Peanut Butter and Jelly Communications

Anyone who has a teenage child, or was one, knows how fast a relationship can deteriorate into an ugly battle. Somebody says something disrespectful, or does something that gets taken the wrong way, and all hell breaks loose. And then it’s a struggle to mend fences, make amends, get things back to normal.

It’s a good metaphor for employee communications, especially during difficult times. Big organizations can be stupid beasts, not unlike inattentive parents who make big assumptions about what motivates their people, and who try to exercise ham-fisted control over them, only to have them rebel. And employees, like teenagers struggling to find their own identity, love to demonize authority figures, rejecting their leadership to the point where the relationship becomes barely tolerable, if not totally poisonous.

Of course, I’m not the first to draw this comparison. In their insightful book, Peanut Butter and Jelly Management, Chris and Reina Komisarjevsky draw all kinds of lessons from parenting and apply them to corporate leadership. “When we think about the home and about the workplace, we see parallels,” they write. “To us, the link is as natural as peanut butter and jelly. We came to that view after watching what went on with our own children at home and then, over time, noticing similarities at work.”

Here are a few bits of simple but sound parenting wisdom directed at corporate leaders, which apply equally well to employee communicators:

• Focus your energy on the things that are really important.

• Create a fabric of strong values – and live them yourself every day.

• Be attentive – watch, listen, observe, think about what is going on – remembering always that you and everyone around you are only human.

“Parenting is one of the toughest jobs on earth. It just may be the toughest job,” the authors proclaim. As a parent I agree. But corporate leadership is even tougher in some ways. Teenagers seldom run away, but employees faced with bad leadership are very quick to leave forever to join a less dysfunctional employer.

As parents and/or communicators, our job is to keep the conversations civil, the judgments tolerant and the respect for people high. If an organization, like a family, can survive a difficult time together, it will come out stronger, happier, and ready to take on the world.

What things have you learned about family life that apply to the corporate universe?