While the world, in general, seems to get tougher and more and more focused on individual power, wealth, and success — rather than the old idea of helping each other to prosperity — I thought that it could be interesting to recap and search through the memories of a long working life, listing the things that actually worked well despite being out of sync with today’s rougher working conditions.

It seems to me like the new style is, in fact, just the pendulum swinging back toward the conditions of the beginning of industrialization after having briefly touched a more humanist approach. The darkening is again becoming the goal, after many years of enlightening.

The light has been switched off.

Utopia

I imagine a world in which each potential employee/jobseeker writes a list of tasks and conditions that would suit them — and then employers can bid in on it with an application. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the world as we know it, hence, a Utopia.

My list

General company terms:

1. Flexible hours — if work can be done at any time, then why insist on fixed hours?

2. Possible to work from home — gives flexibility in life and easier time management

3. Stress-free environment (not “we are always very busy” or “you thrive with tight deadlines and rapid changes in goals and conditions”)

4. Overtime is fine, occasionally, but in general, the work can be done during the hours agreed on in the contract

5. Values: Respect for the individual + knowledge sharing

6. No performance management — control and cooperation are rather based on dialogue and mutual assistance. Any measurements are for the purpose of understanding, not for punishing

7. Physical surroundings suitable for the job, i.e., if a car is needed there are parking spaces, if meetings are part of the job there are meeting rooms, etc.

Characteristics of the job itself:

1. There is a defined area of responsibility

2. Tasks cover end to end, allowing for an understanding of the value of each step and being proud of having completed it — also when several people collaborate to do this

3. Plans are made carefully but with the flexibility to allow for new understandings and learning to be utilized and new needs to be included. No panic reactions and sudden, unexplained changes of course

4. Knowledge sharing and communication are part of the job

5. Goals are reached through people, processes, and techniques — in that order

6. There is feedback on the work, showing that it is important to some

7. No matter the job type and level, the employee is part of a team that has a main focus on helping each other to make good decisions and, simply, to ensure a systemic approach to solving the tasks

Some features of the boss:

1. A human being, not an archetype — the HR approach to standardizing leadership is taking away the human aspect and should be used with caution

2. Team oriented — is helping their employees rather than commanding them, allowing them to create their own successes

3. Coaching, but in a human way, like a colleague — not “coaching for performance”

4. No treatment of employees as types — they are individuals and must be treated as humans

5. No micromanagement

6. Good at filtering tasks so that employees will not be given such that are meaningless or counter-productive

7. Ensuring the correct work environment, suitable for the tasks

The culture and colleagues:

1. Polite atmosphere — “Good morning”, “Have a nice weekend”, holding the door, etc. makes it pleasant to be together

2. Friendly but not intimidating — understanding that being colleagues is not automatically the same as being close friends

3. No mocking

4. Learning and personally developing

5. Accountable and taking care of their duties, showing responsibility

6. Helpful

7. Adult people, serious about their work — but all of them individuals

Myself — what would I need to bring in:

1. Dedication and enthusiasm (of course, in a ping-pong with the surroundings)

2. Strategical, visionary thoughts about tasks, working place, business area

3. Observant, analytical and improving, participating, and developing

4. Accountable and taking care of my duties, showing responsibility

5. Flexible

6. Helpful

7. Another individual — broadening the scope of thinking and problem-solving capabilities of the team and the company

Mix and match

Headhunters, recruiting agencies as well as internal HR departments are often a lot more focused on matching than they are on mixing — meaning, they do not appreciate the extra competencies and additional experience a job candidate may add. They are even tightening in on a few treats and mostly considering everything else as noise that should be kept out of the company.

However, the ability of an organization to adapt to changing conditions and develop a pleasant (and thereby efficient) work environment depends on mixing various experiences and competencies. It is not enough to find the “best” candidates for selected areas. An example:

I started in a new job, many years ago, where the focus was systems development based on Microsoft tools and platforms, so these skills had been asked for. However, a few days into the new job a customer asked for a Crystal Reports consultant — as I happened to know about this product too, we got the assignment, and it became the beginning of a long and important collaboration with this customer around their reporting needs. Without my extra and not-asked-for skills, this would not have happened.

