Tag Archives: dealing with generations

June 2, 2013 · 8:46 pm

Reactions To My Discrimination Post

generations at work

Reactions to Reactions To My Discrimination Post

I had readers respond to my Are They Discriminating Against You?  Probably. blog post in a couple of different ways.  First, one reader challenged me about “accepting” discrimination.  He believed that I should advocate challenging the ‘discriminatory behaviors’ of others through complaining to the powers that be and/or Human Resources within the organization, or through the legal system.  I certainly don’t mean to suggest that those aren’t legitimate avenues.  It depends on your goals, though.  Do you want to help fix discrimination long term?  In your company? For everyone?  Then routing yourself around the problem and going to find some place and someone(s) who can judge you for what you are and what you bring and make decisions based on that (as suggested in my last blog) is NOT the solution.  Challenging the status quo is the right thing to do.  Go for it.  Those of us who wimp out on that will really appreciate you.  And support you.  And do whatever you need us to do.

If you need to get a job this month, then you need to find a place that doesn’t discriminate.  You need to find decision makers who are smarter, have better judgement and who are worthy of you.  Leave the others in the dirt–where they belong.

The other people admitted that they themselves discriminate and were unhappy with doing so.  One person who reacted wrote that she found herself sometimes on the side of being a discriminator.  She finds herself feeling the way about young people that older people used to feel about her.  Yet another person who responded–same issue–being a discriminator–just can’t break her thinking of older people as ‘time to go-ers.’ The good news is that both of these readers don’t think that it is ‘right’ to think the way they do–they just feel justified.

So What Do You Do?

I guess my first advice is to acknowledge that there is a huge “humans are this way” element to this. We think of people who are different from us as, well, different.  Not as good.   And then my second advice is to do what I do–struggle with yourself every day to challenge this thinking.  Instead of seeing the instances when the young or old person, does something completely wrong, look for when they make sense.  Work really hard to see it from their perspective.  What do you know that they don’t know that would change their perspective.  What EXPERIENCE (not advice or ‘telling’) could you help them have that would help shift their thinking.  Don’t give them the experience and then take credit for it.  Give them experience and let it go.  Give them the experience and try to figure out the next one that will lead them to an understanding of your point of view.  Think of it as an experiment.  Keep trying things.  Try with one person.  Try with two people.  Compare.  What worked and why.  What didn’t work and why?

Now experiment  with yourself.  Listen to your language.  Are you “them” and “us” -ing?  Are you plopping damning stereotypes on a whole category of people?  Work to see each as an individual.  Note the ways in which the person is ‘different’ from the stereotype.  Another thing we humans do–we make fairer judgements about others who we see as ‘exceptions’ to the stereotype.  “Well, s/he is DIFFERENT.”  Of course s/he is–we are ALL different.  None of us completely fit the damning stereotype.  The sooner you can stop applying that stereotype, the sooner you can stop discriminating.

Go for it!

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May 27, 2013 · 7:00 pm

Are They Discriminating Against You? Probably.

iStock_000011070043XSmall

Discrimination

Not only is it likely that someone (or several someones) are discriminating against you, it is also likely that you are discriminating against someone (or several someones).  It is human nature that we like/trust/believe in/select those who are like us more than those who are different from us.  So . . . Europeans choose Europeans, Americans choose Americans, young people choose young people.  Then there is the problem of stereotypes.  We believe them–without even being aware of them for the most part.  We believe that ‘old’ people aren’t as capable as people our age. We believe that young people aren’t ambitious (at least the latest generation).  Asian people are smart at math.  Women aren’t ambitious because they’re going to go have babies. White men are more ambitious than black men.  And on and on and on.  These stereotypes cause us to discriminate, sometimes without our even being aware of it.  Stereotypes are as  wrong as they are right.  In fact, those of us who are the subject of the stereotypes usually believe they are wrong–period.  I say all of this to acknowledge that discrimination is alive and well in all of our behaviors.   I’m not in any way defending it, just acknowledging it.

