Leadership's Future: The Need To Change
by Miki SaxonI’ve written a lot about the problems and difficulties with Gen Y, but I want to make something clear.
Gen Y didn’t raise themselves to feel entitled, require constant praise or expect success for trying their hardest.
Jan left a comment a few weeks ago and I think she speaks for a large number of her generation, “There is a great amount of pressure to earn good grades and gain a GREAT career, as if somehow that is the only way to gain success in our lives. … The present often does not matter, including learning the subject. Students live under this constant pressure to make good grades, with that fear of failure programmed into the back of our minds.” (Please take a moment to read her entire comment.)
Decades ago after my sister had her first child she said, “I know that I’ll do things that mess up my kids, but they damn well won’t be the same things that messed us up,” and they weren’t.
This is normal life, with the previous generation screwing up their kids in some way and the kids eventually sorting it out—or not—and then moving on to the next generation, but it’s changed now.
Greg Jayne is the Sports Editor for my local paper and he summed it up nicely in a column about the people’s attitude towards performance enhancing drugs.
“Last year, Major League Baseball drew 78.6 million spectators to the ballpark… The sport generated about $6 billion in revenue, nearly twice what it generated in 2000 and roughly $20 for every man, woman and child in the United States. … The baseball-watching public simply doesn’t care that much about players who cheat the game. … We live in an era in which style trumps substance, and the superficial is held in such high regard that we all are diminished. Is there any reason to think that baseball should be different? Is there any reason to express moral outrage when somebody is trying to improve his performance and help his team win? That is, after all, the ethos of the time.”
Yet there are still supposed to be areas that are sacrosanct, people we assume will work for the good of our kids; people to whom we don’t give a second thought—until their actions blow up in our faces.
Priests/ministers/rabbis. Teachers. Family. Judges.
It’s terrible when people are driven by their own inner demons, but somehow it’s even worse when they ruin kids’ lives out of plain old fashioned greed.
“…two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks. … Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.”
Obviously, it’s not just individuals, but the laissez faire attitude prevalent in a large percentage of all generations that’s driving the problems to levels not seen previously.
Enough is enough. We need change—but where to start?
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Image credit: drinksmachine on flickr
May 15th, 2009 at 9:38 am
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