Brotherhood and Pain - A Call for Fellowship

I learned a lot through pain as a high school wrestler. That first week of practice each year was a revelation. We would start with warmups that were more intense than an entire soccer practice, drill basic techniques and more advanced counters for 45 minutes or so (never letting the heart rate fall), and then wrestle live until it was time for conditioning. That first week, it would be somewhere during the drilling that I would hit "The Wall" - my physical limit where my body said "I can't do this anymore!" and I would have to push through with mental toughness, visualization of success, and camaraderie from my mat brothers.

Each year I would turn in homework that week with a different handwriting than the rest of the year. My entire body would be so spent from exertion and musce fatigue that no matter how I sat, some portion would be holding me up and twitching from the effort.

Gradually my wall would get pushed farther and farther back. We would do less and less of the drilling and technique and more of the live wrestling. By a month into the season, we would be managing to wrestle live for more than an hour a practice. Together we would push our walls back and fight through sore muscles, head colds, parents who wanted to overfeed us, and all the other problems life can throw at you.

Each time you got your hand raised in wrestling, it brought a compelling feeling of success. Wrestling is a mano-a-mano sport where you are each the same size. Winning means you stand victorious when all you had to rely on was yourself. It is also a team sport.

People not on the team often made fun of us for wrestling. For being homos, for wearing spandex costumes, for caring so much, and for not eating whatever we wanted like the rest of the boys in high school. I had it easy (our team was state champs all four years I was in HS, so critics were kept mostly to snide whispered comments), but I can imagine how it must have felt to have those jokes amplified.

The only other team I have heard described the way I think of my wrestling team is football. With 90 players on the roster and 11 on the field engaging in carefully choreographed plays, you must place your well-being in the hands of your brothers every time the ball is snapped.

We build bonds as men together when we sacrifice, overcome hardship, and ultimately learn that we are stronger through fellowship and mutual reliance than we ever would be alone. We need more wrestling, more football, more fellowship, and more initiations into a common brotherhood.

I do not know what form this future fellowship should take for me, I only know that I am open to it.  I will readily embrace the chance to build strong bonds with men in my life and to mentor those younger than I in their journey towards manhood. I am reminded here of two interpretations of manhood that I have considered seminal that lack this sense of mutuality - and hope to find one that does: If by Rudyard Kipling, and It Takes a Man by Chris Young.

Millennials Giving Back

As a generation we have a pretty bad rep. Whether it's our parents, employers, or the news, we seem to have been labeled, judged, and receive regular shaming. While I acknowledge much of this judgement is accurate, I think it is much more a reflection on those who came before us than it is a reflection on us. It is our duty to use our circumspection and faults to give back more than we've received.

I didn't choose to get participation trophies at the YMCA as a kid; expecting a seven year-old to refuse a trophy at the end of a season is ridiculous. Those trophies came about as a result of parents demanding that their child was special and so deserved a trophy no matter what. As a child, I, like many people I've talked to, knew that those trophies weren't worth anything. I had two shelves for my trophies, one for the YMCA ones that didn't matter (and even those I had arraigned to put the one or two trophies from "good" teams at the front), and one for the trophies from other sports leagues. This second shelf was much smaller, and its contents far more precious.

Our parents and our parents' generations have let us down in many ways. Complaining about it won't get us anywhere. Pointing it out is a decent step towards realizing what actually is the problem, but is likely to lead to much more awkward visits home that include far less congeniality.

The solution is something that many millennials have already taken to doing - making sure that what we do for a living reflects the values we hold as a generation. While this can mean a hippie approach to living which is unfeasible (or undesirable) for many people, it can also be done in almost any workplace through conscientious adherence to a set of values.

It's a done deal for us millennials that people can be whatever gender they feel fits them most. It's a no-brainer that people should be able to love whomever they love, people are people and love is what saved Harry Potter after all. Millennials are so cynical about institutions and the establishment that it sometimes hurts us, but often it just gives us a highly refined bullshit meter that lets us ignore the partisan hackery coming equally from Fox/Brietbart/Drudge as it does from MSNBC/HuffPo.

Millennials may be ignorant about many facets of world history, husbandry, home ec, or the energy industry. We do, however, know that war kills people and shouldn't be a political tool used by political tools. We do know that large companies who pollute are failing to incorporate the externalities of their products, and that is wrong. We haven't realized yet the tremendous cost of our haphazard destruction of the environment and workers rights because of companies like H&M and Forever 21 - we have yet to learn how to buy and repair quality goods. We can identify the damage and insidiousness of monopoly powers throughout American industries, even if we refuse to label companies like Amazon as such. Our disdain for wealthy liars and the lying politics they employ is massive.

We have not yet come into our own and demanded that the diversity and equality embedded in our values become a permanent part of the American experience. We will soon. Millennials are getting older and our startups are getting bigger. We are getting promotions and starting families, and we won't make the same mistakes our parents did - we will make our own, new, and idiotic mistakes! We won't settle for a status quo that gives so much to so few while leaving so many without a chance to succeed.

The one silver lining about the incoming Donald J. Trump administration came from my father. He said "It would be a shame if whoever comes after him just goes back to doing everything the same way we used to." I agree. I am terrified of the things he will do and the damage that he will cause as our "precedent". But I hold out hope that as we millennials grow up further and take the reins of power from our elders, we will forge a more inclusive, rigorously honest, and caring country. One that looks after its citizens instead of locking them up. One that refuses to let insurance companies determine healthcare policy and demands that all children have a chance to learn a profession and if needed, go to college.

I do not know what I want to "do" with my life. The idyllic notion of joining a company and staying with it for life and pension isn't gone, but it does require sacrifices that many millennials are unwilling to make. If we want to live in a country that embodies our values, we need to be disciplined and over time demand that our governments, institutions, and workplaces reflect those values. The best way for us to give back and deserve the privilege we inherited as 21st century Americans is to demand through our jobs and social lives that our society leap forward to meet our challenges and take advantage of the technological paradise in which we live.

A Story of Growth

Sometimes it takes a life-changing event to realize something that was always in front of us.

Yesterday I listened to a man in his 40's tell a story to an elderly lady while eating lunch at a diner. In his mid 20's he had gone on a skiing trip with his then girlfriend and a few other friends. After a day of frustration helping out his timid girlfriend, he decided to go on one last run with a friend who was very talented at skiing.

After taking the lift to the top of the mountain (for the first time all day) and banking into a few sharp turns and steep downhills while following his friend, he decided to try to do one of the trick jumps his friend was doing. He mistimed and misaligned the jump and instead of landing the perfect back-flip he saw in his minds-eye, he went flying head-over-heels and ended up sliding off a 40ft drop.

Ribs cracked, lungs punctured, hips and pelvis broken, he recounted going in and out of consciousness as they tried to stuff a breathing tube down his throat on the helicopter. Without the ability to speak, he finally coughed sideways and saw the teeth that had been lodged in his throat fly out the helicopter window.

He woke up again once before his induced coma - long enough to recognize a doctor in the ER as the shortstop, Pedro, from his middle-school baseball team. Pedro didn't recognize him because of the gore, but saved his life with numerous surgeries.

After talking in detail about his reckless decision and the debilitating aftermath, the man concluded with a simple observation - "I had been so reckless with my life up to that point because I thought no one was watching and no one cared. It was only when I woke up after weeks in a coma to see my friends and family gathered around that I realized people had been there the whole time."

By our very nature, we to slip into solipsism. We feel isolated and scared to face our inner wildman. But the truth is, people are watching, they do care, and what we do every day can help and effect those around us for the better.

