Back in 2010, Standard & Poor’s predicted that the biggest influence on “the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking” will be “the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”
As usual, our governments at all levels are doing little more than funding studies, wringing their hands and making dire predictions. In all likelihood they will continue doing more of the same, since constructive efforts would require bipartisan cooperation, and politicians aren’t known for their willingness to bite unpopular bullets — as our country’s aging/decrepit infrastructure proves.
Companies, by contrast, are uniquely positioned to change practices and attitudes now. Transformation won’t be easy, but companies that move past today’s preconceptions about older employees and respond and adapt to changing demographics will realize significant dividends, generating new possibilities for financial return and enhancing the lives of their employees and customers.
Companies might be in a better positioned, but rampant cognitive bias, whether unconscious or conscious, often prevails, resulting in a preference for hiring “people like me.”
Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.
Are companies prepared? The short answer is “no.” Aging will affect every aspect of business operations — whether it’s talent recruitment, the structure of compensation and benefits, the development of products and services, how innovation is unlocked, how offices and factories are designed, and even how work is structured — but for some reason, the message just hasn’t gotten through.
So forget companies.
Current bosses, as well as bosses-to-be, have the great advantage of being able to do it now themselves, rather than waiting for their companies to act.
And it’s to their advantage, assuming they want to keeping their teams humming, well-staffed and highly productive.
But, depending on your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), don’t expect it to happen overnight or minimize the amount of work that may be required.
To get started, click the link at the link. It will take you to a seven part series in the Harvard Business Review called The Aging Workforce. It’s probably the fastest way to wrap your mind around what’s happening in all its complexity — or at least a lot of it.
And join me tomorrow for a closer look at cognitive bias, which affects the entire human race — including you and me.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I wrote this post in 2008, midway through the Great Recession (2007-2009), which lowered demand for talent and mitigated the expected people shortage. It took a decade, but the talent shortage is here with a vengeance — at all levels. Moreover, birth rates have fallen below replacement needs creating a demographic time bomb. One result is that bosses at all level need to become expert at managing a multigenerational workforce — not just managing, but also hiring outside their comfort zone if they want to stay staffed. More on that tomorrow.
Great post by Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace on How Age Impacts Your View of Life. It focuses on satisfaction and expectations at various stages of life. Click over, it’s well worth reading.
But what I wanted to discuss here today appeared near the end of the post.
“During the past few years we’ve seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions…I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly “retired” workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.”
Steve’s got a point about the recovery, but what if this mess hadn’t happened?
What if a normal down cycle had occurred? One that didn’t go global with the same vengeance; one that required only spotty realignment as opposed to wholesale layoffs.
Worker demographics have been a global concern for over a decade, but the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the corresponding skills needed to manage a multigenerational workforce haven’t improved nearly as much as was hoped.
Why? Is there a root to the problem (challenge, if you prefer) that should be addressed, but isn’t?
I have an idea about the root, tell me what you think.
I believe that one large piece of this problem stems from the relationship of parents and children and the difficulty of letting go and changing the paradigms.
Notice that ‘paradigm’ is plural, since there are several going on simultaneously; the major ones are
older (parent), younger (child);
peer (siblings/relatives) to peer;
older (sibling/relative), younger (sibling/relative) and vice versa,
but there are multiple other minor configurations.
What I’ve found is that although there is no family involved, for many people the interaction styles are habitual, unconscious and happen across all ages with no discernible pattern.
If, in fact, this is a root problem how do we fix it? Other than a one-at-a-time approach I have no idea.
What are your thoughts regarding the validity of my hypothesis? What ideas do you have to address it?
I had something else planned for today, but two things, took precedence.
First, I had coffee with some guys and they started in about how overblown the whole “he touched me” thing had gotten. There were five of them, two said it had been blown up by the media, two thought the women had a point and the fifth said it was all feminist crap from a bunch of man-haters.
I accidentally spilled my coffee on him (it really was an accident; I choked on the sip I was taking when he said that and spilled it), which broke up the party.
So I came home, looked at some news articles and found one that was so relevant I had to share it with you.
For the project, titled “The Dress for Respect,” researchers built a dress embedded with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure. The information was then relayed to a visual system so that researchers could essentially track harassment in real time. (…) In just under four hours, the women are touched a combined 157 times.
Two news stories have been running through my mind this week.
A few weeks ago Amazon announced their two new locations for HQ2. Queens and Northern Virginia. Both are already heavily populated and expensive places to live.
And, if we are being fair, those cities may not truly benefit from Amazon arriving. Time will tell of course, but a greater impact might have occurred had Amazon chosen a medium sized city.
