¶ Success Should Not Be Defined By Institutions
“We’ve done a great job of telling our students what success is, and that just doesn’t work. I want to make sure that our students understand how to define success for themselves. What is it that they want to do? Not what is it that we want them to do.”
—Adlai Wertman, David C. Bohnett professor of social entrepreneurship and founding director of Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab at the USC Marshall School of Business
Students, patients and employees are all tired of being told what success looks like. This was one of the core messages I absorbed while listening to people share their personal stories at a recent 2021 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit.
This article is part two of a six-part series that features a blend of written content and short videos of individuals from across industries (doctors, professors, executives, deans and more). In part one I introduced the primary obstacle underscoring nearly every challenge leaders are facing today—whether it’s pressure to figure out hybrid remote teams, how to thrive in our perpetual state of uncertainty, how to fulfill their promises of inclusion and how to elevate their commitment to personalizing wellbeing.
That obstacle? We’ve been suppressing individuals. It’s time to start unleashing them.
Here’s why it’s urgent: one of the top trends for 2022, according to this article from Harvard Business Review, is that managerial tasks will be automated away, creating space for managers to build more human relationships with their employees.
There are some assertions baked into that statement.
First, that our current manager/employee relationships are not currently “human” enough (I agree, as demonstrated by the research cited in my last article).
Second, that managers have to wait for something to happen outside of themselves – for managerial tasks to be “automated away” in order to create the space required to build those relationships. (I don’t agree: there’s no time to waste waiting).
Third, that having the “space” is the answer (I definitely don’t agree). Just because we have the space for more human relationships doesn’t mean we know what to do with that space. Managers have been trained for those so-called managerial tasks, not for building those human relationships.
That’s probably why Gartner says organizations need to invest in “human-centric” managers. With this, I heartily agree.
So, how do we do this? The most human-centric thing we can do is to talk with those very humans. Do you teach students, treat patients, lead employees? Do you know them as individuals?
Individuality requires a concerted effort to know and account for the realities and the values of individual employees, customers, patients and students. What do they really need and want from you? What do they wish you knew about them?
In the next few sections, we’ll hear directly from them.
Listen to Students
The events of 2020 radically disrupted higher education. What do students want and need from their teachers and their institutions?
Pete Baron, a student at Fairfield University, shared this at the summit: “In the age of standardization, the purpose of education was content. It was about imparting knowledge on students. If you're an accounting major, we're going to give you the skills to be an accountant.”
But Baron said last year he heard an academic leader suggest that education should be guided by a question, not a major. “I started thinking about my question,” said Baron. “I'm interested in sociology, philosophy, rhetoric, politics and history. I figured out my question is, ‘are socioeconomic inequities inevitable? Or are they avoidable?’ Now I have an individually designed major centered around that question. And because I'm leading with a question instead of just a discipline, in every course I take I'm thinking about my question and how it fits in with what I want to solve for.”
How motivating! Watch this short video of Pete to get more of his story.
Students are also watching our efforts at diversity and inclusion, and seeing where they fall short.
In the video below, Brielle Lubin, a high school sophomore at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, shares her unique perspective about the dangers of social media and warns that our efforts to be more inclusive can inadvertently create environments where clubs (or diversity resource groups) feel exclusive.
Listen to Patients
What does it mean to stop suppressing individuality within the context of healthcare? Obviously, this is a realm in which standards can be important. But we start suppressing when we let those standards obstruct our view of the individual in front of us at any given moment.
That’s what happens when people are seen and known solely by their cancer diagnosis rather than by the unique individuals they are.
“As an African-American woman, an undergrad, and an adolescent and young adult – those things should have been taken into consideration pre-treatment, during treatment, and post-treatment. Unfortunately, they were not,” said Kawana Williams, licensed professional counselor at My Healing Center. “I'm an African-American woman in my youth with a cancer that is typically restricted to Jewish, white women in their forties. I was treated as a standard cancer patient. ‘You're young. We can blast you with a crap load of chemotherapy. And once you're done, you'll be fine.’ That's how I was treated.”
Watch and listen to her talk about it in her own words.
Kayla Redig is a competitive athlete and elementary school teacher. She had a similar experience with cancer in her 20s, and has produced a documentary film about the special challenges facing young adults with cancer.
In this short video below, she talks about her isolation. “When you're diagnosed with cancer at 24, you no longer fit in with your normal peer group. Good luck trying to date when you're bald and you don't have breasts anymore. You don't fit in on the outside. And then you go on the inside of the hospital, the space where you're supposed to be welcome, and I was lumped in with everyone who had the same diagnosis [older women in completely different life stages]. Not only did I not fit in on the outside, now I don't belong here on the inside.”
She offers a suggestion: “I've had a lot of unexpected, out-of-control things happen with the cancer diagnosis. I'm willing to and wanting to grasp onto anything that feels familiar, concrete and sturdy. So if you [healthcare workers] can give me some of that control, I'll take it.”
Listen to Employees
It’s tempting and common to put people in boxes based on one aspect of their identity, because that makes it “easier” and more efficient to deal with someone in the moment. But that’s also what isolates us from each other, and it’s what makes it hard for leaders to be what Gartner calls “human-centric.”
“We should never feel like we need to decide where we belong to feel included,” said Ivy Nguyen, senior manager of security awareness at General Mills. Nguyen also said we shouldn't have to adapt and change who we are to belong and to fit in. In this video, she shares her own story of feeling the need to make things simple and easy for everyone else, rather than honor her own identity.
That’s such a common feeling among employees – that they have to sacrifice their own identity for the sake of the organization.
Listen in the video below of Meaghan Gilhooly, doctor of veterinary medicine and vice president of veterinary quality for Banfield Pet Hospital, talking about why organizations may find it difficult to treat employees as individuals. Namely, that individuality is hard to scale and people tend to avoid what’s hard.
Another challenge, according to Frank Ross, senior manager of cyber security engineering and operations at General Mills: “One of the mistakes I see is that we haven't incorporated the groups of people that we're trying to help in the solution.” He talks more about that here.
Ross’ point is a good one, and that’s exactly why our process toward unleashing individuality must begin with a process for assessing how we might be suppressing people. You can’t start unleashing if you don’t first investigate and listen:
Where can you find useful intel?
Who do you need to listen to and how?
Whose voices do you have the hardest time finding and hearing?
Are people staying silent because they're afraid to speak up, or because they’ve learned from experience that speaking up is not safe?
Or are they not silent at all, you just haven't heard them?
Who can tell you who else you need to listen to?
Stop defining success for others. Start making a way for them to define and achieve it for themselves.