(Get Dirty to) Validate Your Staff's Roles

Lots of managers badmouth the jobs their staff do. You can draw a direct line from how much the boss validates the staff jobs to how motivated the staff are to do their jobs.

If a manager believes any job is 'beneath' him or her, then the staff won't want to do that job. If a manager believes that the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task should be their own, then staff will aspire to do the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task they can. If a manager attempts to use their authority to rest, do less, or have privilege, then the staff will seek to rest, do less, and have privilege. 

At camp this is really easy to see and to avoid by action. One tactic I use all the time that works wonders (and is fun to boot!) is to play with kids. If you make it a habit to play with the kids as often as possible as an administrator at camp, then not only does that validate the counselors' role of playing with kids, it helps them visualize what it means to get really good at their jobs - most administrators became administrators because they were really good at the "lower" job. In some jobs and roles it's not practical to go do the work of your entry level staff, which means you have to be much more cognizant of the words you use to describe their role and job, as actions speak much louder than words.

A second valuable tactic for this at camp (and I recognize not everyone would choose this one, but you could pick your own gross/stressful job that you happen to enjoy) is that most days I would jump down in the kitchen and help out a counselor who had the chore of doing the whole camp's dishes. I love the machine efficiency of using an industrial dishwasher, and knew that the dreaded dishes was often something that a new counselor had a lot of apprehension about. If I stepped in and helped out, something they thought would be a drag on their day and take up part of the coveted Rest Hour would instead be done in 20 minutes with little fuss. Knowing your boss has your back, gets your apprehensions, and is willing to get dirty to make sure you have a good day builds loyalty.

Using Biases to Win

Whether you're preparing for a meeting, changing your organization, or attempting to corral unruly employees/campers, you will be much more successful if you make use of people's cognitive biases. People like to feel street smart. They like to feel important. They like to believe that they have understood what is going on and have made an informed, intelligent choice based on that comprehension.

If you set things up cleverly, you can take advantage of this and are more likely to get people to choose whatever results you want. In addition to getting the result you desire, you are also giving people a feeling of agency, which enhances their buy-in and perseverance.

For a few marketing examples of decoys, check out this blog post. For a comprehensive and easy to read list of cognitive biases, read this.

I have often found that you can blend together a bunch of biases to get things going your way. Before you jump to some kind of "wow that's manipulative" conclusion - check yourself - this is how we do things all the time, I'm just talking about being more deliberate and increasing your effectiveness. If you genuinely care about people and want the best for you/them/the institution, then you're not being manipulative, you're being effective. Here are a few examples I've found useful over the years:

• I take really good notes for each staff member's exit interview each fall/winter. This helps people feel like they are important and that they have a say in how things go.
• Once I have a library of notes, I make sure to quote people to each other as often as possible. This means frequently re-reading the notes and is a time commitment, but people can imagine you quoting things they've said to others, which ensures people feel like they have agency and importance. It also makes people want to be mentioned in the future by you so they will focus more and try harder to impress you or be memorable.
• If I had an idea of a change I wanted to happen, I would ask a bunch of people what they thought about it. After the first person, I would be able to use the quote method mentioned above too! When I instituted the change later on, no one would question it, as most of them had already had a chance to express their opinion - and their opinion was tempered and massaged by the fact that I chose to quote peers whom they respected who agreed with the change or peers whom they didn't respect who disagreed with the change.
• People prefer to be happy - if you emphasize positive aspects of something in a way that expresses how long it will make them happy, they will be more likely to believe you. Since we start and emphasize that "Camp is for the Camper", I will also often mention how what you do with kids this week will stay with them for the rest of their lives. If your extra little bit of effort today results in lifelong positive changes for a kid, you are likely to put in that extra little bit of effort.
• People will take risks to avoid negative outcomes. If a counselor is worried about their cabin  not getting along or meshing, they are much more susceptible to suggestions that involve creative solutions. This doesn't work for positive outcomes, if a counselor is optimistic about being able to get their cabin back on track, suggest things that involve less risk. This logic works exactly the same when dealing with a camper - if they are afraid of not making friends they are willing to take more risks to get friends, if they expect to make friends, they will be more likely to respond to suggestions that don't involve as much social risk.
• Say it in a new and inventive way and people will remember it. Say it with a pun or a rhyme or an unusual physical flourish and it will be embedded in people's memories.

I think I'll have to do a series of posts moving forward digging deeper into how we use cognitive biases in a variety of ways and settings. Most social interactions are filled with overlapping biases, and people who are aware of and make use of the biases in themselves and others are powerful and effective.

Conflict and Growth

People grow through conflict and discomfort. I was reminded of this recently by a Facebook post showing a lobster shedding its shell only when it grew too big and the pressure too high.

I spent a lot of time thinking about conflict while developing training modules for administrative and counselor training weeks at camp, and I have never come to a satisfactory conclusion about how to teach conflict.

When conducting exit interviews several months after the summer, each year one of the most cited examples of "staff issues" would involve a seminal argument in the staff lounge. I can't identify why it is that these conflicts hold so much power over people's perceptions, though I think there are several connected explanations:

First I think these arguments serve as a shorthand for other issues those people are already having. It's not that disagreeing about feminism (or change, or racism, or politics...) is all encompassing, it's that it embodies the laundry list of faults and unresolved disagreements each person sees in the other. When we don't like or get along perfectly with a person, we can use a public display of disagreement to justify those feelings even long afterwards.

Secondly I think people like things to be resolved. We like there to winners and losers, facts and liars, heroes and villains. When we can cast ourselves as heroically defending truth against some other, we feel good about ourselves. Many of the arguments that got cited were about topics that have no easy resolution, so to feel complete, we retreat to our well-worn opinions.

Thirdly I surmise that most people are bad at the process of conflict, and thus tend to see the argument at irreconcilably far from resolution when it is mostly a matter of viewpoint. I am reminded here of an example in a physics class I took in college that discussed string theory:

https://brilliant.org/wiki/string-theory/

Imagine an ant on a power line that can travel along the wire or around it. For the ant those are two distinct dimensions. If we zoom out to street level, we can only observe the ant moving along the wire one way or the other.

Conflict is often zoomed way too far out. If we started in close by using conflict resolution skills like agreeing on what we agree on (usually arguments surround small fractions of things while the core principles are agreed upon), we would tend to see that there are many dimensions of agreement despite the one or two ways we disagree.

Teamwork Combo-Platter

Hire the right combination of people and set up your professional environment correctly and your team has the best chance of producing incredible results.

Today I'd like to talk about creating smaller working groups for a particular project that use individual's personalities and preferences to your advantage.

My dad has done a lot of work with insurance companies analyzing the risk culture they exhibit, and which management strategies are best suited to their individual challenges and existing team. He often talks about the four types of approaches to risk that are most common to managers in insurance companies. I've used a basic version of his logic in helping formulate a lot of the culture I have tried to perpetuate as a manager. In simple terms, the four types of risk approaches outlined in the paper above are articulated in the following diagram:

In case this type of drawing doesn't scream applications at you, here are a few for a camp setting:

• Each summer we take the whole camp on several trips to the beach. This trip is fairly straightforward but carries several health and safety risks. Big worries include losing a kid, a car crash, or inclement weather. Medium risks include injuries (assuming it's like broken arm or less, otherwise, push that one into major worries category!), sunburn, or a venue being difficult. Small risks include scarce or incorrect food, or counselors not doing their job well enough. The leader needs to be someone who will proactively solve minor problems and won't freak out if things start to go wrong. I would put a type 2 person in charge if possible and send a type 1 and type 3 for counsel in emergencies.
• We run several theme days at camp where we transform camp into a particular magical world. This summer one of them was Spooky Halloween themed. These days are planned out over several weeks and incorporate sets, costumes, vignettes, an overarching story line, and often several completely new major activities. The biggest challenges include practical assessments of progress-to-goal in terms of set, writing, and costume construction and lack of buy-in from campers or counselors. For a team of people running one of these days you want a type 3 in charge of the day, with assistance from a type 2 and type 4. You would want the type 2 person to help push the timetables and a type 4 person to help with a lot of the creative engineering of the day. Keep type 1 people busy on smaller, goal-oriented tasks that let them feel stability and believe things are going well, don't let them near the brainstorming meetings if possible.