The switch

Can we change the job market to the reverse, as I fantasized about? Or are there good and sound reasons for not being much interested in the wishes of the employees?

Can we similarly reverse the development, the pendulum movement, to again focus on what actually works in terms of delivering what the customers need, which is a collaborative and both analytical and goal-oriented approach, making use of thoughts and skills of individuals, rather than on the internal power structures and bonus payments?

Is it, perhaps, just a matter of switching the light back on?

Postscript

This article was first published on LinkedIn, but the date is no longer known, then reposted on World Pendulum on 5 November 2016.

I was trying to be reasonable and not demand anything that didn’t exist already in the business world. Today, I might want to tighten the requirements a bit.

It is sad but interesting that even when knowing the detailed criteria for a new job, I wasn’t able to find any employer who cared the least — or fulfilled just a fraction of the bullets on the lists.

One employer came closer than the others in some areas, but the overall idea for all of them was that an employee existed for the sake of the company, not the other way around. There was no “we”.

We had only just met, small talked a bit, and he had said that it was time to move on with the talk. Music? I love music! But I never knew that it could be relevant for a job.

When I applied, I thought that it was just a job — one of many possibles. The job market is full of jobs to apply for, and most of them are announced with just about the same information about the job itself and the company behind it. Just a long list of the same clichés.

Most of what is written in a job announcement is wrong. Or outright a lie. Sometimes this is done on purpose, but most often there are other reasons — especially copying old job announcements when making new ones and then just quickly adjusting it a bit. There is also a lack of knowledge: Those who write the announcement often do not know much about the job or the elements of it, leading to nonsense requirements and promises that will not be kept.

So, I applied, knowing for sure that this was just another one of these. Even though the announcement sounded nice. Something with “We would like to meet you, and hopefully you will like us and want to take part in our wonderful world”. How often do you see that in a job announcement?

A recruiter’s world-view

For every job announcement, there seem to be hundreds or even thousands of applicants. This has always puzzled me: with an unemployment rate of a few percent, and a share of the workforce willing to move that is somewhat higher, there should of course be many people who can apply — but there should also be many vacancies. If unemployment is close to zero, there should be close to 1 applicant for each 1 job. If they would be evenly distributed, of course.

But the companies get so many applications that they cannot reply to them. It’s almost a natural law. From time to time, recruiters claim on social media that this is impossible: “There can be 200 applications, and giving back a response to each one of these could take several minutes for each, that would be… a day or two!”

Well? What else should a recruiter do? How much time have they spent before even putting the announcement up? How much along the way, processing the reception, sorting, and evaluation of the applications? Why cut away that exact part that is the most important for the applicant?

I’ll tell you why: they do not care about the applicants. They care about some internal needs in the company. Applicants are like goods in the supermarket — you do not tell at the check-out which goods you don’t want to buy: you just grab those that you do want to buy, show them at the check-out, and that’s it. All the rest is not interesting for you — until next time when it is expected that the supermarket has an abundance of all kinds of goods to pick, as you wish. Or ignore, as you wish.

Applicants are considered to be goods, SKUs, items. Like you fill up the company with computers, tables, chairs, and coffee machines, you also fill in some applicants.

Back to my interview

Music. Okay, asking about my taste in music was perhaps just some kind of trick? Maybe the interviewer wanted to see if I was capable of focusing on the business needs, despite being shaken a bit by unusual circumstances.

So I quickly said that I do like music but when working, I am focusing on that. I thought that it sounded very business-wise, but he looked disappointed.

