Are We Talking about Process or Needs?

When reading about or talking to people about managing demands across their personal and professional lives, I often hear about a weekly routine in which they look at their calendars and sort things out. For example, here’s former Ford CEO Alan Mulally describing his family’s Sunday morning routine to the New York Times: “The kids would have their schedules and we’d have ours and everybody would compare schedules. And if they needed a ride or they had a soccer game or they had ballet or they had a school activity, we’d figure it out.”

That practice seems reasonable enough, but I suspect it’s easy to talk about how to accomplish everything on the calendar but leave out the more important conversation—what each person needs. After all, the point is not to get everything on the to-do list done but to make everyone satisfied with what gets done.

In Having It All...and Making It Work, HBS professor Quinn Mills describes how that logistics-focused family conversation can cause you to miss changing family dynamics. “Role reversals or adjustments may be needed at times. The provider may become the nurturer for a season. Think of the family as a theater company or cast in [a] live production. Changing conditions may dictate using cast members in novel ways—a lead actor may need to play a supporting role, for example. Or a supporting role player who has matured and gained experience may be ready for a new role.”

If expectations and needs change but we continue to play last week’s role or deliver on last week’s commitments, that’s a recipe for frustration and relationship friction. That’s why it is so important for family meetings to go beyond logistics and enable each person to answer, “What do you need from us?” 

Mills tells of how those richer discussions have yielded insights that help him make better family decisions: “I have had many surprises during these conversations, learning that my children’s and even my husband’s time requests are often different than I would have assumed. In fact, they have told me that they don’t like it when I come to every one of their games because it makes them nervous, and they don't perform as well. But they love it when I make them breakfast in the mornings.”

What I like most about that shift in the conversation is that it changes it from one about avoiding the “failure” to complete items 4 to 10 on the to-do list to one about how to successfully deliver on items 1-3, which are probably 10X more important than everything else. 

That dynamic comes up at work as well when conversations with our bosses and internal customers focus on their requests of us without pausing to investigate what they most care about or their underlying goals. With discussions like that, we risk putting our effort in places where it’s less impactful and spending emotional energy worrying about what’s not getting done rather than feeling confident that we are delivering what’s most desired.