Over time the people who you manage will change, and it is important for you to look over your team regularly and make sure that you have all four of these types of people represented. Depending on your workplace, it may also be important to stack the team with more of one or more types of people since you know more situations will arise that call for a particular type.

"I've Never Been Promoted; I've Promoted Myself Several Times Though"

Pushing employees to be their best involves making sure they realize when their decision making and ability to take on responsibility is greater than what they currently do.  It's not hard to tell when people are smart or talented enough for more of a challenge, what is hard is making sure that they create opportunities to take charge of things.

Fear of stepping on your boss' toes might make you hesitate to push for more responsibility. However, once you establish a role, you will be expected to do that next time. Your boss isn't going to be upset when they have less work to do, so stop being afraid to take on something.

Recently a Baby Boomer told me a story about an employee of hers (who she doesn't directly manage) who is talented but plateauing. When she asked that employee who would be giving lower level staff performance reviews, the employee said she assumed it would be her boss, even though she directly managed those people. The Baby Boomer told her to just put together materials for the reviews and then when the moment came up, she would be ready to tell her boss "I'll handle this." Then the next time she'll be assumed to be in charge of it.

The Baby Boomer concluded with the powerful thought: "I've never been promoted, I've promoted myself several times though."  As a manager it is your job to help your employees with talent and smartsmanship take those moments and grab more responsibility.

The Nurturing Father Model

A little while ago I read an article that really hit home with me. You should check it out.

Lots of men harbor a secret about sports - when we see these men perform inhuman feats with their bodies, we know they are using physical discipline to cover for their lack of personhood. This is why no one in sports is surprised or truly tries to fix the brokenness that manifests in domestic violence, rape culture, and misogyny. Deep down so many of us are insecure. We believe that if we fail or show weakness ever, then people will see our inner gollum. We have never learned how to truly care for each other.

I was listening to a country radio show a few weeks ago and the DJs were giving one guy grief because as he was taping his wife and he having a discussion about how sweaty he was at night, it came up that he liked to cuddle. He vehemently denied to the other DJs that he ever wanted to cuddle or instigated it, eventually bowing to audio evidence to say yes once in a while for a few minutes he might be willing to cuddle.

So fragile is our position, so undeveloped is our limbic node that we fear the ground falling out from underneath us with any misstep.

I am left with simply a question and and hope: What can I and we as a community do to help realign our culture to create a nurturing father model? I hope that I can help contribute a sense of unconditional acceptance to those around me as I continue on my journey back to wholeness and rest.

Wordsmithing for Evil or for Good?

William Shakespeare was the consummate wordsmith. I always loved reading his plays in school, and given my penchant for passionate exterpolation, I have never limited myself to preexisting language when expressing myself. A good word play, portmanteau, or entendre can bring a moment from banal to blingin' in a sentence.

But there is danger in creating language too. What we say and how we say it to each other isn't just good fun. I have struggled with finding the hidden misogyny in my language since college (did you notice toughies like sportsMANship? Sometimes hidden misogyny is a manwich, sometimes it's manspread, but misogyny is everywhere man).

Richard B. Spencer is a dangerous man, and a dangerous wordsmith. As the progenitor of the phrase "Alt-Right," and leading voice in the white nationalist and neo-nazi movement, he has committed his life to hate in a way that damages the fabric of our nation. This Chrome ad on has just been created to help you out in correcting the linguistic damage currently being done by Spencer's abhorrent wordsmithing.

If this kind of nomenclature interests you (and you like movies like Pulp Fiction or have read some Sci Fi), I highly suggest you pick up the book Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. The main character has some incredible moments with regard to how we speak and what we call things - I will leave you with a quote from the book that I believe sums up the danger and the power of words:

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Insulate Your Workplace

There are many variables in the world around us. From the social and interpersonal to the physical and environmental, there are thousands of factors that we keep balanced throughout every day of work and life. If, for even a minute, we stopped to consider all of the variables we are juggling, we would become unstuck, so our brains do a good job of hiding all of the calculations and action-reactions going on all the time.

I think that one part of why I enjoyed working at camp so much is that the number of variables shrinks so much that we are able to control more of what goes on around us and choose consciously what we want to do.

For children (who are by necessity discovering the world around them and placing themselves one lego block at a time into  an unfamiliar and scary world of variables) there is often little control over most environmental and social aspects of their lives. They don't get to choose their classmates, classes, classrooms, meals, homework, or often much else at all in a normal day.

At camp we let them choose, for hours a day, what to do. Obviously we are limited in some things based on the number of campers and sandbox property. However, the self exploration embedded in our mission statement and daily living provides a great guidepost for how you can motivate your employees in a non-camp setting.

As a manager it is important to give your employees a chance to do meaningful work with people they like. Sometimes there are jobs and chores that have to happen regardless. But there is almost always something for which it makes sense to give latitude to employees for how they pursue the ultimate goal. I would recommend using this type of framework to figure out if something can be made into an insulated work space for self-exploration, realization, and ultimately motivated accomplishment:

1. Agree on the starting point - meet or brief working group on where you are now.
2. Give benchmarks that you require, whether timetables for completion, details about reporting progress, or important components that are required for completion.
3. Agree on the substance of the final goal.

Make steps 1 and 3 as specific as possible. The more latitude you can give your employees in proceeding in between, the more empowered to explore how they work want to work. When they feel that they are responsible for a meaningful task and have the agency to make decisions within a framework that is provided, they will respect your authoritarian outline whilst working to keep pace with peers and impress their superiors with the product.

Personal Kryptonite and First Impressions

One of the most successful millennials I know explained to a group of us that her professional kryptonite is incompetence. She further defined that to include people who don't try, saying that when someone is trying hard, she can work with them to improve. Getting people to try is the hardest and most important aspect of management.

While she was being a big sarcastic and bombastic, it got me thinking a little bit more about how our personal preferences influence the way we get our staff to be intrinsically motivated to perform at their best. First impressions are key, both for the employer and the employee, and it is important that we stay true to ourselves in how we present in those key moments, otherwise we will create unsustainable personas that people will soon see through.

If you, like my friend, truly value competence, make sure that is communicated through your attire, body language, and opening words with new employees. You can do this for any value you have. You should also make use of your physical surroundings.


Assuming you have succeeded in engendering your intended values with an intentional first impression, you still have to actively create an environment that continues that value and regularly use implicit and explicit methods of keeping that value around.

One of the most important values to me is working hard and working efficiently. One way I like to show to my staff at camp that I value those two things is that I will try to identify whatever task in a given situation or project will be the hardest or most complicated or involved and publicly work on that task whilst teaching staff (and campers since I know the campers will one day be staff so it's never too early to get them competent). Since a large portion of jobs at camp are dirty or gross, this often means doing my best Mike Rowe imitation and getting dirty.

You don't always have to get dirty, and you don't always have to do the hardest task publicly, but showing your staff that what they are doing matters and is not beneath anyone is a powerful method of motivating them, since it validates their effort and allows them to picture themselves transitioning from their entry level job into a manager or executive. The new CEO of JC Penny, Marvin Ellison, is a paragon of this executive virtue, and it's paying off.

