Sanity & Madness
Stronger Than Me
“Gen Z can handle stress – in fact they’re brave enough to say it’s unacceptable” says Bruce Daisley in this opinion piece in the The Guardian. Unlike many of my generation, I’m in total agreement with Bruce.
I wish I had had the awareness and the balls to push back in my career, to establish and defend firm boundaries, to tell my bosses when to back off and, critically, to be able to express how the workplace was impacting my sense of self and my wellbeing.
But I didn’t, I went along with it and allowed myself to be absorbed and overwhelmed by ‘work’. In fact, I actively embraced it through some false sense of ‘getting on’ and ‘being strong’. I chose to work late, I chose to respond to each cranking up of the demands by gritting my teeth and ‘pushing through’, I chose to be stoic and unbending when my insides were being ripped apart with emotion.
So I am all for Gen Z saying “Up with this we will not put”. It’s long overdue.
I don’t think they are ‘snowflakes’ or that they lack resilience. I think they are much more aware of their limits and when they are about to pushed over them, and they refuse to allow that to happen. Good. We should not be expected to push beyond those boundaries, it’s dangerous.
Unfortunately, this attitude is all too prevalent. In Bruce’s article he quotes Steven Bartlett, the entrepreneur and podcaster, claiming Gen Z are “the least resilient generation I have ever seen”. He’s 30, as a millennial, you’d think he’d have more insight and understanding. Also, how many generations does he have experience of hiring? Is this a view really based on experience, or just on what other people are saying?
He goes on to say: “I just fear that when I’m hiring people in that generation, I almost need to go an extra length just to check they can cope with a high-intensity culture…”. Hey, Steven, maybe, just maybe, the problem is with the high-intensity culture rather than the people? Maybe you’re overlooking that your business model is based on burning people out and pushing them over their limits and that’s the issue here.
Gen Z are plenty resilient. Especially to this stream of hackneyed bullshit.
As I said of ‘Quiet Quitting’ last week, this is simply a sane response to the workplace environment that people find themselves in and a rational act of self-preservation.
Hold On, I’m Coming
Bruce is promoting his latest book, “Fortitude”, in which he explores this topic of resilience (I’ve haven’t read it yet but I have bought it. That’s almost as good, right? It’s osmosis or something, that’s how it works, isn’t it?).
As I understand it, his main finding is that fortitude (which he prefers as a term) is a collective thing. People have the fortitude to deal with difficulties when they are supported, when they are part of a community. Look at the people of Ukraine, it’s not their resilience as individuals that is helping them to endure the war and fight back but their collective spirit as they come together as communities and as a nation.
That’s why ‘resilience training’ doesn’t work. It frames the problem as one to do with the individual when it is actually to do with the environment. You can’t ‘strengthen’ the individual to solve the problem.
I often refer to resilience training as giving people wellies so they can stand in the crap for longer instead of cleaning the crap up. In fact, the level of crap keeps rising and the training is just giving people bigger wellies. Eventually, people are in the biggest wellies they can fit into and it’s only a matter of time before they get overtopped and then … I’ll let you finish off that analogy yourself!
We need to stop handing out the wellies and deal with the problem at source. We need to Decrapify Work.
Jump Into The Fire
Christine Armstrong has published the finding of Armstrong & Partners’ survey of knowledge workers. (I mentioned this last week).
Whilst there is still a lot of confusion and uncertainty out there, it seems that many CEOs feel it is time to make some decisions about office space, hybrid working patterns, recruitment and all the other issues they’ve been sitting on the fence about.
When we are in a state of uncertainty, it is very uncomfortable and distressing. At some point we reach the limit of our tolerance and decide on a path of action, not because we believe it to be the best one but because we cannot stand the discomfort any longer. Any path of action appears better than staying in limbo. However, that is a false impression, as some CEOs are going to find out.
One of the striking things in the full report is that a number of interviewees report internal psychological conflict about the correct working model i.e. their own experience of hybrid working is positive but they do not believe it is sustainable for the organisation.
This is a paradigm conflict. Their lived experience is in conflict with their paradigm of how work should be, so they dismiss the evidence of their own eyes. They then defend their paradigm by creating reasons for its validity - the familiar tropes about culture, learning, innovation and so on.
I find this fascinating, there’s real turmoil going on in the minds of senior people and that’s driving decisions that are about to impact the workplace.
Those that have developed a high tolerance for uncertainty will be taking their time to decide the way forward, running experiments and analysing the results, de-risking their decisions, giving themselves options and increasing their adaptability. They are waiting to see what emerges and will take decision when they feel it is the right time, rather than leaping to solutions in the hope they will deliver some certainty.
Others are going to jump and there’s going to be some heavy and painful landings.
Those that can stay on the fence until it becomes clearer where they should jump are going to be the winners.
Mad World
I was reminded earlier today of one of my entanglements with the ludicrous process that is the Corporate Plan & Budget cycle back in my days in BT.
It wasn’t the fact that in the late 1980s, it took about 34 days for BT to produce the monthly accounts for the business (think about it). Seems the accountants were not just creative with numbers but with time too.
No, it was when I had to produce a forecast in August for the next financial year, when we were planning to launch a new range of products in the latter part of that year i.e. in 12-18 months time. We had never launched any products like these, or sold into that market because it didn’t really exist yet. What’s more, the products were based on new technology that we had no experience of using. Oh, and we hadn’t actually designed them yet.
I explained this to the finance guy and said “So, I’ll just have to guess”. “NO!”, he exclaimed, “we want solid forecasts, so they MUST be based on data.”
“But there isn’t any data, so I’ll have to just guess”.
“NO! We will not accept guesses, we MUST have solid figures backed up by data.”
“What if I told you they were backed up with data?”
“NO! That would be lying. You MUST go and find the data and then come back to me with your forecasts.”
And so this back and forth continued until it got to the deadline - and we were still deadlocked. So how did it get resolved?
He phoned me and said, “Today is the deadline, I must have your forecasts and they must be real ones based on data. We will not tolerate any further delay.”
I replied, ”OK, I’m going to send you a forecast and I’m going to tell you it is based on data.”
Him: “Good. Is it really?”
Me: “No, I’m lying.”
Him (through gritted teeth): “I didn’t hear that.”
A little example of the everyday absurdity that is corporate life, a parallel universe to real life where the normal rules of logic and physics don’t apply.
If you have any similar tales of your time through the corporate looking glass, let me know, I’d love to hear them.
Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?
There is no truth in the rumours that the UK government have set up a Go Fund Me page to pay for what’s left of the mini-budget. However, for all you career coaches out there, I hear a formerly high-ranking minister may be looking for your services - and he could have quite a few colleagues to recommend you too quite soon. Form an orderly queue.
At the moment, politics is making corporate life look almost sane, which is terrifying on all sorts of levels!
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