“I’m sorry to hear that — if this is really how you feel; because I am not so sure about that” — he said with a mysterious smile, and continued, “This is not an interview, and I am not going to evaluate your skills or anything like that. I just wanted to meet you, to see what kind of person you are, learn what is moving you, what you like — and tell you all the same things about me and the other people here. So that all of us; you, me, our colleagues, can get a feeling of what we can be for each other”.

I looked at him, surprised, but relieved. Of course, people can say a lot of that kind without meaning it, but I felt that it was different this time. He said “what we can be for each other” — not “do”.

I smiled, genuinely, and said that I liked that, and, in fact, I liked music very much, so let’s talk a bit about music.

Flow

As it turned out, both he and the others on the team were all fond of music — and all kinds, just like me. They had not painted themselves into a corner of belonging, they were not listening to a particular kind of music just to be able to feel connected with a particular group or to be talked about as a certain kind of person. They just loved to listen to music, to experience it — discover new music, talk about it, listen to others talking about it…

I was in heaven! For most of my life, I had this relation to music and was turned off by 99% of the people I ever met, because they didn’t feel the music, they didn’t love it — they just accepted it as a social phenomenon, and perhaps they were using it as an occasional wall of noise between them and the world. But they didn’t want to talk about it, and even less share their thoughts — or mine.

My new colleagues also liked arts and nature — many of them were taking part in one or more activities that included being creative and enjoying the world.

Together

During the conversation, I learned that it was really all about “being”, not “doing”. These people were there for each other. Together, they are creating a platform of psychological safety and — friendship. Within this environment of trust and helpfulness, both creative and practical tasks were performed by people who enjoyed it. They did what they wanted, but they naturally wanted to do what was needed by their colleagues. They were often discussing new ideas with open minds and an understanding that no great idea had ever been developed or understood fully in an elevator. It takes time, collaboration, trust, and — open minds.

It worked well. Because people there were so happy to work with each other, it led to their customers feeling the harmony and joy and wanting to be part of it, wanting to work with exactly this company.

So the business model could be said to work well if only there had been a business model — because, what my former interviewer, now friend, could tell me: “It is not important for us if we earn a bit more or less. We do not have KPIs or performance measurements of any kind. The main thing is that we all have the possibility to enjoy being here. We all have good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. We do not produce equally much all the time. But because we support each other, we can maintain a good and stable company that continues working, continues to be the place where we want to be — and each of us then contributes with whatever we contribute with, at any time”.

When we finished our conversation, after talking about all the things in the world that two creative minds, two people who were still able to find passion and emotions deep inside, despite being business people of some kind, could think of talking about…

…his last words stuck in my mind as the most unusual thing I have ever heard in a company, but also one of the most beautiful ways of putting it; this, which is really the main thing of working together:

• We are not slaves. We do not own each other.

• Each of us know and think a lot, is valuable without limits.

• All of us are leaders of our own thoughts and ideas.

• We are all learners — we learn something each day from our many fruitful talks.

• We need no leaders nor any kind of suppression or control.

• We are free people who are happy with what we are.

To sum it all up

We are not slaves. Each of us is valuable without limits. Happy.

We can talk about anything that moves us, inspires us, and drives us  — personally. And this is who we are, so this is what we give and learn from.

My kind of workplace. My kind of friends!

After many years of fitting into a role at work, playing some kind of theatre where all the others also had their roles, and the working day being a scene in a Dogme-movie where everybody is supposed to stick to their part of the movie, say their few regular lines and be very careful how they improvise — modern people have had enough.

They want to be themselves and be honest with each other — talk in a language that they identify with and talk about things that make sense for them, and get meaningful responses from their colleagues.

The Hannah Shirley TikTok video

About a year ago, Hannah Shirley, a young woman who until recently had worked at Udemy but apparently quit her job to be free of the business jargon, posted a video on TikTok:

@hannahshirleyIs it just me ?!? #worklife #9to5 #officejob #corporategirlies #joblife #remotework #corporateamerica #acting

Tiktok failed to load.