What is Cheating and Who am I to Judge?

As a high school wrestler I spent a lot of time saying the following sentence “Wrestling isn’t a sport, it’s a lifestyle.” While a little cheeky, this saying embodied a sentiment about the totality of dedication necessary for performing with your body at the highest level. As a wrestler I woke up standing in front of the bathroom sink holding a cup of water about to drink it on many occasions. I have vivid memories of standing in the shower manually closing my mouth because I couldn’t afford to take in the water weight of a few mouthfuls of greywater flowing down from my scalp.

I was not someone who had to cut much weight; I wrestled at or around my natural (though beefy) weight throughout all four years of high school. I know explicitly the dedication and self discipline needed to stay fit and lean by eating a proscribed diet, working out for hours a day, and never compromising, even for Thanksgiving dinner! That’s what it took for me to be a champion, and that’s what it took for me to master my body.

The mano-a-mano attitude that saturates wrestling is part of what makes it so compelling to me. There are no excuses on the mat other than that you are not as good as the human being having their arm raised while you slink off in defeat.

In combination with this respect for discipline, I have a healthy dose of libertarian notions about personal choice. I always used to say I could beat someone who is any two of the following: Stronger, Better, Tougher. As long as I could identify in which category I had an advantage, I would find their cracks and expose them through mental and physical warfare during the 6 minutes we had on the mat. I’m not trying to brag, but with a 94-18 record through 4 years, I won 84% of the time with this approach.

One of the other wrestlers on the team with me was two years older than I and much better. He had more talent, was stronger, and was really tough. I rarely if ever scored a point on him. Sometimes just because he could, he would hold both hands behind his back and brush me or others off throughout a whole period of “live” wrestling during practice with only his forehead and temples. When he graduated, he joined the military, and I believe became a Green Beret or Army Ranger, or some level of national service even beyond the exceptional dedication necessary to put your life on the line for our glorious country.

He also often reeked of vodka. He was not (to my knowledge) drinking during the day or before practice, but especially reeked when we had practices during school vacations or extra hours other than our usual 3pm-6pm Monday-Friday. The alcohol came out of his pores as his body cleaned up from his previous nights’ debauchery. I do not know how good (or how emotionally unstable) he would have been without drinking. I do know that I treated my body with the utmost respect and demanded every day that I improve my performance, and drinking or doing drugs would have inhibited that.

What does it mean to cheat? Where is the line between performance enhancing and performing at your best. Who is to say that he would have been better without his vices, and who is to say that his vices held him back? When we let rules be our guides rather than performances and facts, we lose the opportunity to express ourselves fully. I believe that systems are an integral part of how we relate to each other, and institutions should be strengthened through time. However, those same institutions should also be curated to allow us to ascertain which rules exist to restrict and which exist to enable.

Single Sentence Precepts

I used to do Goju (a particular type of Karate created in Okinawa) for a few years. All throughout the training there were a few phrases that really stuck out to me and I refer to all the time in how I think about problems and the world around me. One of them was "Kihon is fundamental" Since "基本" is the Japanese character Kihon, which means fundamental, it's kind of a rough platitude to wrap your head around. But bear with me - another way to say it is "truth is truth," or "All of Goju can be summed up in a single punch."

These sentences are meant as a guide to help us cut through all of the clutter. When you are punching, there should be nothing else, your body should act as one fluid drawing strength from the earth and placing all of your energy at the tip of your first and second knuckles. If you leave room for other thoughts or extra actions, you will reduce the ultimate power of your punch.


Stephen Mitchel's translation of the Tao te Ching says this in a particularly interesting way: "When it rains there is only rain." Give yourself over fully to what you are doing.

While it is nice for your organization to have a fully fleshed out mission statement, and you certainly should trot it out regularly to prevent yourself from losing sight of it, it is important for you to create single sentence precepts for your projects, team, and organization. These precepts give people a chance to all start from the same place. These sentences will be accessible enough to give you the chance to correct your employees or groups when they begin to stray from the path you think is best.

Additionally, if you create a strong enough sentence, or simply repeat a mediocre sentence enough, people will come to see the concept as its own entity. Once this happens, you will not be the person making them do something, the concept will be, thus freeing you up to focus on fine tuning rather than enforcing your broad organizational goals.

Maybe Two Popular Vote Victories (and Electoral Losses) Means We Need to HELP Each Other...

For the last several days, my news feed has been filled with a combination of self-righteous anger and genuine shock at the ascendancy of a "serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S." (most of Huffington Post's editor's note that has accompanied any story about Donald for the last six months or so).  I believe in the electoral college and why we have it. I think it is important that we not stifle anyone's voices, no matter how much I disagree with what they are saying.

I agree with the people who are protesting in that I think they have a right to express that their choice for president did not win. But I think that there is a severe lesson to be learned for the democratic and progressive people living in Cali, DC, and NY (and the other urbanites who voted heavily for Hillary). There are millions of people in this country who have not been helped by Barack Obama's administration. Those people have a right to the same degree of self respect, self sufficiency, and employment as people fortunate enough to attend college (or some of it). 8.4 million jobs have been added to our economy during Obama's administration - for those with a college degree - while those who have only a high school degree have received nothing.

As a student at Lehigh university from 2005-2009, I ran a program at my house called Thursday Night Dinners where we invited local community leaders to come speak to us about issues important to them. The most important series we held involved local community leaders, Sands Casino representatives, and Lehigh professors speaking about the prospects of building a casino in the old steel mill. For the most part, it seems like our impressions were proved true, by 2012 - residents have "wore out the phrase ‘neutral’ to describe the overall affect of the complex at 77 Sands Blvd".

Hundreds of towns and communities all throughout PA and other rust belt states have floundered as industry has moved away and technology has reduced what used to be impressive factory towns into meth-havens ignored by Democrats. Most of those communities have not been as lucky as Bethlehem (and I do not consider Bethlehem to be lucky).

Our country has much to be proud of, and it is our diversity and cultural diffusion that makes us strong. I chafe at claims by high-tower elites who cite asymmetrical facts to deride our performance in categories like education or literacy. Our country has far less corruption than one of the only other comparable democracies, India, and our economy is stronger than any in the history of the world. Relatively speaking, we have shrunk to only the size of the best empires in history, rather than continuing to dominate half of the world's trade.

What this election is showing me, more than anything else, is that we need to take a serious and rationed look at how to improve the lives and opportunities of those left behind in the recovery. I refuse to believe that many of the old, white voters who supported Trump are as terrible and reprehinsible as Hillary claimed or as the liberal elites want us to believe right now. If you went to a school or lived in a town where you have never met a Muslim or lived with a LGBT person or had an interaction with a Jew, than your expression of beliefs in support of Donald Trump's vision is less deplorable than it is ignorant.

It is my job as a member of the landed elite or liberal coastal citizens to educate, inform, and help out our fellow Americans. In the all important words of Pope Francis, "Who am I to Judge?"

Donald Trump and the New Rise of the American Blue Collar White Voter

Donald Trump just won the election. Besides the shock and unease, I have been filled with a few competing thoughts since the voting data showed that the election was going Donald's way around 8:15 last night. First and foremost I am disappointed in my fellow Americans. As turnout data ossifies in the coming weeks, I’m sure I will have many things to say about the story those numbers tell.

