what if bringing some of your work culture home with you could give your family life a positive boost?
As Founder and CEO of CornerStone Dynamics (CSD), I know companies do a great job at implementing a framework within their own walls to ensure that strategies and goals are met, leading to the organization’s success—something that can also be very helpful for families and home life: bringing greater connectivity to the family unit.
Implementing a strong family framework allows for everyone to be on the same page, connected with each other and with the overall expectations of each member of the family unit. Applying business skills at home doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, but instead, taking concepts that work in business and apply them to your home life—for a happier and more productive outcome.
Establish your core values…family values that is
At the office, vision and mission statements along with core values are commonplace, giving employees an understanding of how to behave and what is important to the company. This is equally important in the family ‘organization’. Families, especially with young children can use these values to shape behaviour and expectation—creating values together produces a sense of ownership, ensuring a high level of success for the family following them.
Know when to be a Manager and when to be a Consultant
In the business world, both managers and consultants bring value to ensuring an organization is successful. Managers guide their teams and are responsible for ensuring the organization’s needs/goals are met while a consultant will provide their expert advice and guide organizations with ideas to obtain their needs and goals. Bring this mindset into the home and understand when you need to direct and ensure things get done versus when you need to just provide advice and ideas.
Ensure everyone has a clear job title and description
Corporations need to be clear on job positions, titles, responsibilities and expectations; they need to know that all needs are being met by the appropriate person and that everyone knows exactly what to do. At home, we tend to forget this concept of clarity and the organic roles and responsibilities within the home become lop sided. Sitting down with your family and assigning each member to specific tasks and/or activities as well as ensuring ensure everyone follows them will guarantee a smoother home life.
Establish a training department
The best tool to being successful in business is ensuring employees are properly trained and up to date for the task at hand. As unorthodox as it sounds, establishing a training department mentality at home will actually help to support family values, roles and responsibilities. For example, asking your child—who has never cleaned before—to clean their room is setting them up for frustration and failure. By showing them the ropes on how to do it will open the road to a more pleasant environment and positive home culture.
Establish regular meetings
This is a double edged sword in the business world. Meetings are necessary to help to ensure everyone is connected but sometimes there are just too many, especially when you have deadlines to meet. This isn’t much different at home, where family connectivity can be lost when everyone is busy with extracurricular activities or their own personal agendas. Using “together time”, like dinner, can also be a great time for a family meeting, to review your values and expectations for the week and make sure you are all connected.