So what?

There are laws against discrimination.  There are rules against discrimination.  There are lots of reasons for all of us to struggle against discrimination by others and ourselves.  There are people whose whole existence is focused on the struggle against discrimination.

Can you wait?  Can you wait until everyone stops discriminating against you?  I can’t.  I think it’s time to take the battle on directly.  I think it’s time to work around/through/over and under discrimination.  Just because the decision makers at your organization think you are too old or too young, that doesn’t mean that that is the case at other organizations.  You have a responsibility to yourself to find a place to work that values you for who you are and what you bring to the table.  You need to find a way to make a living that values who and what  you are.

I talk to people who are absolutely sure that they are being discriminated against.  That makes them feel like there is nothing that they can do about it.  They are the age they are.  They are born black or Hispanic or Asian or female, and nothing can change that. True.  There are places, organizations, friends, decision makers, and opportunities where it doesn’t matter.  Go find them.  You are not sentenced to the status quo.  You choose it.

Do something different.

You are not stuck.  When you graduated from high school you didn’t think about this the way you do now (unless, of course, you just graduated from high school).  Life and your experiences have made you believe that people are discriminating against you.  Wipe all that experience off your radar and ASSUME that someone out there can and will believe in you and what you can do.  Go FIND them!  Where are they?  Make people prove that they don’t believe in you instead of assuming that they don’t.  To be clear, I’m not saying they AREN’T discriminating.  I’m saying, don’t let that rule your life.  Go work someplace else.  Go work for a different boss.  Find a way to make a living (including working for yourself) that doesn’t let those who discriminate against you prevent you from doing/being/having what you deserve.  I know that it might be hard.  I know that it would be a lot easier for all of us if discrimination wasn’t a factor.  Don’t let it prevent you from living your life, making a living, being successful.

And then focus on your own discriminatory behavior.

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April 28, 2013 · 2:29 pm

Who Are You And How Did You Get That Way?

In the mirror

Understand Yourself

One of the most important tasks of becoming a great leader and a successful Executive (and those things are not necessarily the same thing) is to REALLY understand yourself.  You need to understand what makes you tick–what motivates you, what slows you down, what scares you and what gets in your way.  You need to understand how others see you.  You also need to understand that what goes on in your head is absolutely invisible to those around you.  They don’t know why you do what you do and they certainly don’t know what you are thinking.  You need to understand your strengths and your weaknesses, your learning style and your interpersonal style.  And then you need to show enough of your internal workings and motivations to help others understand you.

We all think we know ourselves.  We are mostly wrong.  That is why it is really good to get feedback from others.  I highly recommend getting 360 assessments done–pretty regularly.  These are assessments that get feedback from you, your boss and your subordinates.  When you look at your opinion of yourself against that of your boss and your subordinates, you frequently get a surprise.   If your boss doesn’t agree with your opinion of yourself, then it’s important to note the differences.  If your subordinates don’t agree with you and your boss about your strengths–another important factor.  These instruments just measure behaviors, though–what can actually be seen.  When you get feedback that indicates behaviors that can derail your career, it is important that you CHANGE that behavior.  It is possible for you to change your behavior without understanding how and why you do what you do.  You just change.  Right?  Most of us can’t do that.