So far the numbers that stick out most to me show that only 1/3 of the population voted (roughly 1/3 is too young to vote, but aware of the definition of bullying since they are all snowflakes, so one can hope that they grow up to resist a bully like Donald). That means that since Donald won about half of the voters, roughly 3/4 of the eligible population thought it either didn’t matter or that they’d prefer Donald Trump as president.

Each person has a right to their say, and while I flirt with elitist mentalities about who should vote, if we hope to form a more perfect union, we must give each American the chance to cast a meaningful vote in elections. It is clear that the American public wants Donald Trump. Look at the map. Unless you live in NYC, DC, Philly, or a city in CA, your area voted for Donald. From the campaign staffers I've talked to, it seems like most of the targeted voters came out in droves, so the election wasn't lost by Hillary, it was won by Donald.

I keep wondering what the world would be like if the baby boomers had focused more on teaching people how to read, or instituted minimum wages that rose with the dollar, or taken a little less acid. Instead they have consistently spent many times more money than they had so they could falsely inflate their lifestyle. This cycle of over-consumption and bust is unhealthy, which helps explain why we have a gluttonously capitalistic and misogynistic president, again.

However, once I start to quaff that bottle of gripe juice,  I find myself unwilling to blame someone else. I am a white cis Millennial American man, and though I worked to help elect Hillary and wish to have the opportunity to vote for women and people of color in many future elections, I am part of the problem.

It’s hard to quantify the blinders I believe have been placed on me because of my privilege - I have had so many opportunities, and receive biased positive outcomes so often that no matter how “woke” I am or become, I will never be able to absorb what the world feels like from the perspective of either a white rust belt septuagenarian or an immigrant.  I would like to think that I am an ally to women, people of color, and anyone less fortunate than I, and when faced with opportunities to help others I try to do my level best to do those things.

It's obvious that the anger, frustration, and hopelessness of the rust belt is a real thing. What solutions can we come up with to address that? If towns and lifestyles are dying and industry has left, what can we do to fix that and bring renewed hope to people outside of large cities? Wisconsin voted for Donald because Hillary never visited it once during her campaign. She took it for granted, but the voters there roared to life and insisted that they have a say.

Perhaps as a result of privilege, I tend to be optimistic, so I resist the urge to lash out in superlatives and hyperbole about what evils that man may do. Either we live in a democracy or we do not, and seeing as I want to respect the institutions that I believe give us the power and prestige that we have, I would like to find some way to help empower our legislators to help the poeple who need it.

Strength and Objectivity over Preconceptions and Personal Agenda

In 2015 the Educational Testing Service (ETS) gave a test to adults ranging from 16 to 65 years old testing their skills in a variety of professional metrics. Unsurprisingly, the youngest adults had fewer skills than the oldest ones. Turns out people learn things as they get older.

If that was all there was to the story, there wouldn't be much interest. But articles like this Fortune article from March 10, 2015, or this "parenting" article from AARP on April 27th, 2015 paint a picture of millennials that makes it seem like it's somehow millennials' faults that they are young and have been systemically let down by their elders and political institutions.

According to an Accenture study of the graduating class of 2016, 80% of grads believed they would be receiving on the job training, but only 54% said they actually received it. This represents a massive gap in expectations between employees and employers, and can only result in tension, disappointment, and corporate-wide under-performance.

The problem here is similar to the bad judgement Roger Godell has shown leading up to Tom Brady's recent 4 game suspension from the NFL. Tom Brady and the Patriots whacked the Broncos. Like tore apart their team, morale,  and hopes and dreams to the tune of 45-7. Every team has skeletons, so Get off your high horse NFL! Brady got suspended (and the team fined hugely) for an offense that often goes un-fined. Tom Brady reasonably noted to the arbiter that there are different sets of rule books for players than general managers and won a repeal of his suspension. Then in order to make sure the integrity of the game was held to the highest regard, the NFL went after him further and won a reinstatement of the suspension.

There is no arguing that Tom Brady is a great quarterback, perhaps the best in the history of the game, and that he tends to try to win every week. There is also no arguing that the integrity of the game is at stake every week through the decisions and performances of players, refs, coaches, athletic trainers and many others involved in the sport.

The problem here lies in the fact that rather than asking how to get your business to the right result, employers, or Godell in the NFL example, are more concerned about having their predispositions and preconceived notions confirmed. Everyone 'knows' that the Patriots cheat, so the moment you think you've got them, go for the throat. Even if that runs counter to your bottom line (Tom Brady jerseys made the NFL more money than anyone not named Dez this year). Mr. Godell has done an insanely competent job making the NFL money, but he let his passion and personal agenda get in the way of smart business.

Imagine if instead of trying to scratch Brady's eyes out like they were fighting behind the bleachers, Godell had launched a massive ad campaign with Brady as the centerpiece. What if they had come together and announced to the world that people make mistakes, integrity matters, and that while winning is nice, sometimes you get carried away. Spot after spot after entertaining spot would have raked in dough for the NFL - instead they spent $14.7 million adjudicating against their premier player, all while still being shitheels when it comes to domestic violence (among a million other issues, some mentioned in the high horse link above). 

Leading through Values

When you lead people through values, you give them the tools and agency to make their own choices. Sometimes this will mean a person makes a mistake or has an error in judgement, but for the most part, giving people a set of values to hold onto is like giving a sea captain a compass. Yeah, you could give them extremely detailed step by step instructions for reading the stars, common and uncommon markings along the shore and across the sea, or you could give them a tool that helps them find a moral north.

At camp we have a couple phrases that we use to guide us through all things. First and foremost (and mentioned within a minute of the official beginning of staff training) is that "Camp is for the Camper". If what you are doing is not for the campers, that doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it isn't heading in the right direction. Rather than managing individual behaviors, it makes it easy to ask a counselor or squad of goofballs to reconsider if their choices are putting campers first.

One caveat I do have is that there is a moment where the humility and 'campers first' mentality begins to head towards dehumanization of the workforce. If you are using your values as a cudgel to get your employees to place their own identity and well-being below that of some larger and unifying goal, then you are risking their health and have a possibility of overextending them.

Therefore it is the job of the manager to be an active curator of values; to balance results and sacrifice; to redirect people before they overextend. We had a bunch of counselors who quickly bonded at the beginning of the summer and started calling themselves the "FOMO Crew" because they were staying up so late together. One the one hand, they were forming bonds together that are sharp and deep. Chemistry that resulted in one of the most powerful and functional cultures of the summer (the Newctown Boys, our very own joke boy-band). But there was a moment where as a manager, several days after I had heard about their tendency to stay up together, where I had to call out several of the boys for their lackluster performance in the morning and discuss (somewhat cheekily, as is my custom) why that was. Rather than reacting with anger at a job undone, I tried to channel their chemistry into something productive. Use your verbal aikido skills to take something that is positive (group chemistry) and ask them to do that positively, rather than living for the nighttime without the kiddos.I think if I had headed off a couple of the boys in 2014 earlier, or had my assistant director do the same thing, there would have been a much more functional culture on that front in 2014 as well.

Feedback and Criticism

For our middle of the summer professional development (every summer we send the kids home for 24 hours right in the middle of the season so we can clean everything thoroughly and have a little in-service training) one thing we did was hand around a general feedback sheet for each person. As a group, we all passed our sheets around and filled out a few comments for each other person in the list.