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She asks, “Is it just me?” about being tired of people talking nonsense and at the same time pretending to be interested only in the success and well-being of the organization they are in.

This resonated well with a lot of people in the world, and you can now see this video mentioned in many posts on social media — it went viral.

Hannah Shirley mentions some of the currently popular nonsense phrases used, such as:

Building the plane while flying it

and

Boiling the ocean

Clearly, she has very little respect for the value of such talk, saying that none of us would talk like that when not at work.

Not new

This topic has several facets, but each of them has been discussed over and over again for many years, and at times a writer gains success with a book about it, such as André Spicer with his book Business Bullshit from 2017, which spawned a flood of follow-up books by other writers.

André Spicer argues in the book that the bullshit language removes the attention from more serious talks that could have helped improve the company.

Being yourself at work

Skipping the formalisms and behaving like a real human being, also when being at the workplace or in a meeting with colleagues or bosses is an idea that has caught so much resonance that it has been possible to turn it into a movement, #BeYourselfAtWork — possibly by that, the movement is now itself formalizing what should have been de-formalization but still, bringing the topic to the table.

Is it a generation thing?

You will often see statements such as:

The new generation doesn’t accept all this

or similar, but it really isn’t a generation question — ask around, and you’ll find that a lot of people of all ages and with all kinds of careers behind them or in front of them, all can agree on the world being a better place if we actually talk as we think and consider the talking to be the means to developing more thoughts or finding solutions — real solutions — based on rational thinking and behaviour.

Lots of people want that; just ask them, and you will know, and it looks like the generation thing mainly has an influence on how much people believe that it can actually be done — the younger ones being more optimistic about the possibilities of changing the world.

The blogging revolution

We have had weblogs/blogs and other ways of expressing ourselves to the world for quite many years now, and we even see how different social media is preferred by different groups of people, which to some extent can be boiled down to different ages as a key dividing factor.

But even though different generations prefer different social media, they all like to express themselves.

While I remember how the early social media was very much another theatre play — people didn’t take it seriously, didn’t know how to behave, and often took on “pen names” on social platforms — I don’t see this equally much now.

Instead, there are some people who are very loud on these platforms in trying to stage themselves and establish themselves as “the one who speaks about silence” or “the one who is an expert in Excel macros”, or whatever.

But the bulk of people, those who are not trying to sell themselves on social media, are in general trying to be direct and honest. With the slight exception that it is mostly preferred to tell about all the good things in their lives, and how good they themselves are, etc., rather than expressing the balance of things.

By large, I would claim that the blogging revolution has made room for a voice for each human being, where it previously was mostly a few VIPs who could ever say something publicly. And that has brought the common man into a new focus, bringing into the everyday media shoutout a large mix of common thoughts and feelings that were rarely heard before.

Conclusion

Authenticity is not a “fad of the month”. While it probably is a relief for some people to be able to have separate personalities at work respective at home, most people do not like it and do not feel comfortable with it.

It prevents many good thoughts from being expressed at work, because they do not fit into the role you are playing there, and it makes people feel dishonest at times.

I could add that this possibly can be related as well to the discouraging feeling of losing all your job friends when changing your job — just my thoughts on it, but it could be that if you are not in the job, you are no longer the role, and it was the role they interacted with, not you personally.

Modern people want to be human beings all the time. They want to be persons, not roles. And recognizable as such, known for their way of thinking, and their points of view, not for their job role.

“Absense makes the heart grow fonder”

This is what I really wonder:
When by absence out of sight,
all suspicion is at might
Rumours grow and gossip run
killing all the absence fun.
Work from home and you’re forgotten
or you are considered rotten.

But

“deceptive is appearence”

Even though it gives you clearance,
none of what you say and do
may be accurate and true.
You may sound like you’re in knowledge,
like you learned it all at college.
But the business bullshit rules,
fooling only other fools.