The Why of Your Behavior

When I identify that I need to change a behavior–interpersonal interactions, eating, exercising, time management–it really helps me to understand WHY I do (or don’t do) what I do.  For example, I used to get feedback that I was “unreadable.”  As I tried to figure out why people thought that, I also tried to figure out WHY I was unreadable.  What did they mean that I was unreadable?  I started asking people (not the one’s who had given the feedback, but others):  “What does it mean when people say I’m unreadable?  Why do they care? What could I do differently?”  The answers surprised me.  It turns out that I used few happy facial expressions.  I wasn’t aware of this.  Whether I was happy, pissed or someplace in between, I was using the same facial expressions. I had very neutral (or so I thought) facial expressions.   I really wasn’t aware of this.  When I thought long and hard about it,  I realized that some things had happened in my childhood that made me very guarded about my thoughts and feelings.  OK.  That was legitimate.  Then.  Those things no longer existed.  And not only that, it was interfering with my effectiveness as a leader because when left to their own imagination, people frequently assume the worse (that I’m pissed AT THEM).  I was able to (deliberately) change this because I was made aware of it, I asked about it to understand it, and then I could persuade myself that the coping behavior from my childhood was no longer necessary.  I was able to change more easily with this realization.

Some of the things that can impact the way your are and can shape your behaviors as a leader are:

  • Your birth order and your relationships with your siblings
  • Your relationships with your parents
  • Your beliefs about how things work (your mental models)
  • Your beliefs about the “rules” of organizations
  • What you believe about hierarchy and how that fits with your organization, your boss and your subordinates
  • Your beliefs about what makes people tick (Theory X, Theory Y)
  • What you believe about people’s responsibility to the organization and the organization’s responsibility to people

Start With Feedback

It all starts with feedback, though.  You can’t know what behaviors are really working and not working unless people tell you.  They probably won’t tell you unless you ask them.  Once you know the behaviors that you should address, think long and hard about where those behaviors come from.  Then do something about it.

Then Change

Sooner rather than later.

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August 26, 2012 · 11:06 pm

The Way You Think Is Wrong

No Matter Who You Are

No matter who you are–black, white, Hispanic, French, Executive, Gen X, Retiree–the way you think is wrong.  Oh, I left out Democrat or Republican.  Our brains are truly wonderful things.  They are efficient processors of information.  There are a lot of tools that our brains us to make us more efficient and effective in our daily lives of being human.  I call all of these, generally, being on autopilot.  Being on autopilot is your enemy in terms of controlling your future.  Being on autopilot is also your friend in terms of making you more efficient at all the things you have to do in daily life.  The key is to learn the tricks your mind plays on you and to learn to turn these tools on and off to make better judgements when appropriate.

Let Me Be More Specific

Our brains use a number of tools or shortcuts that help us process information:

  • Halo Affect: assumption that because someone is good at doing one thing, s/he will be good at doing other things
  • Availability Heuristic:   assumption that because you think of something more frequently it is more likely to happen
  • Generalizations:  assumption that people, challenges, mistakes, organizations,  . . . pretty much everything . . . are just like the ones we have already experienced.  We tend to generalize trustworthiness, bad intentions, skills, incompetence, etc. based on other similarities.  Examples:  Asians are smart, Senior executives are bad, old people are degenerating,  Gen X’s are . . . (depending on your view).
  • Illusion of Understanding:  assumption that familiarity with something means you understand it
  • Hindsight bias: the tendency to view things as more predictable than they are
  • Motivated forgetting: re-remembering things to avoid blame
  • Overconfidence bias: the belief that your abilities are greater than they are–80% of drivers believe that they are in the top 30% of drivers
  • Recency bias:  giving more credibility to more recent data–the last presenter, the last candidate, the last answer
  • Clustering illusion:  seeing patterns where none exist

We All Do It

All of us use these tools.  They were developed back in the day when we lived in caves and hunted.  They are tools that help us make instant decisions without a lot of effort.  The problem is that they don’t work as well with today’s problems as when we were outrunning lions and tigers and bears.  The worst part about them is that we are generally unaware of them.  We value eyewitness testimony over other kinds of evidence, even though it is highly defective.  We choose candidates like us because we are generalizing and making assumptions at the subconscious level without really evaluating the basis for our assumptions.  We take risks based on shortcuts our brains make without even being aware of them.

What Can You Do?

The best thing to do is to educate yourself about these “tricks” that your mind plays.  There are several great books that can help:

Then Practice!

