MOLLY FLETCHER
Speaker & Former Sports Agent
MOLLY FLETCHER helps inspire and equip game changers to dream, live and grow fearlessly. A keynote speaker and author, Molly draws on her decades of experiences working with elite athletes and coaches as a sports agent, and applies them to the business world.
Here, Molly talks about 3Â Leadership Lessons from Parenting:
Time passes so quickly that I can barely believe my three daughters are almost teenagers. Seems like they were just in diapers, I was telling my friend Hal Runkel, president of The ScreamFree Institute and a national expert on helping families create great relationships. I love to pick his brain to be the best mom I can be as my children grow more independent.
Hal’s wisdom helps people become better leaders, not just better parents. Hal repeated three simple words to me: love, learn and launch. That’s your role as a parent, he explained. It stuck and serves a great reminder for building great relationships on corporate teams, not just families.
Lesson 1: Love.
A great leader (and parent) is excited about each team member, their skills and personality, and how they will fit into your mission and team chemistry. This connection remains no matter what the person does. Yes, you may have to have hard conversations along the way—the deep respect that grows from a leader’s care makes those difficult moments easier to navigate.
Here’s a specific example of love and leadership: recruiting and hiring. This is your first step to bringing a new person into your team, and he or she can sense your passion and authenticity (or insincerity). There is no substitute for this gut emotion.
In recruiting and hiring, we only have one chance to make a first impression, which can make or break success. As the keynote speaker at a recent national conference on talent acquisition and the candidate experience, I learned that nearly half of all candidates (47.7 percent) had no previous relationship with a company before applying, meaning that the candidate experience is the first exposure they have to a company’s brand and highlighting the need to for employers to get it right.
Company values are crucial to shaping an employer brand; 41.4 percent of candidates stated that the most important marketing material influencing their decision to apply was the company’s values.
If you are unsure of this person’s qualifications or fit, that can be hard to hide. Great leaders find some level of emotional connection to those who work for them. This can be through a shared passion for the work, for the team, for goals. In this context, “love†is a deep connection that is essential for long-term success.