Communication and Relationship - What We Can Learn From Our Children
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The discussion - part 8
Communication and Relationships – What We Can Learn From Our Children
As professionals, we spend a remarkable amount of time overthinking how we communicate. We draft, redraft, and sanitise our emails; we rehearse strategic talking points for meetings; and we carefully construct corporate personas designed to project absolute authority, polish, and control.
Somewhere along the path of building our careers, communication becomes a high-stakes tactical game. We worry about hidden agendas, reading between the lines, and protecting our turf. But what if we’ve overcomplicated it entirely?
There are times when we need eyes in the back of our head or to be wary of an overambitious colleague who could throw you under the bus, but there is so much that we can learn from our children.
If you want a masterclass in effective, low-friction communication and relationship-building, you don't have to look to executive leadership books or negotiation seminars. It could help to take a look at a playground.
It’s worth examining what happens when we strip away adult defences and look at how children approach the world. Their natural blueprint for learning and relating offers a surprisingly powerful framework for the modern business environment.
The default setting: Openness and curiosity
Watch a group of young children meeting for the first time, and you’ll witness something remarkable. They don’t wait for a formal introduction, nor do they run a background check or analyse the potential political fallout of saying hello. They approach life with radical openness.
The vast majority of children share a fundamental desire: they want to make friends, they want to help their peers, and they are inherently curious. Crucially, they don’t thrive on catching people out. Their first instinct isn't suspicion; it's possibility.
Compare that to the typical corporate dynamic, where communication is often defensive by default. We keep our cards close to our chests, anticipate resistance, and sometimes view interactions through a lens of competition rather than collaboration.
What would happen if we brought a child’s openness back into our teams? When we stop treating every conversation as a test to be passed or a debate to be won, communication suddenly becomes remarkably easy again.
The courage to try (and fail) openly
Children are supreme learners because they are entirely unafraid of looking foolish. If a child wants to build a tower out of blocks and it collapses, they don't call an emergency meeting to assign blame or draft a memo explaining why gravity let them down. They laugh, figure out what didn’t work, and try again - usually inviting someone nearby to help them build it bigger next time.
In business, fear of failure is one of the biggest bottlenecks to authentic communication. People stay silent in meetings because they are terrified of asking a "stupid" question or offering a half-formed idea. They wait until an initiative is 100% polished before sharing it, losing weeks of valuable collaboration in the process.
When we adopt a childlike willingness to try things out in the open, culture shifts. Psychological safety isn't built through corporate mission statements; it's built when leaders and teams model the vulnerability to say, "I don't know the answer yet, but let's figure it out together."
Helping peers and sharing success
Another defining trait of children is their instinctual desire to support one another. If a child figures out how to solve a puzzle, their first instinct is usually to turn to their friend and say, "Look how I did this, try it!" They celebrate collective wins naturally.
In a professional setting, silos and individual metrics can sometimes distort this pure desire to help. We get protective of our knowledge, treating information as currency rather than a shared resource. Yet, high-performing businesses thrive on the exact opposite - cultures of mutual support where helping a peer succeed is recognised as the ultimate driver of team success.
Reminding ourselves how easy it is to be a good communicator
Being a good communicator doesn't require a masterclass in rhetoric or a complex psychological strategy. At its core, it requires the very things that come naturally to us before the world teaches us to put up walls:
Saying what you mean with kindness and clarity.
Asking questions because you genuinely want to learn, not because you're trying to trap someone.
Wanting others to succeed and offering a helping hand when they stumble.
Being willing to try without needing to be an expert right out of the gate.
We spend so much of our professional lives trying to master the complexities of human interaction. But sometimes, the most profound step forward is stripping away the corporate armour and remembering how to play nicely in the sandbox.
How is your team fostering openness and reducing friction? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.