Maybe

“faith will move a mountain”

letting joy spray like a fountain.
Trusting people lets them do
what they can be able to.
Out of trust, you build a bond;
strong and long these can be found
in the modern leadership.
This is just a simple tip.

“All that glitters is not gold”

says the poor man, growing old.
You may trust and be betrayed,
see those leave who should have stayed.
Gold will come in many molds,
knowing this should make you bold.
Simple isn’t life’s condition,
therefore you will need a vision.

“Of two evils choose the less”

No, that leads to no progress!
You must try to be more free
of this thought fatality,
spreading friendship, trust, and love,
rather than the boxing glove.
Life is not a big disorder,
therefore: go and cross that border!

“It’s the first step that is hard”

- but it isn’t! Just be smart!
Start by letting life take place,
give your colleagues lots of space.
Do whatever you can do,
let the others do with you
what they feel is right for them,
and you have revealed a gem.

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The idea of sharing information on a “need-to-know” basis in the organization is very convenient for those who are appointed leaders — because, when being blindfolded, and left without any information, their employees have no other option than to just (blindly) follow orders.

Maybe a military thing

Many ideas used in business life and other management situations have been taken in from the military.

I don’t think that people always consider if such ideas are actually suitable for the situation, suitable for civilian leadership situations, as there has been an overstated faith in the value of the military principles of all kinds — after all, they do work when directing hundreds of thousands of soldiers into war all over the globe, so they must be good?

No.

My (military) courses

in a previous job, I was taking part in a series of leadership/management courses, and they were partly led by some instructors from a military organization.

I guess that this had its reasons, partly, in that these people had decided to offer courses, and they seemed to be good at it, so they were simply considered along with all others in that business. But another reason may have sneaked in — the same one that led another company, I had worked for some years before that, into hiring mostly former military officers: the belief that these were the best leaders.

Well, I have to say, honestly, that they were good at what they did. I appreciate their style and skills, and I find that I learned valuable lessons from them. But not because they were militarians; instead, it is because of their great skills in reading people and giving appropriate guidance to each individual.

Blindfolded

An element that was part of two of the courses was a practical activity, kind of a game, where everybody apart from one was blindfolded. The blindfolded had a connection to each other through a long rope that they were all holding. The seeing person then had, by voice only, to direct them into shaping a figure with the rope.

While that may sound simple, it isn’t.

And even though some teams managed to do it quite well, the actual shape wasn’t the intended outcome of the activity — the learning was.

And the learning was, as we all experienced, that whenever you are blindfolded, you have no clue of what everybody else is doing — and then you cannot adjust your own activities accordingly. You simply have to trust that the one who sees will guide you appropriately.

What to learn from this

The intentions were never explained. But there are two angles to it:

Angle 1: You could, as a collaborative and knowledge-sharing kind of person, decide that what you learned was the importance of ensuring that everybody would be well informed — that everybody would be able to see for themselves what was happening in the company so that they could adapt and act in a reasonable way.

Angle 2: Knowing that people will follow you without any questions if you keep them in the unknown. You, as their leader, will get to know various details about the company, people in it or outside of it, etc., but you will carefully select what to share with your people and how to shape it. The goal is to prevent them from doing anything on their own initiative — so that you personally will maintain absolute control.

Relating to real life

Even though the course activity was only a game, it does reveal or at least hint at something, I guess most people with experience from large companies have seen: that there is no transparency, no knowledge-sharing, and that nobody wants you to contribute with your views if you are only a person on the floor.

Many leaders and managers over time have deliberately failed to share important details or they have even fabricated false information in order to control their position and gain personal advantages.

In the game with the rope, the seeing person could do whatever they wanted with the blindfolded ones — they had full control; total power.

How modern leaders look at it

As modern leaders are in reality collaborators, and only for an individual situation taking the lead, while at other times trusting that their colleagues will do that well, they seek to maintain full transparency and make it possible for everybody else to get engaged and bring in all their knowledge, their intellectual capacity, and their practical participation in dealing with the matter.