There were a few interesting psychological observations I had during the process - first it was interesting that as a few comments accumulated for each person, I found (and others agreed about this pressure when we discussed it later) that I wanted to learn what others had said about that person before formulating my own opinion. Since we were giving only 40-60 seconds to write a few lines of feedback for each person, I found that it was mentally draining to try to formulate a full picture of the person and then write a comment, and instead I would read quickly over the list and add one or two comments to sections that seemed like they were under-filled, or I felt were too one-sided. Interestingly I didn't feel the need to balance ones that were one-sided if I felt like the person really needed the feedback in that direction, though if I disagreed with most of the comments in a one-sided area, I would definitely comment to try to balance it out. There was also an interesting curiosity and lopsidedness to the information that everyone had. Since you were commenting and passing around all 35 other people's sheets, you got to see what was accumulating for their comments gradually and feel the tone of the whole group's comments develop even though you had no idea what people were saying about you. I found that odd assortment of information/blankness to be stressful.

Afterwards, we collected all of the sheets, photocopied them, and then returned the originals to people the next day. For the most part people seemed to take the criticism and praise well, and really only the most emotionally immature people were outwardly upset that they received negative feedback. While there were a few mean-spirited comments, it was overall a very productive and considerate process, and even the people whose reviews were the harshest were filled with positive comments. It seemed like the people who got upset were having trouble more with the fact that they had negative comments at all than with the actual content of the negative reviews. I think this is an interesting potential negative externality of the "participation" awards and removal of grading from many elementary schools / academics. Some of the people who responded poorly seem like people who have likely had a family/educational environment that stressed inclusion and feelings over collectivism and results, so while they are caring individuals, they lack the grit to hear something negative. Also interestingly enough, several of the people who responded the most poorly to negative feedback are people who I would most strongly identify with having a fixed mindset and not a growth mindset.

I will have to check back with my Assistant Director sometime next week to hear how all of the counselors have responded in their check ins with him as he has worked through those lists with people and helped them turn constructive criticism and praise into goals for the final weeks of the summer.

Spiritualism and Industrialism

Been having a series of discussions with a couple people about what benefits humans have from spirituality and religion that we have replaced with a reverence and idolatry of technology. As we have replaced collective activities in space (fewer mandatory community events, many people exist in separate bubbles, connecting only by choice through the internet and as their children's schedules dictate) with collectively reinforced beliefs through our own filters (facebook news feeds, online news filtering, getting to hear and read only things you already agree with) we have lost something fundamental and meaningful that we had before the industrial revolution because we had to focus on things closer to home.

This discussion has often started as a discussion about the divinity of Christ, or the differnces between Abrahamic and Christ doctrine in the bible - and out of that has come an active discussion on the ability of humans to be something more than their parts when combined. As in Christ was wholly human but able to make decisions that were divine - and so was able to be more through the use of the holy spirit than he could be by himself, much in the same way that through fellowship and compassion, we can be more together than we are individually.

These discussions have also focused on the reductionist tendencies of Donald Trump and the Tea Party / libertarian ideals espoused by many in the far right in America today. If we use politics to separate, and blame people for their life circumstances rather than asking what we can all do to make each other's lives better, then we are falling into a trap that will bring us backwards and make us less together than we would be alone.

David Brooks wrote a great article in the Times this weekend on this idea: The Governing Cancer of our Times

Queen Elizabeth II had a great speech in 2011 about a similar theme: UK and N. Ireland Peace

Losing and Gaining Employee Trust - Say Yes When Possible

Rank and file employees' trust in the good intentions of their bosses is a very fragile. It is slow to be earned, and accumulates through micro-choices, but can be lost in an instant when efficiency or bottom-line thinking supersede the human factors inherent in managing staff.

These pivotal moments are easy to identify in retrospect, but can be difficult to avoid as they spring into existence. Two easy examples, one from several years ago and one from today:

• Staff had been arriving back from their days off sporadically tardy, and it was becoming a drag on both the administrative end of things (scheduling them for an activity or responsibility is tough when you can't be sure they'll be back on time), and for the individual counselors who were being screwed over by their peers. As an administrative team, we had a productive and appropriate brainstorming session as part of our weekly long staff meeting on Sunday afternoons, and we came up with an adaptation to the days off scheduling (starting/ending at 9:15am instead of 9:30am). The change was shared later that evening at the weekly all-staff meeting. While staff followed the new rule, I learned in the end of summer feedback forms that this was a particularly discussed and maligned decision. Staff felt like we'd had one way of doing things, and we were screwing them over by changing the rules to their time off mid-summer. While we fixed the short-term, non-vital problem, the damage we did to their trust in the administrative staff proved irreparable. To be honest, this is just one example, as is to be expected in a long and exhausting season, there were many other micro-choices in that summer that also contributed to the overall distrust (more of an 'us versus them' than a 'we're a happy family' - we're not talking like huge trust issues here, just the subtleties of maximizing intrinsic motivation). 
• This evening was the last night of the first session, and traditionally we have had counselors stay on duty for an extra half hour in order to get a little extra time in with their campers on the last night. Instead of being off-duty at 9:30, they are free starting at 10:00pm. Right as all of camp was heading back to their cabins around 8:30pm, a bunch of the administrators gathered and it was realized that none of us remembered letting counselors know that Friday nights are a little different. Right as we were about to decide what to do (expediency was required), a first-year counselor piped up from the edge of the conversation group and said "I think most people were split on this, we were talking about it a couple days ago and staff was about half and half" - I replied "Well I'm glad you guys were thinking about it, that's the kind of question someone should ask Ad Staff, since we hadn't remembered and it would have been great...." Here I hope/think we made the right quick choice and I sent around the most easy-going and chill member of administrative staff to let people know that they would be covering until 10:00pm. Because a counselor had given us the information (or in the first case had we asked the counselors what they thought) we were able to make a choice that we wanted for camp and do it in a way that would assuage any potential backlash. 

I guess the moral of this post is one effective way of maintaining employee trust (and thus intrinsic motivation to perform at their highest level) is to find room for their preferences and desires to be expressed and met when possible. Or - Say yes when possible

How do you reward/appreciate planning?

Today the PD did a really great job planning things out. It was her day off starting at 9:30am this morning, so she had to appoint someone to be PD. The counselor she picked was a fantastic choice; full of ideas and energy, a third year counselor, and was very honored to get to be PD.

The PD also wrote her schedule to be mainly rain-adaptable since it was supposed to thunderstorm all day, though we somehow just managed to be be "dry" but sticky all day instead. Her schedule featured things like dining hall bowling, makeovers, board and card games, puppet-making, and a slew of other activities that were tailor-made for indoor weather.

I'm just not sure how to properly appreciate her for a job well thought out. Maybe I'll give my Reinforcement Award at staff meeting to the counselor, and mention her being PD on that (which she did a great job at, so duh), and then make sure to tell the PD how much I thought her planning led to the counselor having a good day and that she was an excellent choice. That way I get to thank/appreciate them both in different ways with the same Award - and since it's another of my administrator's award system I've adapted, all of the awards also stand as a testament to his good idea.

Tower Building

Tower Building Write Up


Did this activity today and it was incredibly well received. Had the counselors add their blocks one by one, and then break up into groups to help each other come up with six items to put on the second block. Then they added them while sharing their favorite, then broke into groups again to do the third block.

In the end, the debrief included everything I could have possibly wanted about how the tower metaphor applied to each person individually (and uniquely) and also that we as a staff build a tower together each day of camp. People really responded well to the metaphor wrapped in a literal tower!

My favorite response someone gave was Jake saying "Guys you realize that all of these 72 blocks say things that each of us is capable of doing on a day to day basis? This means we can all be amazing counselors, we just have to try" (Paraphrased...)

Building Ethic Instead of Details

I remember reading a leadership article a while back that talked a lot about KITA (Kick in the ass) managing - it provides stimulus, but doesn't persist after the kick has faded into the background.

