Six Signs of a Parent-Child Dynamic at the Office

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Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section | 2

Six Signs of a Parent-Child Dynamic at the Office

By Jennifer Jordan | MIT Sloan Management Review | June 17, 2024

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The people at the top felt like the people in the layers below just didn’t take the needed initiative. As a result, the managers felt an obligation and responsibility to tell the direct reports what to do and how to do it. The direct reports, on the other hand, used to complain that the top managers didn’t trust them enough and acted paternalistic. As a result, the direct reports feared that if they took the initiative and something didn’t work as planned, they’d be punished.

That’s a parent-child dynamic in all its dysfunctional glory at the workplace. Is your organization falling into this damaging trap? How to spot the trouble signs and move the culture toward an adult-adult dynamic. Six Key Indicators of Parent-Child Dynamics are: 

1. An unwillingness to be vulnerable at the top. Like actual parents, leaders often fear showing their weaknesses. Revealing fears and insecurities to children is something that parents “just don’t do.” In this situation, leaders rarely disclose their own failures and hard-won lessons, and a culture develops where mistakes are swept under the rug.
2. A lack of trust from the top down. Its about competence-based trust – the upper echelons see the lower echelons as lacking competence and needing to be told what to do and how to do it. This attitude can not only be paternalistic but also can descend into the realm of insulting.
3. An unwillingness to appropriately empower individuals. If people in the levels below aren’t seen as competent, then they’re also not seen as ready to have shared power. So power stays at the top, and those people below don’t get the appropriate and necessary chances for development.
4. An unwillingness to try something new, for fear of disappointing leaders or incurring punishment. Parent-child dynamics can manifest in people at the lower levels as the tendency to rarely innovate or push boundaries. 
5.  The need to cover up mistakes. When management takes on a parental role — especially a disciplinarian-parent role — the result is often that people feel little psychological safety to share mistakes, both standard and exceptional.
6. An unwillingness to pull the plug.  Leaders pile initiative on top of initiative, without a willingness to let any one of them go or to identify or communicate strategic priorities. This aversion to prioritization often comes from a fear of disappointing anyone. 

Three ways to move into a healthier way of interacting could be: examine gaps in trust — in both directions, leaders must habitually ask more questions of team members, and remember to listen to the answers.  At a cultural level, two things must be true for the transition from a parent-child dynamic to an adult-adult dynamic to be successful. First, and most obviously, there must be an awareness of the current dynamic. Second, there needs to be a sincere dissatisfaction with the current culture. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. The people at the top felt like the people in the layers below just didn’t take the needed initiative. The direct reports, on the other hand, used to complain that the top managers didn’t trust them enough and acted paternalistic. That’s a parent-child dynamic in all its dysfunctional glory at the workplace.
2. Six key indicators of parent-child dynamics are: an unwillingness to be vulnerable at the top; A lack of trust from the top down, an unwillingness to appropriately empower individuals; an unwillingness to try something new, for fear of disappointing leaders or incurring punishment; the need to cover up mistakes, and an unwillingness to pull the plug.
3. Three ways to move into a healthier way of interacting could be: examine gaps in trust — in both directions, leaders must habitually ask more questions of team members, and remember to listen to the answers.

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Topics:  Culture, Organizational Behavior, Communication