I recall the madness/hope by city leaders all around the nation. They lobbied, made promises and petitioned for Amazon to arrive and help their city thrive.
I live in St Petersburg, FL and we have a growing tech scene. We also have an MLB baseball stadium with low attendance and in a prime part of the city. Our proposal to Amazon included tearing that park down and leasing the 80 acres at a reduced cost to Amazon. I’m sure other cities made comparable offers.
All in an effort for salvation from one company.
You hear the other side of it too. GM is closing five plants. Tens of thousands of skilled employees are now laid off. Those were good jobs, too, for the area.
They are the anchor companies that allow the baker, the book store and the banks to survive. When those plants came to those cities it was salvation. People had a job, benefits and could raise a family.
I understand that companies come and go. I firmly believe in the free market and realize that companies are not charities. They are profit driven and make decisions based on the bottom line.
My point to all of this is that cities cannot rely on one industry alone. They need diversity. Salvation is not found in any one company.
In the intro to yesterday’s post, about how boredom often triggers creativity, I referred to the hoops being jumped through to foster creativity in the workplace.
Unfortunately, it’s not working and that’s what to day’s post is about.
You may have noticed that creativity is all the rage—and not just among artists. American culture, and indeed the world, has become obsessed with manufacturing creative kids, who will turn into inventive workers, who will then become the innovative leaders we need in these rapidly-changing times. (…) As creativity is increasingly touted as the “premiere skill” of our time, [Diane] Senechal argues, there’s little interest in just letting this ability develop independently. Instead, it is being quantified, dissected and tested, taught and measured.
That approach may work on some talent, but developing creativity isn’t one of them.
In reality, that approach does more to destroy creativity than almost anything else.
The enormous number of major discoveries grounded in serendipity should be enough to convince people that structure and pressure don’t work.
If institutions really want to encourage creativity, in other words, they’ll have to develop the requisite patience to wait for it—and the ability to recognize what inventiveness is really made of. Insisting on innovation will never work, according to Senechal. “Perhaps the worst thing for creativity is dogma,” she argues. “Dogma delights in nothing; it insists on its own rigid ways.”
Of course, humans are notorious for believing they can improve any process by structuring it — even when it goes against research and proven results.
Bottom line, if you want your people to be more creative you need to let go, not hold on.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Creativity and innovation are on every bosses’ mind and they do everything possible to create an environment and/or process to increase it — but it’s not working. In fact, as all those efforts are actually crippling creativity. Join me tomorrow for a look at what’s actually happening.
…a phenomenon that’s been identified by Edward de Bono, the legendary creative thinker. He calls it the “creative pause.” (…)The creative pause allows the space for your mind to drift, to imagine and to shift, opening it up to new ways of seeing.
From HBS’ Jim Heskett’s research question on deep thinking to my own comments on the value of silence, the need for undistracted time and the resulting creativity is well documented.
To be or not to be distracted is an individual free choice and can’t be dictated by others, but it is always wise to look at the consequences of one’s chosen actions.
Distracted driving kills people.
Distracted thinking kills creativity and innovation.
And while Facebook is clearly the poster child for data misuse, Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t exactly on the side of the angels.
Politicians on both sides are weighing in, but, considering the money involved in US-approved corruption, AKA, lobbying, that effort is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
“Increasingly — and especially given the political environment — a key part of this consideration for workers has become the moral and ethical implications of the choices made by their employers, ranging from the treatment of employees or customers to the ethical implications of the projects on which they work. This is especially true given the central role of ‘big tech’ in new fears about information, rights, and privacy and the growing feeling that a lack of oversight in this sector has been harmful.” –Prasanna Tambe, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions
“Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there,” said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. (…) As Facebook has been rocked by scandal after scandal, some young engineers are souring on the company.
“Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”
“They do a lot more due diligence,” said Heather Johnston, Bay Area district president for the tech job staffing agency Robert Half. “Before, candidates were like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do team interviews. I want a one-and-done.’” Now, she added, job candidates “want to meet the team.”
“They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”
More than 20,000 employees and contractors walked out of Google’s offices around the world Thursday, Nov. 1, organizers said. The group is protesting sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a non-inclusive workplace culture.
So.
Perhaps “we, the people” will have more force in the corporate world than it does elsewhere.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
For all the promise of technology people are still people and they respond as such. Further, I doubt that’s going to change within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing.
(Note: Although the “Chat with Miki” box no longer exists, I typically reply to email within 24 hours.)
“Clint” used the ‘Chat with Miki” box in the right-hand frame to ask me this question.