Learn to take control of the way you think by practicing.  Ask yourself, “Why do I think this?”  “How do I know this?”  “How can I think of this differently?”

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July 31, 2012 · 5:32 pm

Keep Up Or Fall Behind

Keep Up or Fall Behind

If You Want To Stay Employed

To stay marketable in today’s workforce, and to be considered for continued promotions, you HAVE to keep up.  Maybe back in the day that wasn’t as necessary–maybe you got to be an expert within your specialty and that was good enough.  No more.  People who make decisions about whether to hire, promote, or fire people take into consideration the prospect’s current-ness, attitude toward change and learning, and awareness of things outside his specific job.  The only way to come out in good stead in this evaluation is to keep up.  You have to keep up with technology, your company’s market, your company’s industry, trends, and language.  I know, I know–how can you do more than you’re doing?  You’re keeping up as much as you need to.  That may be true.  Or you may need to do more.  Let’s explore this a little.

Technology

There are several kinds of technology that you need to keep current with–how current depends on what your job is, where you are in your career, what market you work in and what your goals are.  There is BIG technology–what are the global trends in technology associated with technology companies and services.  Unless you work in the technology industry, just being generally aware of these is enough. There is also what I call SMALL technology (others may call it something else).  This is the systems and tools that you use in your job and that others (competitors, especially) use to do similar jobs.  Things like Salesforce.com or Oracle or Access or Visio or Telepresence or GoToWebinar.  You should take the opportunity to learn to use absolutely every tool that you can.  If you are lucky enough to work in an organization that uses a lot of technical tools—software, systems or hardware–you should take advantage of all the opportunities to at least become familiar with them.  If you can, you should become proficient at all the tools that others use to do the job that you do.  If you find yourself bounced out of your job, you want to be able to put as many of these on your resume that you can.  Learn them while you can.  Then there is what I call PERSONAL technology.  These are all the technical tools and toys that can make your life more productive and fun.  You should also keep up with these, so that you can keep your mind growing and so that you can be relevant in conversations you have with other people.  Yes, I said relevant.

If you find yourself disagreeing with me, think about why that is.  Is it that you think the technology is irrelevant?  If you think it is irrelevant, I would challenge you to research or discuss this view with others.  If you find that you’re right after you do that, I’ll get off your back. Do you disagree because you don’t really like the discomfort of learning these new things?  If you plan to stay in the workforce more than five more years, you’re going to have to learn and keep learning new technology.  It is better for you to jump in and do it willingly—it makes it look like you’re a positive early adapter—and therefore much valued by organizations. 

Market

It is important that you understand the market you work in, no matter what your job.  If you don’t, it is like walking through a thick forest that borders a high cliff in the dark.  You need to know (or at least have opinions about) what is coming.  You want to know that you are working in a buggy whip factory sometime before the auto industry perfects the assembly line.  If you keep your head down and do your job in your company without checking out your market on a regular basis, you’re likely to get caught without a seat when the music stops. 

Set up Google alerts on key components of your market, your competitors and your company.  How does your company stand against the rest of the companies in the market?  How do their products compare?  Their revenue?  Are other companies breaking out of the market?  Why?  How?  Is the market growing?  Shrinking?  What cataclysmic events can you imagine that would affect the market negatively?  What events could cause it to take off?  Is your company doing anything to prevent/accelerate either of these?

Industry

What is happening with the industry?  Think of the extraordinary changes that have happened in the music or the publishing or the telecom industries in the last 10 years.  Who would have imagined the confluence of these three, the new products, and even the amount of money that could be made?  What is happening in your industry?  What extraordinary change might be on the horizon?  Good or bad?  Is there another industry that might be coming your way like an unexpected tsunami?  Does your company’s strategy foresee anything like this?  Should it?  Again, if you haven’t thought about it, you are not likely to be positioned to take advantage of it when it happens.

