Millennial Management in a Baby Boomer world.

This is the second in a series on management styles as they pertain to Millennials.

“Change agent” and “work-life blend” have become nomenclature de rigeur regarding a generation of current employees percolating up through the bases of organizational structures in public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Their hallmarks: overabundant utilization of new technologies, a desire for purpose driven work, and breaking down the entrenched hierarchies of business culture.

If you read that opening statement and considered this not the first time you’ve heard a generation fantasize about reforming their work environment to find a higher purpose, improving office protocols and efficiency through space-aged technology, congratulations! These are modalities inherited from their parents. The flower children and Volkswagen van touring generation birthed a new generation just the same. There is even a movement of 20 - 30 somethings to travel in tricked out, wifi enabled late model vans living the digital nomad lifestyle. The new American Dream includes a life of liberty on the open road according to a new Vice article by David Jagneaux.

However, where the whole of writing on the topic has gone completely awry is in the estimation of Generation Y’s taste for hierarchical work structures. Millennials are quite comfortable and entirely amenable to working inside of these sorts of structures - as long as they were the ones who imputed the structure. Such is the idea behind so much of the post-classroom work in which TFA is involved, as well as NLC, StudentsFirstNY, and a variety of other parallel organizations whose prime objectives are fundraising, and pipe-lining their alumni into key positions in the current political and business structures.

This is the hidden curriculum of the next generation 'leadership training' forums presently in vogue. The ideals behind flattening existing organizational structures and eliminating traditional pathways to leadership positions is to leapfrog trained, experienced, well-rounded - and, admittedly, a bit more seasoned, - individuals already in the leadership pipeline, displacing them entirely. But we have seen this insidiousness in prior versions of both world history, and popular fiction: Joffrey Baratheon, Jiao Long; in myths and legends - Phaeton, Patroclus, and in current business arenas.

Augmented reality. Photo courtesy of Design Boom

With the advent of the all-seeing, all-knowing interweb, IoT, Augmented Reality, and literally the power of the universe in the palm of their hands, now more than ever the generation needs guidance on why it is that they are performing the mechanical operations they’ve learned for their junior roles via YouTube channels.

Upending hierarchies
Photo by @dorania_luo

Fast-tracking untrained, inexperienced individuals into leadership positions is not a successful, long term sustainability plan for any of the three sectors. Thoughtful, reflective, purposeful leadership requires experience, learning, training, certification and degrees. It requires having had mentors so that as a leader they can in turn mentor the next generation. It requires a philosophical basis upon which the leader's daily actions and interactions are founded, and not one that is regurgitated in sound bites that make excellent five second Vines or catchy t-shirts devoid of historical context. We have seen this movie before and it always has a bad ending, always requiring the appropriately trained, highly experienced, and usually, a previously selected leadership figure to arrive and rid the kingdom of its ills (Game of Thrones has not yet arrived at this juncture.)

To quote Ryan and Robert Quinn from Harvard Business Review: Change Management and Leadership Development have to Mesh. This is a crucial concept for, as the saying goes amongst Navy SEALS: "Under pressure...you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That's why we train so hard." Millennials, in order to be effective, will have to get the very thing that they lack - experience. Here I should echo the sentiments of a recent Forbes article: “Trying To Manage Millennials? Give Up And Lead Them Instead.” They will need leadership in terms of purpose, leadership in terms of habits of mind, leadership in terms of succession planning, and leadership in terms of critical thought. America will have to come to terms with the idea that the mentoring, instruction, and planning will have to be done by a generation older and more trained than the Millenials. The alternative is that while inexperienced, untrained 'leaders' are busy sinking to their level of training, the whole of the organizations around them will sink as well.

Where's the closest tire shop?

So much has happened in the past two weeks, that it is nearly impossible to publish a faithful report, though I will endeavor to create something of a fillet.

As part of our assignments, we've been given the task of reading, and commenting on posts of our choice from the Harvard Business Review Blog, and that said, I've made a range of comments, here (as J. Valjean), and also here (as the title of this blog.) As time passes, and I acquire more information on the management aspects of public administration, it is indeed interesting to see the collection of thoughts on HBR blog. Written almost uniquely from the perspective of the private business industry, rather, as far as I've seen anyway, even as pertains to the field of Education, I'm repeatedly surprised by how - despite undeniably parallel organizational structuring, and practically mirror imaged management philosophies, - that the business world seems to inherently lag behind the public sector in terms of the more internal development type of evolution. Ed Sermier would ask: "What does that mean?"