This week has been an amazing example of managing by building ethics instead of building detailed information based lessons that are underpinned by KITA. For example: we have not mentioned tardiness or attendance since the first day, when people were shown and told clearly that we show respect for each other by being where we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be there.

By setting the standard of you are being disrespectful to others and the institution when you are late, it has (so far) made people want to be on time in order to show that they care and that they want to be here. Instead of it being me or another administrator getting angry and acting childish (and that anger being a KITA), which would mean that staff would only care about being on time when they thought a manager was watching or would notice.

Feminism

Debated for about an hour tonight about some of the facets of shucking off the patriarchy, and there were a lot of ideas bandied about. The best metaphor of the evening compared the patriarchy to an old house. Yeah you could slap anew paint job on it or throw aluminum siding around it to preserve it for a generation, but if you really wanted to build your dream house, you'd gut it and save all the materials you could and redesign it from the bottom up.

Culture is passed down over time

Vocabulary is a strange thing. When we add words to our lexicon, it helps us agree on what a concept or cultural phenomenon is.

The last few days (which have been the first few days of staff training) I have heard four or five of my "rules of camp" mentioned in the exact context they deserve to be in by counselors I know weren't on staff when I introduced those rules in 2014.

Besides the pride that swells in my heart by knowing those have been added ot how people think, I also really like seeing the process of cultural change through vocabulary.

"Camp is for the camper"
"Say yes when possible"
"Assume best intentions"

Those three all made it onto our social contract this summer, without me mentioning them explicitly.


We also added the phrase "pumpkinface" to describe someone who shows up late to breakfast because they stayed up too late and turned into a pumpkin - minor shaming, silly, in good fun, but gets the point across to anyone late for things that it is not okay to be late. (a little woried of this turning sour by being a hazing thing, but I'l make sure to head it off if it goes in that direction)

Why use social media?

In discussion this morning with some of my staff I asked why they use social media.

What I learned from them was surprising - mostly they claimed they use their phones in bursts, when not required to do something else, so our culture at camp of being busy and around people makes them not miss their social media, whereas in bored/down moments they will reflexively reach for their phones to prevent even a moment of boredom.

The most surprising set of answers was that it seemed like none of them spend much time looking through or keeping up with all of the selfies/snapchats/whatever that all of their online friends are posting, they mostly just enjoy the simple action of capturing themselves (and friends) doing something and then sending it off.

I don't really understand the brain science that's going on here, since if they all know that mostly none of them are looking carefully at each others' posts, the narcissism that often gets attributed to millennials is inaccurate. (it seems like the people who actually are into this science would agree with me)

So if millennials aren't using social media because they are more selfish, they're using it because they're bored, that begs the question - how do we keep them engaged (with or without their cell phones)?

Is it the parents?

This weekend we had a group of families staying over, about 30 people in all, and a dozen kiddos. In the morning we had several activities, including our giant swing. One mother arrived back on the property with her 11 year old around lunchtime. I spotted the girl walking across the main area crying from inside the kitchen, so I knew the mom who was flanking her was bee-lining to ask us to help fix something so her daughter would stop crying.

The mom asked me if we could set up and let her daughter get a chance on the giant swing since she had been at lacrosse all morning and missed out. Of course I said yes and at some point later in the afternoon a couple of my staff sent her up.

The problem here is that parents aren't teaching their kids that choices have consequences. If you are in a lacrosse league, and choose to go to the game Saturday morning, you may not get to do everything the other kiddos who didn't go to sports got to do. That's life. By teaching their kids that the world will shift to accommodate their needs, we are not raising them to be healthy, happy, strong adults.

It is hard for me to lay much blame on the shoulders of millennials when we all know that in our childhood, our parents borrowed more than anyone ever had before them to make sure they got to increase their living standards. American credit card debt rose throughout the 90s as millennials' parents insisted they deserved better than they were getting and just went out and bought those things.

While it may be true that mortgages are the single biggest factor in debt (according to this 2014 study, there is a .96 out of 1.00 correlation between size of debt and presence of a mortgage), this doesn't excuse our parents. Not everyone has the income to be a homeowner. Every parent, by biological necessity, wants the best for their children. "No", "You can't have/do that", and "Life's not fair" are three important lessons every parents should practice into the mirror every day until they can do a better job raising their children.

I think there are two really easy ways to think about this that will help (both, ironically, from the keynote addresses at the Tri-States Camping Conferences the last two years). First, change the way you talk about your life - instead of "I have to pay the bills / walk the dog / go to work ..." say "I get to pay the bills / walk the dog / go to work" - Bert and John Jacobs, Founders of Life is Good. This sentiment teaches us to recognize the privileges we have in all things, which encourages gratitude. Second, when asked how she could cultivate the ego necessary to be president while at the same time maintaining the humility to keep the common touch, Hillary Clinton replied that she reflected daily on a need for a "discipline of gratitude."

Manage through Fear or Respect?

Millennials have been raised to respect their elders. If their manager's actions (perceived or subjectively) make this difficult, an imbalance will develop. This imbalance is the cumulative difference between the millennials' expectations of the manager's potential leadership and the manager's actual behavior.

For the most part, this imbalance can be corrected through blasé complaining. However, if the imbalance happens too frequently or severely,  complaining can instead poison a workplace as people create closed social spaces where they can safely complain with increasing bitterness and malcontent. After this point, people tend to do their job and listen to their manager out of fear rather than respect.

Please don't forget millennials are people too. Just because you are a manager and have kids and a family and a house doesn't make you more of a person. Or to put it in a hilarious political way: Passion is an important ingredient in political success. But a passionate voter still votes only once. That is to say: I have every right to be treated with dignity and respect, even if you think I'm not grown up enough, not old enough, or that my generation hasn't met some poppycock yardstick you put out there. Manage millennials like humans with dreams and goals and you'll find out just how powerful the internet has made us.

Crashing and Integrity

One of my staff crashed the golf cart into the pool fence today and didn't fess up right away. When Tim asked them all who/what happened, no one spoke up and so he had all of them go fix the fence. Later, the one who had crashed it this morning came forward and told him.

Not sure where to go with this, but it happened today.

Managing Them Out of a Distraction or Irrational Behavior

When adding a millennial to a working team or project, they are just as able as any other generation to observe a task or process in place and then place themselves inside.

When working in a small group of two-four people, everyone is constantly making micro-judgements about many aspects of the group. From the work ethic to the process/product balance, employees use many environmental and managerial signals to determine what to do and when. Since employees must balance their energy level, life outside work, and social situations, we know that they are often distracted or irrational in their approach to work.

Millennials have several unique characteristics that make managing them out of their distraction or irrational behavior easier:

• The language of the internet is chock full of things to be explained. No one is more open to learning than someone who is teaching, so getting a millennial to teach you something about the nearly infinitely new internet age makes them ripe for guidance. Education is a two way street and they are an expert.
• Since the distraction can sometimes be technology induced, but many jobs require computers and being available 24/7, this can pose a nasty conundrum. This is where establishing a culture makes all the difference. Most jobs have an existing culture of how they use technology, so rather than creating a culture, you have to change things. See post on the process of cultural/organizational change. If you change your culture to create times where your staff are free from technology and instead have to rely on each other as people, you will have a much stronger team. Which is more, your millennials are hungry for this kind of deep social interaction. The narrowness of social engagement online causes this.
•  Millennials like to be liked. Use that to your advantage instead of complaining that they have inflated senses of worth. You could go touchey-feely and write your millennials personal notes. You can go parody and make a twitter "wall". You can go statistician and prepare a report for them of the value they bring to the company. You can post positive results of recent customer surveys. You can create an annual social event designed specifically for millennials. You could pay them a pension.

