Most effective leaders know the importance of setting shared values to shape team culture and collaborate more effectively. Bijal Shah, CEO of learning and development company Guild, has a second set of core values, one chosen with her husband to guide how they show up with their kids and with each other.
“We’re both executives in high-growth businesses, we have two little kids, and so time kind of feels short sometimes, and we can become impatient or we can be short with one another,” says Shah. “It’s just a really good grounding to be like, wait a minute, my values are to be kind, to be persistent, to start with curiosity… in moments of tension or conflict.”
She points out that these three values—kindness, persistence, and curiosity—have also made her and her husband more effective leaders at work, which she hopes will also be true for her children when they enter the workforce.
Ahead of Take Your Child to Work Day this Thursday, we spoke to Shah about the origins of that practice and how she and her husband reinforce their values with their kids in their daily lives. Here’s what she said, in her own words, edited for length and clarity:
How it started: Aligning on core values
My husband is a very thoughtful and intentional human being. After we got married and while I was pregnant with my first kid, he said, ‘Hey, as we learn to parent together, I think there will be times where you and I take a different approach to how we parent, and I think it’d be really great if we aligned on our core values so that we could remind each other of those things in a world where we might be diverging in terms of how we operate or what we are trying to do with our kids.’ I’ll admit that I thought it sounded hokey as a process, but actually it was really fun.
My husband had been gifted a pack of values cards, which are pre-made to look like a deck of regular playing cards, except they have a bunch of values written on them, including family, community, persistence, and kindness.
We sat down and went through all 52 of them and we each picked out five to seven that we thought resonated with us and then looked where the overlap was to pick the core values that we wanted to raise our family on and reinforce in all aspects of our lives. We ended up tailoring the words to ourselves, so they might not have been written in the way that we now communicate them to our kids, but the essence came from the stack of cards.
How it’s going: Morning reminders and association examples
Every morning when my kids are brushing their teeth, either myself or my husband will ask, ‘What are you going to be today?’ And our kids will repeat, ‘Kind, curious, and persistent.’ We started very young, so as soon as we started brushing my daughter’s teeth, around eight months or a year old, we started that call and response. At that age, I don’t think you have the capacity to understand what those words mean, but we’d just repeat them again.
Over time, we started using examples from our daily lives to explain what these words mean because kids learn best by association at this age. When we read books and the character is helping someone else, we would say, ‘Oh, this is an example of kindness.’ Or just the other day, my daughter asked me what ‘examine’ means. So I explained it to her and said, ‘That was an example of curiosity. You just showed that you were curious by asking me more questions about something that you had heard.’ When our daughter was learning to ride a scooter, she would try to give up and we’d say, ‘This is an example of not being persistent. If you want to learn this thing, you have to keep trying until you get it.’
We use those association examples to really ingrain in them what it means to be kind, curious, and persistent.
Looking forward: Growing up with core values
My parents instilled values in me that my husband and I talk about among ourselves without my parents harping on them constantly, so I hope that we can continue to reinforce our values in small, meaningful ways at the right moments as they continue to grow, and that they do that for themselves when they’re older.
Even though we won’t be standing next to them when they’re 18 years old, asking, ‘What am I going to be today?’ I hope that they ask themselves this question, and I hope that these values are translatable for them in the workforce.
If they are overlooked for a promotion, for example. That doesn’t mean you should give up. Use that as an opportunity to learn about what you could be doing differently or how you can better invest in yourself. Or, you might end up in a situation where you have to make a hard decision at work, with divided opinions on your team. How do you make sure that when you make that hard decision, you do it from a place of kindness? I hope that they use our core values to be servant leaders, thoughtful leaders, and they break the mold of what effective leadership can look like in the future.