Becoming a parent is the purest form of leadership. Yet, the best leaders can struggle with this relationship the most. This is the voice of regret from a marketing executive who spent the first 14 years of his daughter’s life tethered to his desk. Leadership is hard to execute from a distance. To win the love, trust and friendship of your children sometimes you have to get in the trenches and play.

Grant Feller is a marketing executive and journalist for The Telegraph and Huffington Post. In this article he expertly sums up the male condition:

“As men, we like to think we’re expert at most things, but the one talent we all share is an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion. The Adonis in the mirror, the double-handed backhand that not even Djokovic could have returned, the bookshelf we built that isn’t at all wonky. And, of course, how wonderful we think we are as dads.”
Feller describes his early experiences with fatherhood as “I was hardly ever there” until four years ago when he was made redundant, started a business from home and became a proper dad.

With this massive change, he had the opportunity to reflect on the five regrets that he had as a disappointing dad who worked too much.

1) NOT BEING THERE

Feller confesses about not standing up to a bully of a boss when forced to miss his daughters solo performance and the disappointment in his sons face when he missed the time he scored a goal. What Feller and his children missed was the hormone serotonin.

When a child receives award or recognition in front of their parents it is serotonin that causes the feelings of pride, status, and confidence. The parent in the audience also gets a hit of serotonin and experiences the same feelings of pride. This is what serotonin is trying to do — create the bond between child and parent.

2) SPENDING MY WEEKEND WORKING

Smart phones have made this a constant battle. Feller apologizes for reading work emails and responding to messages when he should have been getting his hand dirty in cookie dough, not on his phone.

David Heine, the very first Executive Athlete, shares “I’m half good but not great. I’m a big believer, when I get home I’m not at home to do work. If I’ve got to do something big that I have to do work on the weekend, I’m going to the office. I’ll try and avoid that if I can. But these things (smartphone) are a bloody nightmare.”

3) PUTTING THE FEAR OF GOD INTO YOU

When executives have put under pressure their tactical knowledge and direct language will sharpen to ensure they get the right result. The biggest mistake the executive can make is to bring that level of expectation and communication into their family relationships.

Feller confesses that his brutal post-school report assessments may have been overreactions and he would rather he instilled confidence, a smile on your face and an ability to navigate the world without any trouble.

4) FORCING YOU TO INHERIT MY TASTES

Executives are used to getting their own way. When you are sitting on the top of an org chart you have the power to overrule just about any decision that is made by the team. Once the decision is made the team has two options — accept the decision or find another job.

Families don’t work like that. It’s all on the line and if you get it wrong you run the risk of being alone. You run the risk of actually genuinely failing at leadership. The skill that you are based your career on.

5) BRINGING MY WORK MOOD HOME

Mark Adams, COO of Versent, counts this as the biggest work challenge for the executive. “It is basically the demands. It’s the time with family. Balancing that out with the work demands and the biggest challenge actually is going home and emptying my head of everything that’s happening at work and actually being at home. That’s my biggest personal challenge.”

Feller apologizes for not reading his daughter a night-time story instead of stewing in his post-work hangover. He shares “I could have been nice because you had nothing to do with the hideous day I’d just had.”

The damage that the destruction of at home relationships causes can be immense. It cuts deeper than any work-related stress. I have seen the most powerful of men totally derailed when their 13-year-old son or daughter put distance between them.

How you navigate the way your work and home life interconnect will be deeply personal. I’m not here to tell you how to parent your children.

What I can tell you is that so often the stress that dogs the success can quickly sour relationships with family and friends. Your loved ones require more than just your presence. They need sincere communication. They need you to engage with them, to remember those important shared moments and to be there to create new ones.

A sergeant is a second-lowest grade in the chain or command. Whilst deployed in Iraq they are asked each day to risk their life for their country and the mission set by a Four Star General. The General is rarely on the ground and when orders come down the chain of command it would be easy for them to be dismissed with — they don’t know. But when faced with a challenge to his strategy his reaction was nothing but first class.

Leadership is hard to establish when you are not there. I have spoken before about the difficulty of a father to develop a relationship with his daughter whilst he was tethered to his desk. What are missing are the simple exchanges between a sergeant and general or a father and child that release oxytocin.

The cost of leadership is self-interest. The strength of the bond between a leader and their tribe is developed by the little hits of oxytocin that are experienced by both individuals every time the leader gives their time and expects nothing in return.

You can’t buy it through a gift. We put a premium on people who give their time and energy, as time is something that we all have even amounts of and can never get back.

Retired four-star General Stanley A McChrystal understood this while leading the US deployment of troops in Iraq. General McChrystal was once described by Secretary of Defence Robert Gates as “one of America’s greatest warriors”.

Not too many sergeants write emails to Four-Star Generals. Even fewer write emails telling them “I don’t think you understand this war”.

General McChrystal took notice of the potential breakdown in the relationship between the top tiers of command and the sergeant on the ground. The very next day he got in a helicopter and joined the sergeant on patrol.

The sergeant was right, what they encountered was a challenge that they have never experienced before. The sergeant was leading his patrol in the Iraqi wine region. There is very little wood in Iraq, so vines are grown over six-foot high mud walls creating square miles of a rat like a maze.

On each patrol, they faced incredible danger because you were stuck going inside these ridges and the Taliban could put mines and also just turn a corner at the end and there is nowhere to go.

General McChrystal spent the entire day on a combat mission with them. At the end of the day they sat and they talked about the higher-level objectives of the war. McChrystal shared his perspective and the sergeant and his patrol explained it from their perspective, allowing McChrystal to gain a better understanding of what they encounter each day.

The following day McChrystal went back to his command post and about 3 weeks later he received an email from the same sergeant. The sergeant shared that 5 members of the team that General McChrystal had gone on patrol with had been killed in the vineyards.

The next day McChrystal took the same helicopter and went right back down again to go on patrol with that team.

“I wasn’t going to make their combat patrol easier. I wasn’t going to add to the combat mission effectiveness, but I think it was important for them to know that I cared enough. It is important periodically to share the hardships and sometimes the danger because you both need to display the empathy, but you also need to understand, you need to walk a mile in their shoes to understand what it’s like. You can’t make it easier for them, but you can certainly convince them that what they are doing matters and that you are willing to take the time to do that with them.”