The Story
The name of the class: Successful Job Interviewing. My Department of Education audience was evenly divided between older men (mostly white, with decades of service) and young women (of diverse ethnicity and race, with only a few months in their position).
They sat in separate clumps.
The conversation turned to understanding our values and being true to ourselves. I asked them to jot down the first words that came to mind when I said “loyalty.”
The elders, aka white males, said “United States, my Agency, our mission, the American taxpayer.” The young women wrote versions of “I’m loyal to me.” A very black-and-white conversation. Things heated up.
“You’re so selfish and immature!”
“How can you be so self-centered?”
“You have no place in the civil service with that attitude!”
During a lull in the verbal fireworks, one of the younger cohort raised her hand and asked permission to speak. She stood to face the men—including me—and said clearly, without rancor, “We grew up in the world you created.”
The group backed off. Here was leadership personified.
Why not celebrate instead of blame?
We tend to categorize others by generation, each labeled by a salient characteristic: The Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Y. These labels provide some resonance to understand perspective, and they also paint with a broad brush to predict behavior and find fault.
I’m no less and no more than a part of my generation. I’m no more bound by my time than by my introversion or my height. Yes, I experienced the ‘60s, but that doesn’t guarantee that I view the world a certain way. And who I am came from being like my parents as well as creating a person who was separate from them.
We take cues from our parents as we struggle to separate from them. A normal human need is to establish our own persona, and that must include I’m not you. We act out in all sorts of ways to discover and establish our identities. When I was a high school teacher, I worried most about the kids who weren’t acting out. I understood from my own experience that they needed to protect themselves from becoming carbon copies.
Instead of faulting those of a different generation (or race or gender or personality type), we can become a model for tolerance. I don’t want younger people to be like me, or to adhere to my values, exemplary though they may be (to me). But maybe I can behave in such a way that perhaps they’ll think it wouldn’t be so bad to become someone with patience, insight and enough courage to not feel threatened by others’ differences, to be comfortable with gray (and not just the hair color).
It’s their turn. Look in the mirror rather than the microscope. As David Brooks says, in the first page of The Road to Character, think in terms of eulogy virtues instead of resume virtues. Become amazing grays.
