Unofficial Bring My Kid to Work Day

It started yesterday, the cough, the nose blowing, the complaint of his chest hurting. Alas, we've been back to school for 3 weeks so we were due for our first sick day. And a sick day we had. My boy, now in the 4th grade, clearly needed a quiet day, but I didn't think that necessarily meant sitting on the couch watching Clone Wars (although that is awesome too). Instead I brought him along on a customer call in the morning after we dropped off his sister.

I prepped him on where we were going and what business we were visiting (no specifics but it was pretty bad ass for any 9 year old boy to visit). My challenge to him was he would run the meeting for the first 5 minutes so he needed to come up with some good questions about the business.

The client was a great sport at first, chuckling as the first few questions flew out "how many rooms are here", "what time do you open", but then something awesome happened, the business owner shifted in his seat and really started answering without the "this is cute' grin. The questions that grabbed him were "how many employees do you have", how many "widgets" are on the floor right now", "how else do you make money" and "why did you decide to do this"? Wow, seriously, the kid is a natural. The only guidance I gave him was to ask questions he generally wanted an answer to, and he totally nailed it!

Ultimately he excused himself so he could go check out the "widgets" but not before impressing his dear old dad and the business owner with his casual interest in the goings on there. I think that meeting more than made up for a missed day at school, after all the first and best skill (in my opinion) is the ability to engage people and be genuine, to that point the boy did very well.

I've mentioned before that we've done this in the past, but never with these results (do note that I never challenged him to ask questions before either). I'll do this with my daughter soon, on her next sick day, to see how the mind of a soon to be 7 year old does in a Q and A jam, that is definitely something to look forward to.

After the meeting I quizzed him on his Q and A to see if he retained what he learned and to my amazement and delight he retained every answer (and even had a few follow up questions that we may put out there at some point).

Anyway, what a great, albeit unofficial, bring your kid to work day today, I'll do this way more often, after all there are some things you just can't learn in school!