Mother Hen Managers

If you were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where you saw how a hen raised her chicks, I shall say you had been privy to one of the greatest lessons you could ever learn from mother nature. Do not be surprised, if I say, the learning from this experience applies to all managers across the corporate world and, closer home, to all parents as well, irrespective of your gender.

Soon after the eggs hatch, the mother hen takes the chicks along with her and searches for food and feeds them with what she finds. The process continues for a while until a day arrives when you will see a significant behavioural change in mother hen. Instead of keeping the chicks closer to her, finding and feeding them with food she searched for, she now appears to mercilessly drive them away. The action is not to be considered as a lack of love, instead one that is intended to make the chicks self sufficient so that they can find food and feed themselves. That is the only way they will survive the big bad world out there.

Now let me take you to the corporate world we are in. We see two kinds of managers exhibiting behaviours you read in the above statements. There are those who constantly feed aka nurture the people who report to them. These are the managers who feel it is easier if they get things done for their team so that it is helpful for the team to finish the pieces of work. This is a behaviour, that is expressed, at times, due to fear of incompletion and other times from an obsessively compulsive nature which do not let these managers delegate their work. Then there are others who constantly challenge their direct reports to go above and beyond their capabilities so that one day they become equal or even better than the managers themselves.

I have been fortunate in my career to have worked with both kinds of managers. While the first ones may appear quite regressive, in the initial years of your career, getting a manager like that helps you as a shield from the wrath of some of the senior executives, when you make mistakes. But as you grow into senior positions, you may want this shield to be broken and learn to fend for yourself, in which case, a manager of the latter kind is better.

Interesting enough, closer to our families, these behaviours resonate well with each of us as parents or children. Parents who help their children with everything always, may think they are helping them survive. But the fact remains that the parents who are like the mother hen who wanted the children to be self-sufficient will be doing a great deal more of a service to their children in the long run.

We all don the roles of either the children or parents. Like it or not, these roles are inadvertently laced with our corporate personas. On this Mother’s Day, when we celebrate mothers, what else can be a good reminder than the mother hen and her strategy to empower those who work with us.

Happy Mother’s Day to all managers out there, irrespective of your gender, who learned from this simple yet powerful lesson from mother hen!