Six Signs of a Parent-Child Dynamic at the Office

To prepare for an upcoming program with a global chemicals company, I conducted a series of interviews with the top managers and the people who reported to them. I heard a familiar refrain: The people at the top felt like the people in the layers below just didn’t take the needed initiative. As a result, the managers felt an obligation and responsibility to tell the direct reports what to do and how to do it. As one manager put it, “They are just not ready to take on this level of responsibility, and they don’t have the overall oversight and understanding that we do.”

When I spoke to the direct reports, they complained that the top managers didn’t trust them enough and acted paternalistic. As a result, the direct reports feared that if they took the initiative and something didn’t work as planned, they’d be punished. One country-level director said, “When something doesn’t work, we’ve learned to push it under the rug. Otherwise, it gets too complicated and messy.”

Unsurprisingly, these behaviors and mindsets also showed up in the company’s results: Although its cash cow had continued to produce profits, there had been no innovations in some time. And the company was struggling to pivot in the direction of a new strategy.

That’s a parent-child dynamic in all its dysfunctional glory at the workplace. Is your organization falling into this damaging trap? Let’s explore how to spot the trouble signs and move the culture toward an adult-adult dynamic.

Parent-Child Dynamics Versus a Healthy Hierarchy

In my work with organizations and their leaders, two types of organizations have emerged. In the first, like the company described above, the top management layer is seen as the parents and the layers below are seen as children who need to follow rules and can’t be trusted to make organizational decisions by themselves. In the second type, people in different layers of the organization acknowledge each other as adults, with each layer contributing in different ways and trusting one another to make these contributions.

Transactional analysis, a theory developed by psychoanalyst Eric Berne, offers an interesting lens through which to view these patterns: It proposes that when adults get into parent-child dynamics, rather than interacting as adults, dysfunction results.1 Transactional analysis was initially intended to explain interactions in marriages, families, and friendships, but I have seen it exhibited across the hierarchical levels within organizations.

Just as in actual parent-child relationships, “adult parents” in the workplace have both a nurturing and a controlling side when interacting with “adult children.” Think of corporate climates in which the top management is paternalistic to the levels below, stepping in when they struggle, or those where the top management attempts to dictate everything the levels below do. Then there are the adult children, who can be fun-loving and adaptive to the world around them (and to the parents’ desires). Think corporate climates where the levels below act like “good children” and seek to satisfy their superiors — aiming to avoid rejection and punishment by not rocking the boat.

But these children can also have tantrums when they don’t get their way, vehemently expressing dissatisfaction with top management’s requests and deliberately irking leaders by going in their own direction. For example, one notoriously hierarchical pharmaceutical company implemented strong mandates and cultural rules from the top, which incited anger among the lower levels. No one confronted or challenged leaders explicitly. Instead, lots of side conversations meant to obstruct the implementation of these rules, and even some sabotaging of them, ensued.

Conversely, mutual responsibility and respect engenders adult-to-adult relationships within organizations. Among actual adults, this is a more mature and balanced way of interacting. In such relationships, both sides critically and rationally consider their mistakes or shortcomings and avoid getting defensive when criticized. Of course, conflict also occurs in these contexts, but the conflict stays at the task level and doesn’t deteriorate into relationship conflict.

Within organizations (unlike marriages or friendships), explicit and appropriate hierarchical relationships do exist; the leader has more responsibility and accountability and is often responsible for the performance and well-being of team members. The difference between acknowledging the healthy existence of hierarchy and having people take on parent-child roles is that in the former, people acknowledge the hierarchy and see the people in all the layers as adults with autonomy and valuable viewpoints — even if their responsibilities and accountability differ.

Six Key Indicators of Parent-Child Dynamics

If you’re worried that your organization might be caught in a parent-child dynamic, consider these six major indicators.

1. An unwillingness to be vulnerable at the top. Like actual parents, leaders often fear showing their weaknesses. Revealing fears and insecurities to children is something that parents “just don’t do.” In this situation, leaders rarely disclose their own failures and hard-won lessons, and a culture develops where mistakes are swept under the rug.

For example, in the chemicals company mentioned earlier, the top managers were so secretive about any failed initiatives that they erroneously believed that people in levels below didn’t know about the errors. But the middle managers obviously knew (and enthusiastically gossiped about the top managers). Because people believed that it was a place where errors weren’t tolerated, a culture of hiding mistakes became insidious and pervasive.

2. A lack of trust from the top down. Here, I am not referring to integrity-based trust, which is about a belief in people’s benevolent intentions, but competence-based trust. This means that the upper echelons see the lower echelons as lacking competence and needing to be told what to do and how to do it. This attitude can not only be paternalistic but also can descend into the realm of insulting.

For example, one bank that I worked with wanted to get the lower levels of management to start using more digital ways of working. Top management implemented training programs that were far below the level of technical and analytic ability of their workforce — so simplistic, in fact, that people found it insulting. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a management-issued cybersecurity manual that read as if it were for 5-year-olds. The team not only ignored the manual but also became incredibly cynical and disheartened.

3. An unwillingness to appropriately empower individuals. If people in the levels below aren’t seen as competent, then they’re also not seen as ready to have shared power. So power stays at the top, and those people below don’t get the appropriate and necessary chances for development.