The Process of Cultural/Organizational Change

Change is hard until we get started, then Newton's first law takes over.

So - how to get going? Well, start with realizing that change happens through a series of your actions and diffusion of social responsibility. Reverse engineer your change in whatever medium you prefer and identify broad steps. Here are several methods to navigate your plan:

• Gather interested people for a low-stakes brainstorming meeting with the intention of redesigning/re-imagining some aspect of your organization that you believe would result or point in the direction of your current broad step (keep the topic narrow but meaningful). Conduct the meeting and hope for new ideas - don't forget it wasn't penicillin Alexander Fleming sought. Prep your notes and take good notes during the brainstorming; try to only interject when you have to to restart or recenter. Afterwards, collate and tabulate - honestly, but with a purpose. Report to the larger group or organization what the low-stakes session concluded with excitement. This method of positive democratic creativity co-opts organizational conservatives because people feel pressured to accept the will of the group.
• Conduct semi-annual or annual "talkfests" with each employee. While time intensive, these debriefing sessions are a panacea for change. If you want to add a concept or problem solving strategy to your culture, start by asking a question the answer to which is your change. Take great notes about their answers and freely quote employees to each other as often as possible. This method allows you to make rapid progress, as you have a monopoly of information compared to each employee who only had one meeting. Each employee also believes they are important because you took the time to listen, both to them and to their peer whom you are quoting (they also desire to be quoted by you).
• Codify everything. Especially things that only happen periodically. This will give you the same claim as every conqueror - the ability to write history. As was so eloquently put by Terry Goodkind: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."  As a result, people want to believe that whatever history says happened, happened. This method is only useful narrowly, as people will only let this cognitive dissonance stretch so far before they cry foul.

Change involves Discourse. President Obama is a Master

Of course a general would match their strategy to their army, opponent, and geography among many other considerations. To do otherwise would be foolish and potentially disastrous. So too should a manager. If millennials are lacking in a skill or personality trait, don't just get angry. Get a plan and take action.

President Obama on "How Change Happens" during Howard Commencement Address:
"You see, change requires more than righteous anger. It requires a program, and it requires organizing. … We remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory, the power of his letter from a Birmingham jail, the marches he led. But he also sat down with President Johnson in the Oval Office to try and get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act passed. ...Brittany Packnett, a member of the Black Lives Matter movement and Campaign Zero, one of the Ferguson protest organizers, she joined our Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Some of her fellow activists questioned whether she should participate. She rolled up her sleeves and sat at the same table with big city police chiefs and prosecutors. And because she did, she ended up shaping many of the recommendations of that task force. And those recommendations are now being adopted across the country — changes that many of the protesters called for. If young activists like Brittany had refused to participate out of some sense of ideological purity, then those great ideas would have just remained ideas. But she did participate. And that’s how change happens."

We Want Heroes

Perhaps it comes from growing up on Disney movies that defined everything in black and white, right and wrong, belle and the beast. We see people as either good or bad, and single decisions (like posting the wrong thing on facebook, failing to use a turn signal, or supporting the wrong political candidate) can be used to justify defining and judging a person or entire group.

We read headlines of our heroes character getting the axe and never bother to read deeper because we know they are not the hero we thought they were. Tiger Woods gave us a decade of the best golf in history, but since the moment his mojo started to crack, neither he nor the viewing public at large has been able to have the slightest confidence in his game. This man was the best, and it turns out he was still just as fragile of a basket case as the rest of us.

No matter the source, whether circumstance, worldview, or the resurfacing of a historical pattern, we millennials yearn for heroes that can stand the test of time. This often manifests in the workplace as a clingy need to follow the leader or boss' directions, but since we're millennials, we can't manage to do this directly. Millennials, even the too-cool hipsters, are carefully watching every move, cataloguing  (sometimes in horrifying online detail) every word, and judging. As a generation, we have seen so much information and imagery and lies that we are constantly looking out of the edge of our vision trying to catch our leaders and bosses the way they "really are" so that we can learn their secrets, whether good, or bad.

The real secret is that their bosses are no different than they; just like Tiger. As millennials, we will only begin to realize our potential when we start demanding it. As another generation is crowned and rises up in the post-internet, post-trump-candidacy america, we will begin to finally settle down and make a life for ourselves.

What we need most is leaders willing to take those chances and try things out while also staking a claim for mistakes, errors, lapses in judgement, and being human. Only through that kind of courage can we stop living in constant fear of the internet discovering we're all secretly not good enough.

Using One's Own Strength (The Prince Chapter 13)

Often it seems like millennials are unable to use and build on their strengths. Machiavelli uses examples of rulers losing power after making use of auxiliary or mercenary troops. I think as a result of the information flattening and social subsumption of the smart phone era millennials are unaware or do not trust their own agency in taking action.

This has several results: Some millennials avoid risks, avoid thinking creatively (even while believing they are creative because their participation awards all said so), avoid taking on responsibilities they perceive as complex or prone to failure, and believe they are not appreciated enough just for showing up. These millennials tend to be in the bottom half of performers, and have worked hard to develop the skill of anonymity and camouflage necessary to avoid trolls and social destruction. They can be very loyal if given guidance to develop a niche, and often have insightful institutional and systemic wisdom because of their time observing from the periphery. They are also prone to form disaffected groups that meet under the proverbial bleachers to bitch and break the rules. Given too much space and not enough supervision, these millennials can be poisonous to an entire working team.

Other millennials conflate the flatness of information with the flatness of value of that information. This has several results, some positive, some negative. Millennial culture has a significant degree of anti-elitism, as few millennials get their news through traditional sit-down TV news hours. This loss of ritual and shared bedrock cultural facts has contributed to the return of the "No Nothing" attitude. These millennials have put in the time and effort to develop a labor intensive skill and are successful in their social media realm. They have disdain for tradition and tend to be wholly ignorant of the historical context in which they live. This conflating of flatness with value can also give rise to political and social action that is ostensibly for the better, as discussed with regard to the rise of Bernie Sanders.

Manage with Dirty Hands

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Doctor Who Quote: S5E5
"There's a plan?" "I don't know yet, I haven't finished talking."

Sometimes we have to think fast, and working with millennials, especially in the summer camp industry, involves lots of performance and improvisational moments. I have found many times that their urge for there to be a plan is so strong that even if they know you are making it up as you speak, they want someone to be responsible.

Teaching millennials how to take this mantle for themselves is one of the most challenging aspects of managing them.

The Wordsmith

Olivia clearly has taken to heart that I called her a wordsmith on her first day. It’s come up several times since I said that on Monday. It reminds me yet again how seriously those we manage take the words we use to describe them.

Distractions are Easy, Work is Hard

Propensity to gossip and chat and get distracted rather then be task oriented - or maybe some people are entertaining, but it was tough to do wood chips steadily with the four of us because of the chattiness. We did work hard. There was an interesting moment on our third or fourth time shoveling when one person had to move places several times until she could find an angle she could shovel in, and we joked that she was inefficient since she could only do things one way. I wonder if or what I should suggest to help them think of that for themselves.

Executive Decisions

One thing I have learned immensly from Timbo is that the more you do the more you can do. People around me tend to wait for others to make a move; tend to pause as they try to blaance the social  and power dynamics with with their own personal abilities. Working with Tim has shown me that when a task needs to be done, you simple start doing the task with whoever is there and show with your body how you do things. Simple things like moving canoes or kayaks and setting up the waterfront makes it clear that people wont make the executive decision to look at the bigger picture and decide what needs to be done. I do not think this is because of alack of acumen, but rather a lack of experience making executive decisions