The aim of a modern leader is not to maintain full control, not to be in power, but to actually reach good results for everybody. It is a team effort, the team needs to be involved, needs to be trusted.

Conclusion

So how are modern leaders considering a course activity like the one described?

Well, we are all individuals, as Brian claims in the Monty Python movie “Life of Brian” — and even though that doesn’t ring a bell for his audience, I am quite certain that most modern people do understand what that means.

We may have very different views on the value of such things, and we are mostly interested in talking about it, and learning from each other’s thoughts. This means, as a matter of fact, that my best guess is that the exercise would become quite popular with modern leaders, as it would be seen as a philosophical kick to develop views on.

But the idea of accepting blindfoldedness in the company is out — it left together with the last organizational dinosaurs.

Leadership is about human relations — so what does AI know about leadership?

Management writing tradition

There has been a tradition for many years now for writing management literature in a certain way. Maybe engaging, but also lining up a few “facts” that “we all see” in our lives as employees or managers, and how these presumed facts are making company life and especially productivity worse.

Next step of a management book is then to explain a clever new idea to doing this better — and it is typically a very simple idea, easy to explain.

Now, easy is not really what describes human relations, is it? There are so many aspects, so many details that can influence our ways of behaving toward each other, that I think it must be obvious to most people that no easy fix can magically cure all our problems.

Another side of it is that what is described as “facts” may not be that — we may actually not all see those patterns around us, but since they are being vividly described in the book, we can easily imagine such a situation. And we are often so eager to be or become one of the pack that we tend to say “yes, it is true” about such things, just to socialize and create an imagined harmony with the writer.

Most of the writers of management books also give speeches and run a consulting business, and the way of talking, suggesting solutions, socializing — it makes the one popular because understandable and relatable is always popular. Easy explanations and easy solutions are always more attractive than the ugly reality of complexity.

Enter AI

Chatbots generate text on the basis of kind of statistics, typically engaging artificial neural network technology of some kind that has learned the essence of a large amount of input texts. This can then be output as a kind of summary text, also shaped on the bases of statistics. As many input texts have been carefully edited during the past several years, they often provide a certain view on how text should look like. The output, hence, also follow that set of ideas.

On top of the statistical part are some correctional mechanisms that should weed out any possible insults, discriminations, bad language, or even legally disputable claims that could appear in such statistically based material. Any strong elements will be removed, and the result will be weak and unengaging.

The style is usually optimistic, grammatically correct, and paragraphs are of equal length. Certain norms for the shape of different kinds of texts have been applied by the chatbot firms, so for a business text you will often see an introduction, a list of five topics, and then a conclusion.

This whole setup shouldn’t be bad, really, since it follows good traditions, good advice on style, and it is pleasant and unoffensive to read.

But where is the soul of it?

What interesting message could there possible be in a text that consists only of a synthesis of what has already been written?

How can the machine add anything useful about human relations and leadership?

The wish for perfection

Many writers try to reach a level of perfection with their written pieces that they may not be able to do all alone. So, they use technology like spell checkers, grammar checkers, and similar, and since these technologies are getting more and more advanced, they can do quite a lot of changes — seen as improvements by the writer.

But for every bit of technologically introduced change, a similar bit of the original human thought will leave the text. And with a lot of automated editing, the text can become a lot technological, in a sense, and very little human.

The chatbot is the ultimate technology for improving texts, as it can write the text out of almost no input. Just a few words, a vague idea, and off it goes — soon to deliver the complete article… with the synthesis of years of writing presented nicely as a soulless text without any new message.

A writer may be tempted to go that way because it looks good — not a single wrong comma, and some advanced phrases that the writer themselves could not have come up with.

It is a bit like ghostwriting, isn’t it? Someone gets help from an experienced writer to say what they found difficult to express themselves.

Only, the ghost is here in the machine, and the machine is not, like a human ghostwriter, trying to get the thoughts and knowledge out of the client — the machine just invents something.

