The inherent desire of top performers to be exactly right makes them afraid to estimate.
One of my favorite MyBlankJob users, WorkingMom, made a post this morning encouraging users to teach their children how to make coffee and not to put fish in the microwave. Those lessons are definite wins for the future of corporate America.
If I were to encourage parents to teach their children something that would be valuable for the corporate world, I would encourage parents to teach kids how to estimate. No matter what one does in life, the ability to estimate is valuable.
The inability of top performers in corporate America to estimate timelines, project costs, etc. fascinates me. I think the challenge is twofold:
1 – The inherent desire of top performers to be exactly right makes them afraid to estimate. Every estimate consists of unknowns, and this can be difficult for those who like dealing with complete, exact information.
2 – A simple lack of experience with estimating. The first thing that one learns from experience with estimating is that some things wind up over and somethings wind up under, and ultimately things land near the middle. The more experience that one has with estimating, the better they get at compensating for unknowns that can drive a budget or timeline in one direction or another. Moreover, experience with estimating helps to mitigate one’s uncertainty and fear of being wrong. We are all way off in our early days of estimating, and we learn from this and we adjust accordingly.
How does one teach a child the skill of estimating? Everyday life presents endless opportunities to teach this critical skill. Some of my favorites is having them estimate the time a routine car trip, such as the drive to school, will take. Each day, they will get better and better at estimating based on their previous day’s experience. From there, they can begin estimating longer, less routine trips.
Another favorite way to teach estimating is a detail up approach to guessing how much the grocery store bill will be. Have your child write down every item that is on the grocery list and guess at how much each item will cost. This will teach them a bottoms up approach (aka detail to summary) approach to estimating, and it will show them how to work through unknowns and how overages and under estimates offset one another. An added benefits is that it is a great lesson in helping them understand food costs.
However you go about teaching a child to estimate, you will find that it is fun, and an extremely valuable life skill. Stealing from WorkingMom’s post, “Their future employers will thank you.“
What skills do you wish that parents were teaching more in order to prepare kids for the working world? Sound off at – Workplace Rants | My Blank Job.