Can you imagine telling your boss that you deserve a raise because you come to work on time every day?
Or that she shouldn’t fire you for poor performance because you tried really, really hard?
Last week on Leadership’s Future a young man named Andrew started a conversation. During it he gave me a link to an article in the NY Times about student expectations.
Expectations based on that sense of entitlement which makes me nuts.
It seems that today’s students expect an A if they attend class and turn in assignments.
And it’s wrong for the professors to consider the quality of work, since a lower grade will affect their job opportunities and that’s not fair.
“A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. … Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.”
It’s not surprising, since K-12 inflates grades, passes everyone in order to keep their funding, and fires teachers who cling to the out-moded idea that school is a place to actually learn.
Here are two student quotes that seem to sum up a majority viewpoint…
“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there really than the effort that you put in? If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point? If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.” –Jason Greenwood, senior, University of Maryland
“I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.” –Sarah Kinn, junior, University of Vermont
As hiring managers and potential colleagues I’m sure this attitude thrills you no end.
Do you find it terrifying that at some point in the future these same students may be your doctor or lawyer and that, reality forbid, these are the people who will teach the next generation? I do.
The story drew 131 comments; I didn’t read them all, but here are three that struck me.
“I think the disputes about grading also stem from students approaching education as consumers. Because they pay to attend school, they have an attitude of, “the customer is always right” and feel they should have their grades their way.” –Tiffany Mills, Detroit, MI
“Having been for a time peripherally associated with a Junior Year Abroad program in Paris, I was shocked to learn that certain parents of students whose grades were mediocre would actually telephone the program director and threaten her with various forms of retribution if the grades were not inflated. Apparently students are not the only ones with a sense of entitlement!!” — Jill Bourdais, Paris, France
I appreciated this one, since it sums up what should happen when grades are down…
“I received a D+ on my first paper for a history course in my freshman year of college. After the initial shock and indignation wore off… That course was a turning point in my education. I wasn’t just regurgitating facts, but thinking about the source materials from the perspective of those who wrote it and really analyzing the content. It showed me a new way to read into materials in other courses and helped me earn better grades. I earned a B in the class and was delighted with the grade, considering how far I come. A bad grade isn’t always a bad thing. It can be an opportunity to improve.” — Maggi S, Chicago, IL
And finally, a comment that probably reflects what many of you are currently thinking.
“Students who think that just attending class and doing the reading is enough are in for a huge shock when (or if) they enter the world of work. I’m a writer. If I spend hours on a piece, but it doesn’t do what my client wants it to do, I’ve failed. I don’t get paid. Merely “doing the work” ain’t enough; it’s the QUALITY of the work that counts.” — JoMo, Minneapolis MN
On a practical note, hiring managers might find it of more value to look at grades a bit differently as I explain here.
I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that as important as hard work, good planning, etc., are, there was something else at work in my life. Something outside of my control and I wanted to know what it was.
I finally decided it was luck—definitely outside my control.
I wrote recently abut how the luck of right time/right place luck played a role in the early success of a startup and also touched on Malcolm Gladwell’s research as described in Outliers: The Story of Success.
“Higher-income parents did gesture more and, more importantly, their children on average produced 25 meanings in gesture during that 90-minute session, compared with an average of 13 among poorer children, they reported in the journal Science. … Gesturing also seems to be an important precursor to forming sentences, as children start combining one word plus a gesture for a second word. … In fact, kindergarten vocabulary is a predicter of how well youngsters ultimately fare in school.”
Such a little thing, but with such potentially enormous impact.
I don’t remember my mother gesturing, but I do know that she talked to my sister and I using the exact same vocabulary that she used with her peers and that became our vocabulary. Fortunately for us, she had a large vocabulary between having gone to college and being an avid reader, but I wonder where I would be if that had been different.
Plus, researchers are finding that children start learning long before it was originally thought.
