I played Rock Band 2 with my kids this weekend. After our Friday night session, our voices were shot, our hands were raw from all of the high-fives, and each one of us walked away thinking secretly “I was the reason we were so successful.”

The next morning I saw that my son had posted this on Facebook:

Playing Rock Band with the fam. The ultimate family bonding experience is taking turns shouting “Shut up when I’m talking to you” into a microphone (“One Step Closer” by Linkin Park).

The whole experience reminds me of management. You have a goal. You have tools at your disposal. You have a team. You have some loose idea about what you’re supposed to be doing, even though you’ve never heard of this particular assignment until this very moment. You never have the abilities to perform perfectly. Your team is looking at you, but you don’t know why. If you’re lucky, you’re surrounded by the very young whose high confidence and energy almost compensate for their inexperience. And no matter what you do, you can’t stop pushing until it’s all over.

And if you are to be successful in management, you learn quickly to fake it, use passion where your talents lag behind, laugh at yourself, have fun, celebrate every non-sour note, and find your own rhythm. Before long, you will have a team, a strong team, that relies on each other, doesn’t offer excuses, and won’t except failure.

For my part, I feel a little guilty about how good Jack felt. He thought I was singing a Linkin Park song. Actually, I was just screaming at him and his sister to “shut up when I’m talking to you!”

But either way, I was the reason it was fun and successful…