I recently met a man who quit his job as a tenure-track professor to use his skills elsewhere. He told me that almost every single friend of his in academia had gone through a job change since the pandemic started.
I asked him why, inviting him to tell me his story. His answer shocked me: “I was tired of being a social worker.”
It wasn’t necessarily that students were coming to college academically unprepared. It was more about their life skills. Teaching was great, but more and more he was taking home personal crises his students were going through.
It reminded me that I had talked with a high-level administrator at a public university who said that almost daily they were dealing with a student in crisis: suicidal, depressed and so on.
I’ll keep the larger cultural issues for another day. I am thinking about the practical side of those of us downstream of college: How must employers prepare to receive graduates?
The workplace challenge
I submit that managers will have to change from how they previously hired, oriented, trained and otherwise employed young adults. An example: I had a client who had to give some negative feedback to a young employee. He had contributed a lot of value to the team and had handled customer interactions well … but the negative feedback was a bridge too far. Multiple times during the discussion, he walked out of the room, overwhelmed with emotion.
Perhaps your thought is, “Well that’s a bad employee–they should replace him with a better candidate.” What if that’s what the average candidate looks like?
Ron Edmondson is a business consultant and pastor I’ve shared here before. His “7 Ways We Can Stretch Ourselves as Leaders” is worth the quick read on our subject.
“A rapidly changing work culture takes creative, innovative and adaptable leaders,” he says. And our work cultures are about to change.
One of his ideas I think especially applies to our topic. Edmondson says to “read something different from what you normally read.”
Your employees are coming to you with existential crises. Having them read a book about productivity and telling them to “leave personal problems in the parking lot” is not going to cut it.
You’re going to need to dialogue, and books can give you vocabulary for that. “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis springs to mind as a common-sense introduction to philosophical and spiritual concepts.
Another option: literature. Hip Socket’s Workplace Book Club uses short excerpts, with discussion questions, to talk about how life works and how it applies to the workplace. The first podcast episode is here, covering a Jane Austen passage. I daresay there is more in Austen to grow a person than a 10-step personal growth book any day. For all the episodes, there are free downloads on our Resources page.
Perhaps Generation X saw corporate environments as soul-sucking (see Dilbert or “Office Space”). Gen Z will instead bring their broken souls to work.
What an opportunity.