The problem is that from zero to six kids dependent on what they get from home; from 6 or so to18 or so they look to their peers, which is the blind leading the blind, and then it’s on to adulthood where changes are far more difficult and, if the research is at all accurate, limited.
No one can control when they’re are born, who their parents are or the economic strata into which they’re born, but you can reach out and help change the people’s luck.
And for all those who look at me and say that they’re busy or that they have donated all they can or it’s just not their problem and there are schools/social services/etc., to deal with it I have a news flash for you.
Unless you plan to die tomorrow, it’s your problem.
It’s your problem because of a little thing called demographics.
This recession will eventually turn around, even if it takes longer than our instant gratification culture likes, and when it does the US is going to need every warm body if it plans to retain/regain its success and influence.
No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.
Your choice is whether to be part of the good luck or the bad.
I received a call from a reader, I’ll call him Doug, (I love calls, you may reach me at 866.335.8054, 9 AM to11 PM Pacific time.) who wanted to know why I kept harping on the need for long-term this and long-term that. He said that he’s 26 and part of “the online generation” and used to “instant gratification.”
We talked for quite awhile and I found him to be intelligent, well-spoken and, in his own way despite what he said, thoughtful—but also impatient.
Influencing others is always stressed as a major trait of leadership—maybe the most important trait. But to lead on any level requires an understanding of the larger picture, along with strategic understanding of what’s coming down the road.
Neither one of those offers much instant anything.
I’m not saying Doug speaks for his entire generation, but in a post last summer I linked to several books and articles discussing changes occurring in brain functions as a result of the digital world.
One of the links is to an essay in the Atlantic Monthly by author Nicholas Carr in which he says, “the net is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”. He cited other high-powered thinkers and online commentators: what if the way I THINK has changed? asked one. “I’ve lost the capacity to read War and Peace any more,” said another, whose current best effort was to stay with a three or four-paragraph weblog entry.”
Another article talks about Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of a new book, iBrain, “who cites a Stanford University study that for every hour a person spends on a computer, personal interaction with others drops by 30 minutes.
“With the weakening of the brain’s neural circuitry controlling human contact,” Dr. Small writes, “our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages.”
You can think of it along the scale of Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there’s not social connectiveness and difficulties with eye contact.”
And this isn’t just about the so-called digital generation, “Scans of the more practised internet users [55-78] during those search tasks showed increased activity in the front of the brain, where reasoning, complex decision-making, short-term memory and the processing of sensations and thoughts all originate. … Within five days though, the digital newcomers were showing the same neural activity.”
Along with greed, is it possible that this new style brain affected the people who ran the banks, hedge funds, and other businesses that played fast and loose with your money?
How will these new brains lead as they move into the workforce and the world?
Would you like to work for a company where the 401K matching on 5% of salary is as much as 11%? Where you can become a manager earning $62,000 plus bonus and company car with no college degree, no Union, no trade—nothing but hard work.
Of course, you’ll have to put up with snickers and even scorn if you mention your job in public.
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
“While an average McDonald’s grosses $2.2 million a year, seasoned managers who motivate employees and keep customers coming back can add more than $200,000 to that total.“Restaurant managers are in the most important position in our company,” says Richard Floersch, McDonald’s chief human resources officer.”
Moreover, with corporate culture being recognized as the moving force behind corporate performance, why is it that articles about changing culture in major corporations employing mostly skilled, well-paid workers, such as IBM, are met with serious discussion, while changing it in major corporations with mostly minimum wage earners, such as McDonalds, is marked down as hype?
Why was a cultural change at IBM seen as key to the company’s survival, but instilling pride in the workers at McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC is viewed as hype, “Raising spirits is cheaper than raising salaries.”
Why do we expect young people to take pride in their first ‘real’ job, or care about the customer, when they were laughed at for the same attitudes/actions in their minimum wage job?
Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they are honest, hardworking, raise families and even pay taxes, which is more than you can say for their wealthier counterparts?
