A Journey to
Discovery (Reflective Exercise)
Date: October 18,
2016
This
blog post will reflect upon the following questions taken from Nick Obolensky’s
excellent book “Complex Adaptive Leadership, 2nd Edition”.
Has your own attitude to leaders changed
in your life, and if so how?
My
own attitude to leaders has changed over time in my life. When I was younger, I resented most
leadership that I encountered. I
resented the authority that they had over my life and the potential to abuse
that particular authority. I probably
resented the fact that I felt that they weren’t as capable as I was in certain
areas of professional life, yet they held the position and I did not. In order to work through these issues, I had
to examine the root causes of my personalized view of the leaders that I
encountered in my early working career.
What made me resent their authority, or any authority for that
matter? Did I simply not like to be told
what to do? Why? Was that a rebellion against my mother and
father who represented authority over me in my formative years? As a parent, what would I have done better
than them? Did my parents ever abuse
their authority? Did I have supervisors
abuse their authority? I don’t hold the
belief that my parents abused their authority.
Parents do not have an instruction manual. They do what they feel is best in the
tradition that has been handed down to them from their parents. That being said, a teenager may well feel
that his or her parents are edging up to the line of abuse when their authority
and punishment rights are exercised. I
did have supervisors that abused their authority early on in my career and that
caused issues for me early on, but now I have turned it into a strength to
realize that a leadership position entails great trust. Care must be taken not to violate that trust
to subordinates, or one will run the risk of “losing” their subordinates. Once the damage has been done, it can be
almost impossible to fix. The final
issue to address was this: if I thought
that my supervisors weren’t as capable as I was, what should be my response to
that situation? Resenting the situation
and lamenting that it was “unfair” did not adequately resolve the underlying
issue. How did they get ahead in this
job? How does anyone get ahead in an
organization? Until these issues were
properly analyzed and addressed, then the situation and the resentment would
not change.
If we take as a starting point the
attitude to those in authority/leaders as held by your grandparents, and then
look at those attitudes held by your parents, and then by you, and then by the
younger generation, is there a changing trend?
If so, what is it?
I
believe that there is a changing trend within the generations and timeline
mentioned. We could probably make this
into an entire book in and of itself, but in the interest of time and space, I will
attempt to summarize it succinctly. This
is what I can surmise of the trend that I identified. With my grandparents, the philosophy that
they held was: “Respect your elders and
your betters, keep your family ties close, work hard and you will succeed, and
your connection with God is important”. With
my own parents, the philosophy shifted slightly to: Respect your elders, keep close family ties, work hard to gain
recognition and you will succeed, and God is important.” You will see that there is not a huge
difference between these generations, but there is a slight shift. My parent’s generation dropped the respecting
of your betters, added the recognition factor in career path, and slightly
altered the religious/spiritual aspect of life philosophy. While my generation has been defined and
redefined several times, I will only speak of what I know or think I know. My philosophy has also evolved over time, so
this will be my current version: “Respect your family elders, keep your
family close, respect positions of authority but not necessarily a person
holding one of those positions, keep a strong work ethic, be known as someone
who can fix things that are broken within an organization, recognition will
follow, God is important, keep your spiritual focus”.
Finally,
what I see of the current generation is: “I
don’t feel like I should have to work hard to move up, I don’t feel as if I
should have to start in entry level positions within the work-force, respect only
those who are able to achieve near-impossible feats, education is the ONLY
ticket to success in a career, God is not real important (or not nearly as
important as he was to earlier generations of superstitious people), I am spiritual
but not religious”.
Why do you think this has occurred?
There
are a number of reasons that these shifts in attitudes has occurred. Many of the current shifts are the result of
that changing standards and demographics of our own educators. Whereas my dad felt proud as a GM executive
that he was sent to numerous training seminars with other executives, and he
was the only one in the seminar without a college degree. In our current culture, he would not be proud
and he would not be acclaimed. He would
be “education shamed”. In my grandfather’s
era, the saying was “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”. In other words, if you don’t like your job,
then quit. In the early 1900s and up
until the 1960s, the prospect of an employee simply quitting and going
somewhere else was rare. I am in the
middle ground between the attitudes of the generations. My resentment of authority early on in my
career, has morphed into a disdain for entry level jobs by people (current
generation) who have never held a job before in their life! I do believe modern society, from education,
to entertainment, to other aspects of pop culture has weakened out spiritual focus. God may be for real, but he is definitely not
in the forefront of people’s lives as he was even a hundred years ago. The list could go on further and an analysis
of all of the root causes that I named would take an extensive amount of
time. Simply to answer the question
above is to say: “Respect for authority
is down, the work ethic is severely diminished, people are good at pointing out
problems but not solutions, our educational system has dumbed down students for
that past 50 years, and our spiritual focus has also declined.” All of these trends can be reversed. Maybe they aren’t the proper root causes.
John
H2O
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