Father’s Day just went by. We must have seen posts, received and sent messages and celebrated in our own little ways.
Fathers or father figures often are seen as providers and rarely as nurturers. It is often considered the mother’s ‘job’ to nurture and care, while the father is sadly placed outside of that invisible circle. But the truth is fathers also provide nurturing and care but in different ways. In fact, the paternal way of showing care can be transferred into many a lesson about leadership, calculated risk-taking and implementation of ideas.
Keeping Calm, to Keep the Spirits Up:
Often times, it is said that men struggle with expressing their emotions. There might be some truth to this: it is important to display your vulnerable side and being in touch with your feelings is the first step in managing them. However, it is also important to at times keep up the self-control and display calm. Not to suppress your feelings but to keep a strong team morale. When crisis hits, fathers provide a sense of protection, not just through their actions but also by their way of being.
Think about the times when one team-member panicked and the entire team, as if through a domino effect, started panicking. Think about the times, on the other hand, when through a calm and composed problem-solving, solution-oriented approach, the entire team found a way to power through the problem.
Love, through Simple Actions:
It seems a common experience of many: mothers are great at showering us with affectionate words and actions both- the warmth is there to feel immediately, no questions asked. How do fathers show affection? Well, it is more through small acts of love. Mention you like oranges to your father once, and you may have a bowl of oranges lying on the table the next day. For fathers, showing care is through the quiet resourcefulness of having the phone-numbers of important people, right from a mechanic, to a computer engineer in their phone book, ready for everyone’s use at an instant.
In our management with clients and colleagues, it is worth noting that it is only through small cumulative actions and quiet resourcefulness at the end of the day that determine how successful an agenda, idea or plan has been. Elaborate plans, post-it notes, vision boards, agendas might be set, but it is the persistent implementation, working on it with our heads down that will determine whether it gets actually done or not. It is the quiet resourcefulness of knowing who to contact when, when all the elaborate networking will actually provide fruition.
Fun and risk, at the right time:
Look at a father during holidays, when he isn’t away at his office, and you will see him giving his kids the times of their lives. Whether it’s through big and small travels, or through playing cricket with them, fun with fathers has its own separate joy. In fact, mothers also feel safer through his presence, and when ordinarily she may have restricted the child from doing something, she lets them have fun, since she knows the father will manage everything.
In our dealing with matters of work, it is crucial to add that ‘fun’ element of calculated risk. The one little step we take that may or may not be a part of the original plan but something we felt we should do. That one client we feel we should take a chance on asking once again even when ‘logic’ says something else. That one call we feel scared to make but do it anyway. That one plan we have been waiting to go forward with when the ‘right’ time comes.
Mothers and fathers complement each other. It is almost impossible to talk about one without mentioning the other. One nurtures by providing warmth that radiates in all directions, impossible to miss, and the other provides a quiet ground to grow on, stable foundations, with deep roots. Mother and father, like the sun and the earth.