James' World 2

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After delivering a keynote to an audience of district managers and C-Suite leaders, several attendees came up to me afterward to talk about how I balance leadership responsibilities with being a parent. Interestingly, it was a group of five men, and their questions prompted me to write this entire article.

“How do your leadership philosophies shape your parenting style?” he asked me.

“It’s simple,” I replied. “The philosophies are the same.”

I shared that as both a leader and a mother, one of my greatest ambitions is to empower the people around me. To me, leadership, whether at home or at work, isn’t just about strategy and execution; it’s about fostering resilience, encouraging critical thinking and nurturing confidence.

Another leader asked, “Can you share some of the things you teach your clients and your kids?”

And this is what I shared.

The first is: Embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow

In our home, my husband and I see mistakes as learning moments. We both feel strongly about having children who feel they can run to us when they make a mistake — not run from us. To do this, we make it a point to acknowledge our own mistakes openly, demonstrating to our kids that this is a safe space and showing that taking accountability is a strength, not a weakness.

This lesson extends beyond the home — whether in the workplace or the boardroom, creating a culture where people can learn from mistakes leads to stronger, more innovative teams. I’ll never forget when a teacher told me our oldest daughter walked into school and proudly shouted to the entire class, “My mom makes a lot of mistakes!”

The second is: Be curious before you point fingers

A pivotal moment in my parenting journey was when a member of my team posted to LinkedIn announcing the launch of a new product. The only problem with that move was that we weren’t planning on announcing the product quite yet. We had a marketing plan in place, social media posts in the works, and a landing page that wasn’t live. I was in the kitchen when my phone started buzzing with all of these alerts congratulating me, and I had no idea. Then I saw the post. And my stomach dropped. I just kept saying, “Oh no… oh no…” My daughter was next to me and saw I was upset.

“Are you going to fire him?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “I need to figure out what he was thinking when he made this decision so we can talk about it.”

Before bedtime, my daughter could see I wasn’t myself.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me.

“I’m going to try to find the silver lining.”

She asked what that meant, and I explained it.

When you find the silver lining, if you find something else that’s good on top of that, will that be your gold lining?” she inquired.

“You know what? It should be,” I said. “Once I find the silver lining, I’m going to try the gold lining for sure.”

She then asked, “Did all of the people who know you see this post?”

“No,” I said.

“Then the silver lining can be that you still have a lot of people to tell.”

And she fell asleep.

In parenting, when my kids make a mistake, we don’t ask, “Why did you do that?!” We choose to take a step back and ask, “What were you thinking?” In work scenarios, I’ve found approaching situations with curiosity before blame leads to constructive conversations and deeper understanding. My team and I grew stronger from this misstep, and my daughter got to see what it looks like to take a step back and understand a mistake before making any major decisions. She also learned the valuable skill of finding the good in things — even when that feels hard.

The third is: Prioritize effort over outcome

Success isn’t defined solely by results — it’s about the dedication and perseverance behind them. When my daughter proudly presents a project she has worked on, I focus on the effort.

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The world is divided by war. Influenza outbreaks smolder in livestock herds and bird flocks for years. The public is deeply skeptical of the value of medical interventions. Public health agencies offer misleading advice and are focused only on keeping the public calm. There is a shortage of qualified medical professionals, with no end in sight.

No, this isn’t 2025—it’s 1918. In the pivotal book The Great Influenza, historian John Barry lays out the conditions that primed the population of the U.S. that year for one of the worst plagues in history and acted like so much dry tinder just waiting for a spark. That spark exploded into the conflagration of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and left many others disabled.

A little more than a century later, now is perhaps as good a time as any to ask the question: How prepared are we for another influenza pandemic? On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. Modern medicine and public health have advanced far beyond 1918. Whereas the scientists of that era struggled to identify the germ that caused the pandemic, we live in a time of genomic sequencing and global infectious disease surveillance, of mRNA vaccine technology and antiviral medications. Our governments have pandemic preparedness plans, stockpiles of vaccines and drugs, and, having dealt with the COVID pandemic, experience with contact tracing and isolation.

Other conditions, however, are eerily similar to those of 1918. Geopolitical crises crowd public health concerns off the front page of newspapers. A dangerous influenza strain, in this case the H5N1 avian flu virus, has recently been circulating freely within poultry flocks, spreading widely in livestock herds in the U.S. and causing infections in farm workers. False lessons drawn from the COVID pandemic have driven public skepticism of medical information to all-time highs. Public health agencies sometimes offer contradictory and falsely soothing messages, further eroding their credibility. And after five years of COVID, hospital systems are stretched thin, and burnout and staffing shortages have thinned the ranks of the doctors and nurses who will be on the front line of the next pandemic. Making matters worse, the Trump administration’s interventions over the past two months have gravely weakened surveillance of and control over the virus’s spread.

The global response to the COVID pandemic offers little solace. In late 2019, as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, gripped China, infectious disease surveillance failed across much of the rest of the globe. Western governments faltered right out of the gate at limiting the spread of the virus—contact tracing detected fewer than 2 percent of all COVID cases in the U.S., for example. The pandemic response plan was ignored, and molecular tests were too few and too late. There were not enough high-quality masks, and antiviral drugs for COVID had not yet been developed. The plan was to “flatten the curve,” but in practice, hospitals ran out of beds, intensive care units ran out of oxygen and morgues ran out of space. While lives were saved by social distancing and eventually vaccines, millions also died needlessly across the globe. They were victims of poor pandemic policy and a sluggish public health response, as well as misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other health measures.

But that was—and still is—a different pandemic, one caused by a coronavirus rather than influenza, with a far lower death rate for acute cases and a somewhat different set of challenges. In contrast, when pandemic influenza hit in 1918, it killed 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population, and around half of those deaths were in young and healthy people. A pandemic similar in scale today would leave 200 to 400 million dead.

Revisiting the Deadly 1918 Pandemic

It’s hard to imagine now, but the 1918 influenza was far worse than the flu we know. Although many affected people experienced a severe bout of seasonal flu—fever, chills, body aches and headaches, followed by recovery—some fared a lot worse. As Barry puts it, these people “came with an extraordinary array of symptoms, symptoms either previously unknown entirely in influenza or experienced with previously unknown intensity.” Those symptoms included agonizing joint pain, burning pain above the diaphragm, subcutaneous emphysema (which occurs when pockets of air accumulate just beneath the skin), ruptured eardrums, kidney failure and severe nosebleeds.

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