A misconception has spread that a chatbot can write better than most humans, so many writers believe that they are improving their writing by letting the machine do it for them.

The effect on leadership

Try to imagine that nothing new is ever being said or done, all is repetition. At work, or in any work relation, perhaps spread over distance, nobody even tries to dig into the problems before acting — they just repeat what has been done before.

Repetition is a deed, and many methods build on this deed. Methods for manufacturing, for quality, and indeed also methods for management.

Repetition is often seen as using lessons learned from the past, benefiting from experience.

But blind repetition without looking at the details will often lead to wrong or at least bad results — there is always an element or more that are different in this particular case. And often, it is all different, so the repeated method for solving the problem will not fit at all.

So how will a chatbot-generated article about leadership help improving anything?

At best, it could indicate some kind of average of how people have been suggesting doing things in the past — through the many simplified ideas of many management books that the chatbot has learned from.

But will it fit the situation you are in right now? Will such a situation even exist that matches the idea presented by the machine? Hardly. I would say clearly not.

Because the details, the individualities of the situation are missing and the context is blurry, not matching anything of today particularly well.

Even if you took all the latest management books only and synthesized them into an idea, using the chatbot technology, you would still get a too simple and useless output of it.

The human touch

The machine’s artificial experience is quite pointless, but the exact contrary counts for the human experience. Almost no matter what situations you have been in during your work life, you will have learned something — or experienced something that is about to evolve into learning — that the machine has never even heard about.

This is your unique perspective. It will, of course, fit your unique work situations — shaped by the exact people who took part in it under some circumstances that are not equal to anything else in the world.

But your description of what you saw, heard, felt, thought, and concluded on the basis of your experiences — that is useful as input for other people’s thoughts, helping them to see perspectives in their own situations that they otherwise may not have thought of.

Your unique perspective.

With all its wrong commas, broken logic, and everything that makes it human.

This is what we need. Not the synthesis made by the machine, not the dampened down average of what thousands of management writers have already said.

We need your human touch, or even more than that — we need a human experience, preferably completely untouched by the machines.

Only then we are seriously talking about human relations — about leadership.

Even though there is a demand for experts, it is at the same time difficult for people older than a certain age to get a job. Age is of course not the same as expertise, but in many businesses, it is seen how age itself, expertise or not, will disqualify a candidate.

The source of the mishap

There is a big difference between young, naive and irresponsible on the one hand, and older, wiser and considerate on the other hand. Through the last few decades, we have learned to appreciate the characteristics of the young and disrespect those of the old. Beauty, physical strength, good teeth, whatever. Everything connected to youth is considered good by most people. And this goes even further, as being wise is certainly not indicating youth — therefore, you will see a lot of people deliberately playing a bit stupid and acting against better knowledge, simply because that will make them look younger in the eyes of others.

Personally, I have met this idea in many shapes throughout my career. A typical result of it is a question like “are you taking chances, acting fast?”, in a job interview, where the interviewer then clearly expects that you will answer “yes, I am very fast in making decisions and I often take chances, accepting huge risks”. Wisdom, the experience of a long life, will tell you that you almost never make better decisions by making them fast, and that a “fast mentality” most likely will make you focus too much on the immediate and urgent, and too little on the prosperous and important. You will spend your life fighting fires instead of building a safe and sound company. But the idea of youth to rule out wisdom makes a considerate mind look wrong in the eyes of a recruiter.

Youth is contaminating. That’s a belief that many have. By being surrounded by young, fast, and irresponsible people, you yourself will magically turn younger. Many job announcements are trying to catch you with phrases like “young environment” or rhetorical questions like “do you like to be very busy in a fast-paced environment?”.

An added reason

The prevalent focus on teamwork as the way of organizing work contributes to the madness. Teamwork is a very good way of bringing in all competencies into a combined effort — if that is what you want. But more often than not, teamwork is being abused for dragging down the quality and efficiency to a level corresponding to what everybody in the team can or could handle — because there is a common misinterpretation of the team idea that all team members should be equal and be able to replace each other on every task.

