The First Leader

Always looking for an opportunity to not only teach, but appreciate the lessons before us.

I think a lot about leadership, communication, responsibility, and accountability. On this particular Sunday, I keep coming back to the idea that the most important leader in many of our lives is the first one: our mother.

It’s one thing to experience that leadership as a child. It’s another to witness it firsthand as a copilot through parenthood.

My wife and I are relatively early in our parental journey, but I can’t imagine a more important person in my children’s lives than my wife, particularly during these formative years. Others will come and go over time: teachers, coaches, and friends. Mom is the constant.

She’s helping shape confidence, judgment, and resilience through successes and disappointments, while also knowing when to support them and when to let them figure things out on their own.

Poor leadership is doing it for them. Giving them the answers instead of helping them develop the ability to find their own.

There isn’t a higher-stakes environment. A child’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being is being shaped in ways that carry lifelong impact.

As a leader, you encounter a full range of emotions, but when you’re a parent, the tears are different. So are the smiles and the laughs.

The mission isn’t a quarterly number or a business outcome. It’s to help develop a human being into someone self-sufficient, capable, grounded, and happy. Someone who contributes something meaningful to those around them and brings a little more joy to the world because they were here.

There is no greater mission than that.

And it’s mothers who, I would contend, are the best leaders of all, especially when you consider what’s at stake.