What I mean is this: I read the "Leadership Lessons of Ants" and I'm still pondering the comments of several of the posters who seemed incredulous as to the validity of a parable to teach any sort of modern world utilizable theory. But then, coming from a teaching background, and having specifically set up learning experiences centered around parables to teach specific life lessons, perhaps I have a different perspective. Of course we use parables to teach life lessons, why do you suppose the Bible is still a best seller? Aesop lived and died centuries ago, but the inherent applicability of creative solutions (as in the crow who filled a jug with stones to be able to raise the level of water and in so doing, drink from what would have otherwise lay at the bottom of the jug, out of reach.) The Lion and the Mouse, another story not from Aesop, but a classic of Spanish literature, and an excellent lesson about how rumors quickly become something other than what we might like them to be: Los Tres Cuervos. And, let us not forget that amazingly talented inventor of moral infused children's literature: Horacio Quiroga, and his 'Las Medias de los Flamencos'. In each of these, lessons from the animal kingdom bear striking resemblance to how we might conduct ourselves amongst friends, family, and even professionals.

In terms of that, our agency is guaranteed to be in flux shortly, as there is an impending mayoral shift, and everyone at executive level has, as a matter of protocol, had to tender their resignation. This puts all of the Fellows at the agency in a difficult spot, because we've only just arrived, and the potential for significant organizational change in a very short amount of time is very real. The one Fellow placed at OCA reported a climate change so dramatic once it was announced that an administrative overhaul would be taking place, that the 6th degree would have been easier to deal with in the Six Degrees of Climate Change. I have personal feelings on the matter, perhaps I will share them as time goes on.

In the meantime, I've taken to inserting myself into as many leadership oriented activities as possible during my time at the site. I've found that it has become necessary for me to specifically seek opportunities for myself to be involved in the leadership process. At the same time, I'm participating in the rewriting of legislation, creating new contract templates, and it's a good thing that I have a background in language and linguistics, otherwise it would be a great deal more difficult for me to handle the tasks I've been handed. Also, in terms of that, I'm still not sure I'm entirely clear on the following that my mentor told me as I was trying to nail down the specifics of piece of the template with him: "Procurement is solely a commercial exercise, whereas Public-Private Partnerships are more development or investment." I'm foreseeing a conversation with Professor Savas in the future...

Last week, our Program Director came down for the Idealist career fair, and several of us in the DC area made it down to staff the table with him. During the couple of hours we were there, we were successful in attracting quite a bit of attention, and at the very least handing out quite a few information packets. I think we caused quite a stir. And speaking of a stir, having to finally articulate the Initial Capstone Proposal this week was even more difficult than the writing tasks I've been handed for the mentorship. I spent the better part of an afternoon scribbling notes and pacing back and forth by my desk muttering to myself (from the example of Booth, et al.) "Where's the closest tire shop?" But, in the end, it got done, and shipped out several hours before the deadline. Now that I have a focus, I can set about streamlining my data collection.

And now, what you've all been waiting for: El Gran Combo

NUF love!

This first week of NUF experience has been quite the affair. Meeting and interacting with the 42 other fellows in this cohort gives me a renewed sense of purpose, almost as if all the crazy ideas about how to forcibly evolve the system I've been having during the rather long trajectory of my professional career suddenly have a springboard from which to leap. Before going much further in this journal, knowing that a few people will likely be reading it, I have to recognize that previously I used this blog as a teaching tool, and so the posts below this initial NUF 2011 spot will be webquests that I designed for my Spanish classes.

On to the details:

Graduation date is 28 July 2011, provided all goes exceedingly well. I predict that, now having read the stats book assignment (partially) that everything else will be, though rigorous, manageable. The welcome week/orientation was also quite pleasant. Many of our questions were answered in terms of how to navigate the very murky waters of financial aid in the university, and Baruch's peculiarities as a business school. The dean of the school wherein our Public Administration program is housed gave a speech which not only left me with insight into where our lives will be guided during the next 14 months, but also his own character, and the fact that I may actually need to spend more time listening to his words, or perhaps at the very least tracking down some of his publications.

Breakthrough leadership is one of those things that as a concept I noticed a while ago, but was entirely unable to completely articulate. As David Mensah kept saying, 'you all already know all of this, you just never strung it all together." In effect he's right; we inherently have all of these fantastic communications tools already bread into us as we acquire language, utilize language, create language, re-imagine language, watch/hear/read/speak about other people using language, we have intake and uptake (Mim is laughing about this right now, I'm sure) regarding the principles inherent in this Breakthrough system, but we just never put them into practice until someone or something creates the necessary stimulus, takes us past the tipping point, or produces an evolutionary event in our internal linguistically programmed productive schemata.

Other than that, I'm of the opinion that alternative revenue streams are in dire need of prospecting with the purpose of creating a separate endowment fund so that the fabulous breakfast and lunch spreads we had during the initiation/orientation week can be continued throughout the 10 weeks of course intensives, and again once we are all back in town for the capstone experience. I'm not entirely certain how many people are going to agree with me on this, but I'm just sayin.

During the holiday weekend, we've met up and shared a few rounds at local venues, and I'm thoroughly impressed by the level of immediate camaraderie in our group. It reminded me of one of the other professional organizations - that of Judicial Interpreters and Translators, - which was so instantaneously filial once we were all introduced. I'm fairly happy about it, and I'm looking forward with great anticipation at the year + alpha that is to come.