I once commented to one of my mom friends, "It must be so easy to be a mom when you have kids as good as your boys."
She was quick to correct me by saying, "None of this came easy. I had to make a ton of tough parenting choices along the way."
She told me stories about how her oldest son wanted to go to parties in high school his friends were attending and she made the tough choice to tell him no to a few of them. Each time she refused her son was mad at her for weeks. She went on to mention several of those former high school friends have since gotten DWIs and struggled in other ways with drugs and alcohol.
Her other son was quite shy when he was little so she would force him to speak to others when he was spoken to. After each encounter he would cry all the way home and ask her why she was so mean to make him do those things. Just the other day though he was chosen to give a speech at his high school graduation and he did so with ease.
She had many more examples of how she got the "easy" job of being a mom to good kids by making all the hard choices along the way. My favorite thing she said was "It would have been EASY to let them do what they wanted to do a few times so I could have been the 'cool' mom but when you make the EASY decisions early you sometimes have to deal with HARD circumstances later on in life. Being consistent is key."
As I left our little get-together I couldn't help but think of my own parenting skills with my daughter as well as my leadership skills at work. Creating a team full of good team members is not an easy job. It means making the hard choices early on in a consistent basis in order to form a firm foundation for the team to grow and thrive.
Making the tough choices is just that...tough. However the easy choices are not usually the best ones in the long run. Sometimes it can be difficult for people to see the big picture but it is our job as leaders to help them to see and understand it.
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