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#Leadership : How To Let Go & Become The #Manager #Millennials Want…Like most Millennials, I Bristle at Command & Control. My Generation Expects a More Personal Interaction with #Management

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As a manager, I’ve Struggled to Double as a Mentor to my Employees. I’ve felt, at times, confined in my formal role by unseen pressures that pervade any organization.

 

Robert Pirsig’s famous motorcycle treatise contains a lesson for managers who aspire to be better mentors (Credit: Public Domain)

Like most  Millennials, I bristle at command and control. My generation expects a more personal interaction with management. We want to confide in them our goals — whether we want to be promoted, transfer departments, enroll in graduate school, or leave to backpack Europe.

As a manager, I’ve struggled to double as a mentor to my employees. I’ve felt, at times, confined in my formal role by unseen pressures that pervade any organization.

Harvard psychologist Harry Levinson called this phenomenon the Great Jackass fallacy. The carrot-and-stick metaphor suggests employees are stubborn mules that need to be controlled.

I’ve asked myself how I can effortlessly shift between being a manager and being a mentor.

For me, the answer lies in a consistent mindfulness practice.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is an open awareness of the present moment in which you observe whatever thoughts come to mind in a detached, nonjudgmental way. But it’s so much more than that.

Robert Pirsig captures its essence in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

In a car, you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

Millennials crave this collapse in distance, emphasizing people and their development more than today’s leaders who, at least to us, are focused exclusively on profit and personal reward.

Mindfulness has the power to tear down the walls that separate supervisors from their staff.

 

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What creates these walls in the first place?

The Arbinger Institute argues that self-deception is the underlying cause of all people problems.

Self-deception is not knowing you’re the cause of the problem.

When we feel the need to do something for someone else and choose not to, we betray ourselves and enter what Arbinger calls “the box.”

From inside the box, our view of others is distorted. We see people as objects available to advance our agendas. Their needs aren’t as legitimate as our own.

We also inflate our view of ourselves. We begin to justify our actions to protect the image we’re projecting to the world.

A manager, for example, might pride himself on always getting results. An underperforming employee, therefore, jeopardizes the outcome and is seen as a threat to his self-image.

Rather than consider his contribution to the problem, he uses a bevy of tactics to temporarily steer the employee back on track. But he fails to create any lasting change in the relationship.

How do we get out of the box?

We can’t “do” anything to get out of the box. Tweaking behavior isn’t enough.

Instead, a shift in mindset is required.

Meditation is a fantastic method for training the mind. A daily sitting practice cultivates the quality of mindfulness that Pirsig describes in his book.

 Researchers have found that mindfulness increases the capacity for perspective-taking.  This means that mindful managers are able to suspend their own thoughts and feelings while remaining fully present to those of their employees.

But certain managers are simply not able to shift perspectives.

“Millennials are used to much more fluidity in terms of role. There are moments of hierarchy and moments of parallelism,” explains Diane Musho Hamilton, author of Everything is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution. “It may be that other generations don’t have that flexibility.”

For those who want to increase their agility, Hamilton offers three suggestions:

    1. Identify the role shift when it’s happening
    2. Practice excellent listening skills
    3. Resolve all your issues related to power

The last one is a doozy. Hamilton says that it’s difficult for people in power to relinquish it, even momentarily. When they do, they’re put into a freefall. They don’t know what’s going to happen.

Yet, as a mentor, you have to be willing to be changed by interactions with your employees.

Cordelia Jensen sums it up well: “I think the most important quality of a mentor is that they are open to following students where they want to go, not always pushing their own agenda.”

 

Forbes.com | October 26, 2015 | Drew Hansen