What Can Halloween Teach Us About Leadership?

I wouldn’t change a thing about the season I’m in right now,because I was never the girl that dreamt about her wedding day – I was the girl who dreamt about how it would look and feel to raise a family. So the old saying, “The days are long and the years are short,” is so true. Yet, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

My girls are 3 and 4 now, and they are sponges. Each year, they become more and more aware of why we celebrate certain holidays, and their questions and what they expect have shifted. Seeing the holidays through their eyes has been fascinating.

We filled our calendar in the month leading up to Halloween with fall-related things to do: apple picking, hay rides, pumpkin patches, pumpkin painting, trunk-or-treat crawling and traditional trick-or-treating.

As my littles prepared for each event, the questions they had for Jay and me continued to affirm that there is an overlap with parenting and leadership. I believe that Halloween could teach us lessons as we both parent AND lead.

Here are 3 Tips and 3 Lessons I took away from this Halloween:

BE YOURSELF. Halloween provides us an opportunity to take on different identities. It’s fun as you get to scroll online for the perfect Halloween outfit or hit up your favorite costume store to find the right costume! Gigi and Izzi started off with a “Hocus Pocus” theme. Izzi was the black cat and Gigi was one of the witches. Each new event we went to, they asked if they could wear a different costume. At first, I was confused because we had only purchased these two items. Then they went into their toy room and pulled out a new “princess dress” for each event. They were Elsa and Anna, then they were Ariel and Rapunzel, and then ….you get the point. lol

Lesson: While dressing up to be someone else might be fun for Halloween, it’s not so great when you’re a leader trying to connect every day with your peers and reports in the workplace. You have to be real and authentic to be effective. That means taking off the costume, and sharing your real self.

Question to ask yourself: How do you want to be seen? This will help anchor you when you feel yourself wanting to put on a mask at work.

MAKE CONNECTIONS. When you pack your schedule with Fall and Halloween activities, it’s easy for it to become a checklist: I need to get to X event at this time, so I can make it to X event by this time. I started to notice how sometimes we were going through the motions, but we weren’t slowing down to make connections. There were a few times I noticed a child from the girls’ school but didn’t engage because I was so focused on the event at hand. (“We have 20 more minutes at this place before we need to leave.”) We were busy! In one particular situation, Izzi started to pull on my shirt and say, “Mommy, Mommy, that’s my friend Flo from school!” It was at that moment that I realized the activities were just one part of the FUN, and making new connections was the other part. I introduced myself, and within minutes we realized we had so much in common (both HR Leaders, both married our best friend and the list goes on) that we ended up making a playdate for the next day.

Lesson: As Leaders, we get so caught up in the busy day-to-day hustle of GSDing that sometimes we forget to slow down and make connections. All it takes is a “Hi” and one or two open-ended questions. It could lead to a connection that you never knew existed.

MAKE IT FUN. Halloween is special because dressing up and having themed parties gives us permission to have FUN. The girls woke up every Saturday morning this month asking, “What fun activity do we have planned for today?” It changed my mood the second I heard it and shifted my perspective: What FUN activity are we doing today, and how do we keep it FUN throughout the day (even when my girls have their meltdowns because they are hangry or tired)?

Lesson: Remember that your team spends more time with you than they do their family. They need to be productive, yes. But they also need to have fun.

Question to ask yourself: How can I make this next team meeting fun?

Which Tip or Lesson did you learn this Halloween?

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