Last year I attended a leadership conference, and one of the sessions was about “office culture.” Basically, the concept is that every workplace has its own unique culture and you should figure out what it is at your workplace so that you can better understand and therefore lead your co-workers.

In the session, the instructor illustrated the concept by telling us the culture of her family. (She referred to the family in which she grew up.) It was fascinating to hear where she came from and it caused me to evaluate my own family’s culture.

I made a list and would like to share that here. (So you know, I grew up with my mom, dad, a brother who’s two years older than me, and a sister 17 months younger than me.)

* We love love LOVE to eat. Food is typically at the center of our minds all day. Seriously.
* We aren’t Catholic, but we tend to be victims of “Catholic Guilt.”
* We do things to the extreme. Especially when it comes to business, religion and love.
* We never argue.
* We like our physical space; we’re not particularly physically affectionate people.
* We’re all up in each other’s bizness. When something happens to one of us (a job interview, a first date, you name it), the rest of us know within hours, sometimes minutes.
* We are motivated by praise and recognition; therefore we are constantly praising and recognizing each other.

Those are just some of the characteristics of my family’s culture. Now that I’m a parent, and Isabella and I are our own little family, I’m curious to see how our culture develops. I’m positive that the cultural elements listed above have made their way into it, of course. But what new items can I add to that list?

And I go back to the purpose of the leadership session, about how understanding your workplace culture can make you a better leader. In the same way, understanding the culture of your family can surely make you a better parent. I think it’s also important for us to know the culture of our friend’s families, and of our spouse’s family, so that we can understand why they do the things they do—things that might seem inconceivable to us but at least are happening for a reason.

What’s your original family’s culture? And how do you use that to better lead your own family now?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under parent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.