Do you remember what learning to ride a bike felt like?

People remember the first bike they rode like they remember their favorite stuffy, or their first

concert, or their all time favorite pair of jeans. Mine was a blue Schwinn I got for my birthday. I was so excited to join the bigger kids on my block riding their bikes up and down the street.

I remember the moment it happened. For what felt like weeks I had been going up and down the street. First tilted too far this way, then tilted too far that way, then flat on the ground with gravel in my mouth and more than once up and over the handlebars.

Then one evening it just clicked. I pushed hard on the pedal, wavered a little on the seat and it’s like everything I had been trying to do happened in the right way. I was riding my bike! And the best part about it was that under the dusky sky, my dad rounded the street corner on his way home from the bus stop after work, our eyes locked and he grinned.

When it came time for my kids to learn to ride bikes, I put on the training wheels and we hit the sidewalk. I was going to spare them the gravel in the mouth and flight over the handlebars. And I was going to respect their autonomy, giving them the freedom to engage in trial and error on their own.

What I have since learned is that training wheels are the worst for teaching kids to ride bikes. I consider it one of my great parenting fails. Training wheels give kids false security about riding their bike unbalanced. When the wheels come off, it’s like starting farther back from ground zero because they’ve picked up bad habits.

The best way to teach kids to ride bikes is to start them early on one of those little two wheel balance bikes. You may have seen kids around your neighborhood riding them. The kids look like little Flintstone characters running around on a bike.

My older daughter who has taught kids to ride bikes for the past two summers will tell you the kids that come to her with experience on the balance bikes accelerate much faster to bike riding than kids who use training wheels. In fact, kids with no bike riding experience do better than the training wheel kids.

I hear often from leaders that they want to give employees the autonomy they need for growth, but when they step back they don’t get the results they are looking for. Balance bikes are a perfect analogy for finding the right balance between autonomy and accountability.

Playing out the analogy, let’s look at how learning to ride on a full size two wheeler, a smaller bike with training wheels and a balance bike compare to finding that balance between autonomy and accountability.

If you use the full size, two wheel bike model of autonomy and accountability:

• • The teacher does a lot of telling and explaining how to ride a bike and then steps back to see if the rider can figure it out on their own. It’s all or nothing.

• • The stakes are higher learning to ride on a full size two wheeler. You fall from greater heights going faster. Once you get scraped up a few times you lose your confidence and are focused more on avoiding injury than riding a bike.

• • There are critical periods of time when the rider is on their own without support or feedback. You could be standing at the end of the block when your fast moving tween has to figure out how to stop or turn. In a panic you shout out directions, but who can hear that and react in time?

If you use the training wheel model:

• • The sense of success is predicated on a false sense of security. It’s like giving someone positive feedback even if the product is awful. They’ll just keep riding tilted sideways and expect they’ll be able to ride a bike. When the training wheels come off they will fall and be surprised.

Here’s the beauty of the balance bikes:

• • The rider gets Immediate feedback about what works and doesn’t work so they can make little course corrections that lead faster to success.

• • They own the success and the failure because they are the ones exercising their judgment based on the feedback they are getting.

• • You can learn from lower risk mistakes. Sure, you might take a digger and get scraped up, but it won’t be off a full size bike going fast.

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