This is the rule of the smallest common denominator — the team will be no stronger than the weakest link, so to speak, but as it counts for each individual task, the team can easily end up being much weaker than any of the team members would be as individuals.

In order to make an effort that fits into the team plan and the skills of the teammates, each team member is expected to avoid showing off. There is no point in doing work at a level or a quality that the others cannot handle — it can actually lead to (as I have seen several times) a requirement to delete the good work and then redo it in a less good quality.

The problem

Of course, this is not good. Behaving like teenagers can easily kill even a big and serious company (and regularly does, I guess). Lots of management guidelines are about making the team work and putting restrictions on any behaviour as individuals. They are, actually, about preventing good work from appearing.

It is common to believe that you can learn from your mistakes — only. So young people who make more mistakes are considered more fit for the learning organization — a management idea that actually has a very good and sound idea behind it, but which is often completely misunderstood by management. They believe that only common learning is useful — only what the whole bunch of employees know in common. They never understand that individuals could contribute a lot, being given the chance.

The remedy

Understand that youth is not the same as good. Youth can be good, but so can wisdom. If you want to run a company in a professional manner, the employees and managers alike must behave like adults, taking their jobs seriously and trying to do what is needed for success. And that might well be something else than what leads to success in your private life.

Quite simple — for the one who is not young, who has experience: stay away from companies that clearly cultivate the idea of youth as superior to wisdom, speed as superior to consideration. They will only ruin your life and you will not be allowed to make use of your wisdom anyway; you will always be measured against the norms of youth.

For people inside a company who have a chance of making changes (be they young or old): start making teams work by forming them from people of different ages and with different skill sets. Enforce a style where firefighting is less heroic than proactive prevention of problems, and where applied wisdom (for instance from lessons learned and similar techniques) is a measure of success. Introduce analytical behaviour and business analysis activities with a focus on making everybody understand other people’s needs and wishes throughout the whole process of doing anything.

For people recruiting others: start thinking further ahead — do not solve an immediate problem where a gap in the organizational diagram must be filled out, find instead people who have the potential of applying their wisdom in several positions, allowing them to start in one place of the company and then move around with the needs. Do not look for an exact replacement for an employee who left — accept that new employees have their own individual qualities. Do not ask that stupid question of risk taking, focus instead on how the candidate will be able to measure the risk level and make a sound decision — and especially, how the candidate is capable of being proactive.

That would, all together, lead to a more professional way of doing business and to better results where employees can actually be proud of what they know and what they do.

This piece was first published on 21 December 2014 at LinkedIn. It was picked out by curation to be part of LinkedIn Pulse — or to be “boosted”, as it would be called in some other social media.

Different times

I believe that times were different back then, in 2014, and that the ageism is less clear in the job market now — except for a bunch of positions where, still, only young people are being considered to be suitable candidates.

There seems to be a tendency, even, in a few companies, to actually mix young and old, as I suggested it in the article. Still not with a strategy of mixing different skills, but perhaps with a slightly better acceptance of people with an alternative background, as long as they can demonstrate the same skills as the preferred ones.

Now, of course, with all the mass-layoffs that have been going on for a while and probably still will for some more time to come, we will probably see a shift toward hiring younger staff again, for cost reasons but also because new and younger managers will be reluctant to hire anyone older than themselves.

A hope

Except for the leaderless organizations! If you and your colleagues have agreed to do the leadership parts of the work in common — each of you taking the role as needed, for individual tasks, but accepting that others are leading other tasks, then you may see a different focus: it will soon become clear that everybody will benefit from having different skills in the team, as there will then always be someone with exactly that skill, experience — and wish — needed to do something.

In such an environment, people learn to appreciate each other's wants and needs, as these are what makes the everyday function.