"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." - Irish Proverb
Photo Credit: Cyrus Restaurant, Geyserville, CA (Kevin Jordan, June 2024)
Greetings -
I hope you, your families and friends are well and enjoying the warm (blistering for some) start of summer. For those traveling during the upcoming holiday weekend, I wish you safe and joy-filled journeys!
This edition explores, in large part, what it means to embrace and celebrate community in our work. How do we effectively navigate a mosaic of values, points of view and range of differences in ways that demonstrate respect for others as well as ourselves? Research and perspectives examine what the best organizations do to cultivate engaged work communities, including the core principles that they live by and the impressive (and sustainable) results they have achieved (and continue to do so).
Central to these communities is a commitment to cultural intelligence/cultural quotient; that is successful organizations actively see, hear and honor the totality of their workforce. Considerable research continues to point to the need for and value of diverse generational workplaces. A range of reading and listening offers practical ways to engage across the generations, starting with the fact that we are, generally, much more alike than not.
And finally, engaged and thoughtful work communities put a premium on equitable and just compensation practices. There are several pieces looking at the gender pay gap, progress to date, and work that remains at the policy and organizational levels.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Featured: Gallup: State of the Workplace 2024 - Employee Engagement
Not surprisingly, higher levels of people engagement lead to a robust set of positive performance indicators and outcomes. Surprisingly, many of the top performing organizations that Gallup assessed did not initially demonstrate high degrees of engagement. What set these organizations apart was a deliberate and strategic focus, over a sustained period of time, to develop cultures predicated on thoughtful, resilient and transformative leadership that prioritize the holistic needs of their employees.
As Josh Bersin delineates, in his wonderfully insightful book Irresistible, the premier organizations are grounding around a shift from:
"- hierarchy to teams will unleash energy, belonging, and commitment;
- jobs to work will empower people to reinvent themselves and to always bring their best;
- boss to coach will give people and management a sense of growth and development;
- rules to culture will bring people together and attract great candidates;
- promotion to growth will create collaboration, development, and skills;
- profits to purpose will create more energy, passion, and commitment; and
- output to employee experience will propel employees forward on a journey of mutual value."
Articles
Harvard Business Review: Leading the 6-Generation Workforce. "...Giving each generation — and, importantly, each individual — the opportunity to be seen, understood, valued, and leveraged in the workplace throughout the course of their career is essential for personal, social, and even societal well-being."
The Wall Street Journal: What’s It Like to Work for a Gen Z Boss? Very Different. "If the early managers are any indication, the workplace will be less hierarchical, more informal and a lot more focused on mental health."
Harvard Business Review: Advice for the Unmotivated. "...All these things—giving yourself distance, acting empathetically, channeling your energy productively, and reframing your thoughts about work—will improve your mental health, make you better at your job, and increase the odds that something good will happen in your professional future."
Kellogg Insight: The Gender Pay Gap Remains Stubbornly in Place. Why? "A partial explanation comes from a seemingly separate phenomenon: the plight of younger workers."
The Wall Street Journal: The ‘Coordination Tax’ at Work Is Wearing Us Down. "Mismatched schedules, wasted commutes and too many ways to communicate. Getting in sync with co-workers isn’t getting easier."
Harvard Business Review: The Permissionless Corporation. "Technology is empowering employees to make their own decisions. Organizational structures need to catch up."
Book
Liberation Day by George Saunders. "[This] masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality...Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances."
Blog Posts & Opinions
Korn Ferry: The Silent Treatment—Between Gen Zers and Boomers. "Forty percent of workers over 55 haven’t spoken to a Gen Zer at work in a year, and one in five Gen Z to someone over 50. Why corporate leaders should be worried."
Tech and Tea: Ask vs guess culture. "When unreasonable requests are followed up with 'but you could have just said no!' Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work."
Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis. "I believe our people deserve mass movements that exude joy, build power, and secure critical victories for the masses of working people...People associated with these change projects would themselves exhibit liberatory values, including the practice of radical compassion and humility...Leaders would invite accountability, act with rigor, and speak with clarity. Problems and contradictions would be met with curiosity instead of judgment and finger pointing. Harm would be addressed with seriousness and an eye toward reparation, remediation, and healing. And we would build power with relish and let our successes and failures breed innovation."
Podcasts
TEDxCreightonU: How generational stereotypes hold us back at work. "The Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Gen Z -- we're all in the workforce together. How are our assumptions about each other holding us back from working and communicating better? Social psychologist Leah Georges shows how we're more similar than different and offers helpful tactics for navigating the multigenerational workplace."
Joan Garry: Cultural Intelligence: A Major Key to a Thriving Nonprofit. "You’ve heard of IQ and EQ. But, CQ is the third intelligence that empowers a nonprofit leader to mightily drive the mission with the strong, rallying support of a unified team." [CI/CQ is by no means only applicable to non-profit organizations. There are lots of nuggets in this episode for leaders of all organizational types.]
Academy of Management: Now, Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap. "...We explore the consequences of the now-outdated belief that “women don’t ask,” finding that it increases gender stereotyping, even on dimensions unrelated to negotiation, and it is associated with both greater system justification and weaker support for legislation addressing pay equity...Our research calls for an updating of beliefs about gender and the propensity to negotiate for pay." [The link is to the research abstract only and a very short and informative video graphic about authors' research findings.]
Arts, Music, Culture, Literature & Humor Corner
An Irish Goodbye (short film). "On a farm in rural Northern Ireland, estranged brothers Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) and Lorcan (James Martin) are forced to reunite following the untimely death of their mother (Michelle Fairley). But when the pair discover an unfulfilled bucket list belonging to their late mum, their pained reunion takes an altogether different course." [A wee (about 20 mins), bittersweet film that is quite well done and won Oscar and BAFTA awards.]
The New Yorker: Stewart Copeland's "Police Diaries:" Bang On. "The drummer and composer talks about his three-take style, Sting’s way with a hit, and his Muppet counterpart, Animal."
The Guardian: Looking back on life in the Brat Pack: ‘It never existed in any real way.’ "Actor Andrew McCarthy’s documentary looks at his time in 80s Hollywood and the pitfalls of living underneath a label."
The New Yorker: "The Buggy" by Roddy Doyle. "The next wave or the one after, the buggy was going to be on its side and the baby—if there was one—would be strapped in and helpless."
McSweeney's: "Writer Math." "If you think a piece is 100 percent done, it’s actually 45 percent done. To get it to 100 percent done, you can’t."
Reflections
“In the depths of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”~ Albert Camus
“Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.”~ Maxine Hong Kingston
“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”
~ Roger Ebert