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.