Trends

The trends you should pay attention to lie someplace between twitter trends and global shifts.  What is going on?  What does it matter to you (personally) or your company?  You should regularly read important blogs (again, which ones depends on your interests, job, company, industry, age, and goals), news (papers, online, whatever works for you), books (you can listen if you prefer).  You should know what is happening in the important aspects of your life.  You should be well read and know what the major new ideas are in the fields  of business, science, health, technology and anything else that is important to you.  How deeply you understand these ideas depends on why you need to understand them—to be well read is one level, to be a thought leader is another. 

Language

Ironically, to be well respected, you have to speak the current language of your audience.  That means that in most organizations you need to know and speak the acronyms of the organization.  To speak to young(er) or old(er) people, you need to use their phrases that convey the message you want to get across. You need to know the technical terms, the terms of art, the phrases.  You can be extremely well educated and speak the language of your specialty, but if you’re not using your audiences’ language, they usually don’t give you the credit you deserve.  Learn the acronyms.  Learn the current expressions.  Learn the cultural terms. 

Who Has The Time?!?

You do.  You have to.  This is the difference between what is important and what is urgent.  For your continued marketability, you have to put the time and effort into keeping up.  Learning how to use Access when you’re out of a job and the job descriptions all require it is much harder than if you’re sitting in an organization that will support your learning it by providing you the software AND the training.  Take advantage.  For you and your organization it is a win/win.  And maybe you’ll never have to learn it when you’re out of a job—because you’re never out of a job.

 

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April 1, 2012 · 10:12 pm

My Generation Is Best, The Other . . . Not So Much

That OTHER Generation is IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!!

One of my favorite team building exercises is to put people of the same generation together and have them describe the other generations.  I have them make a list of the characteristics of the other generations, the strengths and the weaknesses, what most interferes with their own ability to work with the other generations, and what they admire about the other generation.  There are frequently three different generations in the groups I work with these days.  What I enjoy so much about these exercises are:  1) how similar the feedback is across different organizations; 2) how surprised and (frequently) outraged the generations are about how others see them; and 3) how important these conversations are to changing the way these folks look at and work with each other.

The Generations

The three generations that co-exist today in most American workplaces are:

  • Millennials- born between 1984 and 2002
  • Gen X- born between 1965 and 1983
  • Babyboomers- born between 1946  and 1964

Someone born in 1946 was born to parents traumatized by both the Depression and World War II.  Someone born in 1966 was born to parents who were influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and the Sexual Revolution.  Someone born in 1986 was born to parents who were just getting used to computers, two-income families, PacMan and the beginning of CNN.  Each generation is different from the other because of the influence of their parents’ experiences, the differences in their education, and the impact of different political and technology influences.  Each generation thinks theirs is “the best.”

More important, though, each generation is trying to solve the same problems–create a home, have a meaningful life, feed and educate their kids,  make the world a better place, care for aging parents (Millennials aren’t there yet).  They believe that theirs is the correct way to do it, but they all are seeking similar goals.  The similar goals are as important a common ground as the different ways are an area of disagreement.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

The most important thing that comes out of the team building exercises that I do across generations is that each wants R.E.S.P.E.C.T. from the other.  Real, genuine respect.  Sometimes these exercises get quite heated–and it is almost always because  they feel disrespected by the other generations (not even necessarily from the ones in the room, but from other encounters.  These feelings are usually built up over years.)   Respect isn’t possible if you continue to think that your generation’s way is the best.  It is one way.  It is based on what was going on when you hit maturity.  It is not the ONLY way, though.  If you had had the same issues/experiences/challenges as another generation, then you would likely have the same priorities and opinions of how it “should” be done.

Figure out how to appreciate the strengths of the other generations’ approach.  I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t have the Gen Ys to challenge me and the Millennials to help me with the constantly changing technology.  They need me to give them a longer perspective that is tinged with wisdom.  Although it would probably be more comfortable to be in an organization that includes only those who share the priorities and understandings that I have, it would be so BORING!

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