In the same vein, why is the four-year grad, with a degree paid for by mom and dad, considered a better candidate than the one who took longer working ‘non-professional’ jobs to pay for the same degree from the same school?
Maybe companies need to wake up. No matter what their family’s economic status, I haven’t seen the same high sense of entitlement in kids who spent their summers working in average and minimum wage jobs as I have in the ones who worked frequently overpaid jobs for their parents or didn’t work at all.
Do you think that segregation is an anachronism? A mindset and action we put behind us with the rise of the Civil Rights movement? Think again.
Segregated activities are alive and well in many small towns.
But these days, instead of turning on and dropping out like the Boomers, or turning on and apathetic like Gen X, kids get involved, even when it makes their lives more difficult.
“In 1997, Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the senior prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi under one condition: the prom had to be racially integrated. His offer was ignored. In 2008, Freeman offered again. This time the school board accepted, and history was made. … Freeman’s generosity fans the flames of racism—and racism in Charleston has a distinctly generational tinge. Some white parents forbid their children to attend the integrated prom and hold a separate white-only dance. “”Billy Joe,”” an enlightened white senior, appears on camera in shadow, fearing his racist parents will disown him if they know his true feelings.”
Not only did they have the prom, with none of the dire consequences predicted and used as the reason not to integrate it, but Paul Saltzman’s documentary Prom Night in Mississippi became a Sundance Festival sensation.
Kids are impatient for change—but they always have been. And in some variation of Moore’s Law each generation’s impatience increases, while their tolerance for whatever is current decreases.
“Show me a school whose inhabitants constantly examine the school’s culture and work to transform it into one hospitable to sustained human learning, and I’ll show you students who graduate with both the capacity and the heart for lifelong learning.”
I agree passionately that the school’s culture is the basis for its accomplishments and that the principal’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) is the source, whether active, passive or by benign neglect.
Unfortunately, the culture described above is constrained, distorted or totally destroyed by education policy—Dallas Independent School District is a great example of how truly bad policy can destroy learning.
Prickett, a school administrator (not in Dallas) hit the nail on the head when commenting on the pressure to produce good test-takers he said “the price of short-term success is long-term failure.”
No Child Left Behind, test performance-based funding and similar idiocies over the years have focused education directly on short-term results.
And that sounds like any number of banks, auto companies, insurance carriers and other corporate entities whose short-term thinking and drive for quarterly results left them constrained, distorted and totally destroyed.
Short-term thinking and quick profits of any kind are incapable of breeding long-term success in business or education.
Too bad. It’s solid K-12 education and life long learning that truly fuels our economy, underlies our democracy and makes for a strong, engaged populace.
Of course, the full effect of actions such as DISD’s are a long-term function that won’t be felt until long after the members of local, state and federal legislators are out of office leaving a mess significantly worse than the current economic debacle.
Even when Congress does do something it’s often botched. They’re rushing out a $150 billion education aid package spread over two years and more than doubling the current DOE budget. A flash flood of money that will be hard to manage and too much is bound to be wasted.
And, of course, there’s the ideological fight as opposed to whether it will work.
“Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.””
True, but maybe the federal government’s role does need to change, especially in mandating expensive requirements—No Child Left Behind, multiple security measures—and leaving the States to find ways to pay for them or be penalized; an action similar to a company mandating doubling the number of new products in development with no increases in budget or head count (yes, that’s been done many times).
When did ‘decade’ and ‘long-term’ become dirty words?
I’ve focused a lot over the last six months on the problems in education and attitudes of the workforce-to-be and it’s been a pretty dismal picture. Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, but that, too, is problematic.
It’s not just that entrepreneurship attracts the best and brightest, is also attracts a significant percentage of high-initiative students and it’s those with initiative who drive innovation wherever they’re at.
And there lies the problem.
Not because these kids want to solve problems, start businesses and attack the world’s social ills—that’s great. But the MAP that drives these kids is the same MAP that is so desperately needed by today’s corporations.