For example, one energy company that I worked with responded to almost every suggestion I made for team leadership development with “They are not ready for that yet.” This mindset not only led to too much being done by the leaders but also created few opportunities for the first-line managers to learn the business and essential leadership skills. Unsurprisingly, this organization had significant succession pipeline issues and had to recruit talent mainly from outside, which further discouraged aspiring leaders.

4. An unwillingness to try something new, for fear of disappointing leaders or incurring punishment. Parent-child dynamics can manifest in people at the lower levels as the tendency to rarely innovate or push boundaries. At one organization, when I asked middle management why they hadn’t tried various methods or technologies, the most common answer was “Management didn’t suggest that to us” or “That just isn’t done here.” Or these middle managers shuffled blame around the organization as to why something hadn’t been tried. When I suggested proposing some of these ideas to the levels above, I got a sort of deer-in-the-headlights look, as if I had suggested that they tell a parent how to run the household.

5. The need to cover up mistakes. When management takes on a parental role — especially a disciplinarian-parent role — the result is often that people feel little psychological safety to share mistakes, both standard and exceptional. (This point relates back to Indicator 1.) A culture develops where mistakes are hidden, and, as one executive told me about her company culture, people feel that “this is a place where all big problems once started out as small ones. But we didn’t learn about them until they were big problems.”

6. An unwillingness to pull the plug. Parent-child cultures often go hand in hand with what I affectionately call “and” cultures. In other words, the top management says, “We have to do X and Y and Z and …” Leaders pile initiative on top of initiative, without a willingness to let any one of them go or to identify or communicate strategic priorities. This aversion to prioritization often comes from a fear of disappointing anyone. The leaders don’t want to have to tell their “child” that their project just isn’t as important as it used to be and another “child’s” initiative is now more important. It’s like a parent not wanting to tell a child that their sibling is now more important.

One financial company that I worked with exemplified this symptom. At the annual top-management conference, the CEO listed 14 strategic priorities for the upcoming year. All 14 were described as critically important for the organization’s future. I saw audience members roll their eyes at this statement and mumble that it would be another year of being overstretched and exhausted.

How to Build a Healthier Dynamic

If some of the above sounds familiar and you think that your organization is caught in a parent-child dynamic, here are a few ways to move into a healthier way of interacting.

Examine gaps in trust — in both directions. Candidly look at the extent to which you do (or don’t) trust the levels below yours to competently take on bigger tasks and responsibilities. If you feel that there’s a gap in trust, the idea is not to immediately task the levels below with bigger responsibilities but rather to assign increasing responsibilities over time. According to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people feel most confident in their judgments when they are either complete novices or extreme experts. The biggest room for learning comes with moderate levels of experience: Here, people know what they don’t know. Perhaps the best time to increase responsibility is when people are at that moderate level of experience.

People in the levels below must also be honest with themselves about the lack of trust they may feel toward the top. If there has been a tradition of punishment for broken rules (and I don’t mean material punishments, like demotions or reduced bonuses, but subtle social punishments, like being ignored or censured during meetings), middle managers will likely view top leaders’ attempts to share power with a jaundiced eye and fear. If this is the case, leaders must start to reveal their own vulnerabilities, realizations, and mistakes. This will increase psychological safety and convince the levels below that the change in culture is sincerely desired.

Leaders must habitually ask more questions of team members. Questions are so simple and yet so effective in communicating: “I see you as a competent and valuable member of the team, and I want to hear your viewpoint.” In other words, ask questions as an adult would ask another adult for advice.

Remember to listen to the answers. Once a question has been asked, if it is not evident that you’re carefully and respectfully listening, the questioning will have been in vain. You might do what Google has termed “ostentatious listening,” which means that when someone speaks, you head-nod, note-take, and ask questions in response. Just like in adult-to-adult conversations, we don’t need to take on every suggestion or idea that another adult gives us. But we should have sincere curiosity about their viewpoint and respect it enough to listen to it.

Awareness Is The Start. Then, Get Uncomfortable

At a cultural level, two things must be true for the transition from a parent-child dynamic to an adult-adult dynamic to be successful. First, and most obviously, there must be an awareness of the current dynamic. Second, there needs to be a sincere dissatisfaction with the current culture. If the organization (especially the top leadership) is comfortable with continuing at the parent-child level, then leaders probably won’t put in the effort or be willing to tolerate the discomfort of change.

Returning to the chemicals company at the start of this article, when I went to the top managers with my observations, they were initially taken aback and denied such dynamics. But they listened and expressed curiosity about what change might look like. They became more open about their own experiments that hadn’t been successful — and asked for feedback from the lower ranks on how to try again. Then the top managers devised methods to gradually share power with more people — giving them a clear framework for handling operations and providing ongoing feedback — while allowing them to decide how to implement the framework. Overall, the top managers were impressed with the results, and people in the levels below valued the opportunities they had to display expertise and take initiative. One of the managers said, “I think I overestimated how much I knew and underestimated what others knew.”

The company isn’t quite where it wants to be in terms of an adult-to-adult corporate culture: Top management sometimes catches itself falling back into old patterns of protecting and dictating. But collectively, the organization is moving in the right direction. Moreover, there has been a noticeable shift in how people in the different management layers refer to one another and rely on one another to listen to their concerns and make contributions.