Have you ever heard this? “People usually won’t change until the pain of NOT changing exceeds the pain of changing.”
Since this is a pretty common idea I thought I’d share my ideas with everybody.
I’ve heard this and many variations of it over the years, especially when applied to the workplace where it becomes a form of management by threat
For example, if your company or boss decides on a change and people’s jobs hinge on that change, they will change.
The problem is that they will also disengage at some level, maybe a little, but sometimes a lot. Not always obviously, but over time it will show in lower productivity, less creativity and, eventually, higher turnover.
Clint then asked if I thought that vested self-interest could be used instead of increasing the pain.
The answer is absolutely.
VSI is the perfect opposite to increased pain.
By rethinking a desired action, such as change, and presenting it in terms of its value to employees you can trip the VSI switch—but not if it’s a con.
As I’ve said a million times, people are not stupid; if the desired action is not really in their best interests there is nothing you can do that will convince them. VSI will still kick in, but the result will be resume polishing, lots of LinkedIn action and conversations with recruiters.
Clint decided that by using vested self-interest he could reduce the pain of changing. He plans to connect his organization’s goals to his people’s goals, which will effectively reduce the pain and increase the likelihood that they will do what he needs them to do—painlessly.
Handy little item my chat box. Try it, I’m usually here.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Most founders love to talk about leadership and there’s little question that they consider themselves leaders.
But leading is a lot more than creating a vision and raising funds.
Leading means modeling the right choice and who better than Wally Bock, my favorite leadership guru, to explain what that really means.
Leadership by Example
“There is no leadership without leadership by example.”
I heard that bit of wisdom from the lips of Captain James Westley Ayers, USMC. But I only remember the quote because of the example he set.
My father said that, “You’re alive as long as they tell stories about you.” Many of us who knew Captain Ayers are still telling stories about him half a century after we experienced his leadership. The big lesson for me was: leaders care for their people.
That’s Marine doctrine. A leader has two jobs. You must accomplish the mission and you must care for the people. But this is more than “leaders eat last.” This is a way of thinking about your responsibility for the people you lead.
One set of Captain Ayers stories revolve around the “meat he couldn’t use.” Our unit had lots of young, married Marines who were living off base, trying to make it on the couple hundred bucks the Marine Corps paid us, and whatever their spouse could bring in. By the middle of the month, it was always hard times. It was time for peanut butter sandwiches and fried baloney for dinner.
And then Captain Ayers would show up at the door. He always asked, “I wonder if you can help me?”
The problem was something like “I’ve got a whole bunch of meat I can’t use, and would you take some off my hands, as a favor?” Sometimes he bought more than he could handle. Sometimes his freezer had broken. Sometimes he bought all that meat for a reunion that got cancelled. Whatever it was, he asked if you would be kind enough to take some meat, say enough for a couple of months of meals, off his hands.
By the time I encountered Captain Ayers, the Marine Corps had drilled into me the idea that a leader‘s goal is to accomplish the mission. Captain Ayers showed me what it means to care for your people. Most of that caring wasn’t dramatic. He encouraged and suggested. He told you the truth.
I experienced that when I wanted to apply for a program that required his recommendation. He spent a half hour telling me that he wouldn’t do it because I wasn’t ready and explaining why. Then he took another half hour to tell me what I had to do to be ready in a year.
I haven’t always lived up to Captain Ayers’ example, but it’s always been there as a shining standard for me. That’s what leadership by example is all about.
When I got out of the Marines, and started in business, I encountered something very different. I won’t give his name, because I hope he’s reformed since I knew him, I call him “My Worst Boss Ever.”
Worst Boss Ever’s example wasn’t so great. He was selfish, haughty, and mean. He relished catching people doing something wrong and belittling them in public.
Leadership by Example Is Like A Superpower
Leadership by example is a superpower. It influences the people you lead and affects the choices they make. Like any superpower, you can use it for good or not.
The people who lead you early in your career have a huge impact on the way you lead. My research in police agencies produced “leadership trees” of good supervisors who had learned their craft working for other good supervisors early in their career.
You’re Going to Set the Example, So Set A Good One
I was fortunate. I experienced Captain Ayers and other effective leaders before I experienced my Worst Boss Ever. When I encountered him, I knew he was a jerk, and how he acted did not model the leader I wanted to become.
You don’t have any choice about setting the example. That’s built into human nature. The only choice you have is whether you will set a good example or a bad one.
Bottom Line
There is no leadership without leadership by example. You don’t have a choice about that. Your only choice is whether you will set a good example or a bad one.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