“”They’re [the Net generation] great collaborators, with friends, online, at work,” Mr. [Don] Tapscott wrote. “They thrive on speed. They love to innovate.” … A report issued last year by the Kauffman Foundation, which finances programs to promote innovation on campuses, noted that more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985…Since 2003, the Kauffman Foundation has given nearly $50 million to 19 colleges and universities to build campus programs.”
We live in a world of impatience; Boomers, contrary to some perceptions, were and are impatient; Gen X is still more impatient and it’s increased by an order of magnitude in Gen Y—and it will continue to increase the faster the world moves and changes.
And, to paraphrase, the world, it is a changin’.
The youngest generation is the most impatient, and that impatience is traveling up.
Yet, it is those with initiative, not just impatience; those with a desire to accomplish, not a sense of entitlement, that companies need to attract if they want to compete and thrive in the new world.
These are the people who can fuel innovation and corporate America’s ability to succeed.
There’s been a lot said (and ranted) over the last couple of decades about the dumbing down of America. Not just kids, but adults, too.
I’m not referring to the expertise each of us has that allows us to do our jobs and generally function, but of the general knowledge of the world in which we live—literature, geography, art, etc.—call it liberal arts, if you will.
Few Americans are multi-lingual, as opposed to Europeans, East Europeans, Russians, Asians, etc., and our knowledge of geography is laughable.
I remember a survey during the Bosnia war and more than half of the respondents didn’t know where Bosnia was or that it, along with the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Herzegovina, were part of the old Yugoslavia, with Serbia and Montenegro forming the rest—nor did they seem to care.
For centuries, fighting of one kind or another has gone on almost constantly in the Middle East and, to put it mildly, is still going on and having a major impact on us today.
But most people have only a vague idea where these countries are.
How much do you know? Click the MAP below and see how well you do on arranging the listed countries.
On a general level I had them on the right continent, but don’t think much of my knowledge beyond that.
Does it matter? Does knowledge in liberal arts areas foster more than interesting, late night discussions over a bottle of wine?
What does it mean to be educated in the Twenty-first Century?
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
There was a time when attitudes and actions moved from older to younger.
But it seems that more and more, instead of children learning from their grandparents, the grandparents are adopting the attitudes of the kids and, as with girls in gangs, it’s not the good ones that are moving—it’s the worst.
Entitlement. Instant gratification.
There are thousands who knowingly bought homes they couldn’t afford (as opposed to buying out of financial ignorance and/or mortgage chicanery) because they wanted it now, not in three to five years when they could actually afford it.
When I was young I thought the same way, but there were all kinds of adults who, by example, showed me that that wasn’t the way the world worked.
Now, with these attitudes spread throughout the generations, where are the everyday examples that show a different way? Worse, the examples that are out there are often ridiculed as being out of step with the current world.
I know that some of you reading my Thursday posts wonder what they have to do with leadership, managing and business.
The answer is simple; these are the people who work for and with you; they are the people you hire now and the people you’ll be hiring for decades.
Can you build a successful business or non-profit of any size on attitudes of entitlement and instant gratification?
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,
Can you imagine telling your boss that you deserve a raise because you come to work on time every day?
I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that as important as hard work, good planning, etc., are, there was something else at work in my life. Something outside of my control and I wanted to know what it was.
A few days ago I read a brief article about University of Chicago researchers Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe, who have been studying the 
I received a call from a reader, I’ll call him Doug, (I love calls, you may reach me at 866.335.8054, 9 AM to11 PM Pacific time.) who wanted to know why I kept harping on the need for long-term this and long-term that. He said that he’s 26 and part of “the online generation” and used to “instant gratification.”
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
I found a great quote on 
I’ve focused a lot over the last six months on the problems in education and attitudes of the workforce-to-be and it’s been a pretty dismal picture. Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, but that, too, is problematic.
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
