Leading with Granny - Using common sense and good parenting to become a better leader

Consulting rates of several hundred euros per hour. Clever books by high-ranking professors and university lecturers. Complicated theories that no one understands. All these things and many more seem to be necessary when it comes to a promotion in your company with a little specialist knowledge, so that one can enter the new professional field merely well-armed. This is often referred to as "management training," a "management development program," or even "management competence training" enriched with Anglicisms.

I myself was able to find myself in numerous such trainings when I started my first job as a manager. Certainly - somehow it also reassured me that in the context of these trainings, whether in the MBA course or in a part-time continuing education program, I was able to meet people who were already much more experienced than I was. I was then able to ask these people again and again what they would do if they were in the same situation as me. That was really a great start! But if you're honest with yourself... how much else really stuck in your head from these trainings? Today I am sure: there was not that much new there. For some reason, many of the insights sold there as "new" didn't seem as "new" to me as they first seemed. It seemed to me that someone had made an effort to reactivate old knowledge and put it into words.

So what is it that can ultimately make me a good leader? How do I learn to deal well with conflicts? And why does it not only seem to me that leadership is actually something "old" that needs to be explained in a "new" way? I think I have found the answer: Leadership is first and foremost about common sense and a really good upbringing, which make you a good leader! And because these two things are simply taught (or not taught) very early in our lives, catching up on this knowledge is now a bit of a necessity and maybe even quite a bit of work.

We are all confronted with one of the most important leadership roles from an early age, without perceiving it as such. The person behind it influences from an early age how well suited we will be as leaders later on. For some people, it's the big brother who leads them by being a role model, making the right decisions and setting aspirational goals. For others, it may be the mother who lovingly and caringly takes the time to address any issue that is bothering you as a child, solving your problem and helping you to simply choose the right (rather than the perceived wrong) things. Most of the time, however, in the course of a person's upbringing and development, there are several people who have a significant influence on our later suitability as leaders.

For me personally today, it is especially the things that my grandma instilled in me and set me on the path for the rest of my life that make me successful as a leader. Grandma keeps the family together by making it clear to all of us how important it is to come to the dinner table together and talk about the things that move us at least that one time a day. There are countless of these "rules" or sayings that shape my life and help me in my leadership role every day. It is precisely these things that consciously or perhaps even unconsciously influence our actions in a positive way - and without being able to explicitly name the rule - that I call common sense.

In the context of this little paperback, I would like to share with you the sentences that my grandma always used to say and that make my work as a manager better. Try to imagine the situation with your (and not my) grandma saying this very phrase and then think about how it would be received if you applied the message behind it to your team and projected it to your professional context. Take it with a bit of humor - grandma certainly wasn't always right either, and some things may be a bit "outdated" or simply out of fashion. But one thing is clear: You will always find a spark of truth in grandma's wisdom, which you can also apply to yourself.

For each of my grandma's quotes I try to give a scientific background, if there is one, which you might already know from numerous leadership trainings and the like.

Now I wish you a lot of fun while browsing through grandma's worldly wisdoms and while training your common sense and while checking and training your good upbringing.