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