Are you a female executive? Been called “honey” or “babe” in the workplace? Asked to pick up the coffee and donuts for the staff meeting? Been expected to ‘straighten up’ the conference room after an ideation session? Those (and many other) seemingly innocuous situations are indicative of a culture steeped in sexism. This article in Forbes magazine offers up three good reasons to confront the perpetrator(s) head-on.
Category Archives: Trends and Developments
Age Discrimination Is Real. Here’s How To Deal With It.
Marc Cenedella founded The Ladders… you know the commercials, “$100K jobs for $100K people.” He writes a weekly topical letter that is often quite informative and, as the job market heats up, this week’s is worth a careful read. It is on the topic of age discrimination and, as Cenedella posits, age discrimination is prevalent while hidden and is affecting ever younger workers. It is something that the savvy jobseeker can overcome… without dressing in clothes from J Crew or getting the latest buzz-phrases from your teenage daughter. In fact, DON’T do that! Instead read the letter.
“One of the things I was most surprised by when I got into the jobs business over a decade ago was the prevalence and practice of age discrimination in hiring right here in the USA. Oh, sure… we’re not like some overseas markets where job ads explicitly demand youth, or a particular gender, or beauty(!), in the applicant, but there it is… the blank look on your interviewer’s face when you talk about growing up in the 60s or 70s. The skepticism with which your Twit-facebook-gram skills are regarded. The cultural references that pass silently like two Teslas in the night…
Well, at least the younger generation seems to get your reference to “Gunga-galunga” and giggle. Most of the time. All of it adds up to a pernicious undercutting of your ability to get hired and get ahead. We just have to admit the ugly truth that age discrimination exists — there’s no doubt about it. And there’s no silver bullet for those facing it. If you’re in the job market and over the age of 52, you will almost certainly face stereotypes and negative attitudes regarding your desirability because of your age. And in some cities, in some markets, that negative environment impacts candidates as young as 40 years of age.
While there’s nothing you can do to stop it, I have, over the years, observed which candidates and applicants have succeeded despite their age and which have failed because of it. If I had to summarize, I’d say it appears to me that age discrimination is mindset discrimination first and foremost. And you’ll need to review how you are presenting your mindset — your attitude — to your future employer. Every hiring manager is asking herself, every HR person is asking himself, these questions about you and every other candidate they’re interviewing. Will this candidate:
| – | Be able to excel in this role? |
| – | Be able to learn and adjust as the role evolves? |
| – | Be able to master the tools and technologies involved today and tomorrow? |
| – | Get along well with others on the team? |
| – | Take direction and feedback? |
And it’s important for you to realize that youth is the symptom, not the cause, of age discrimination. What I mean by that is that hiring managers are hiring for open-mindedness, flexibility, and a sociability with others. On average, there’s a perception on the part of hiring managers, whether right or wrong, that those attributes are more frequently found in the young, as opposed to the experienced.
And it’s worthwhile to review why these attributes have so much value in the business world today. As the world changes, businesses change even more rapidly. Companies sometimes need to jump on new trends before they pan out, or hedge their bets, or make sure they’re well-prepared for most contingencies. And that means there’s always plenty of “new” to keep up with. So a workforce that is flexible, open-minded and interested in learning is far better than a workforce that is determined to keep doing it the old way.
“The old way works fine” might be OK for you around the home, but in business, it has proven to be an enormous destroyer of value. Take a look at the hard times that old famous companies have fallen upon. Heck, even some of the newer tech companies that were darlings within the last decade have had difficulties mastering new environments. So expecting your future employer to be pleased with an “old ways are tried and true” mindset won’t serve you well in your job search. So it is not necessarily youth itself that companies are hiring for, rather, it is those attributes that have proven effective in today’s business environment.
The cause of age discrimination is the perception around older professionals’ adaptability, curiosity, and team spirit; youth is merely a symptom. Since you can’t change your age, your goal is to address the underlying root causes of age discrimination — your goal is not to appear or act age-inappropriate — it is to present yourself, effectively, as a constructive, resourceful, “coachable”, team player. When confronting misperceptions in your job search, it is always better to “show” than to “tell”:
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Describe situations in which you adapted new technologies to the problem at hand. It is helpful if these examples aren’t from the seventies, but rather represent transitions that your interviewer herself went through. |
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Recount how you were able to help younger (and older) staffers get to a solution that was stumping all. Detail the challenges you faced and what tactics you used to overcome them. |
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Relate your experiences with receiving and using feedback constructively. Discuss how you used the situation to update your behavior and outlook. Share the process you went through to find where you could perform better and the steps you took to achieve an improvement. Ideally, quantify that improvement. |
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Illustrate with specific stories your interest in, and passion for, the work that you do. Why does it drive you? What excites you about your work? Your younger competition does this out of habit — because they can’t talk about decades of success in the business — so you need to make sure you put yourself on a fair footing. |
As you can see, the important thing is that rather than telling the hiring manager that you’re open-minded, curious, flexible, adaptable to new circumstances, and sociable enough for the role, show him that you are. And a final word to remake the point about youth being a symptom and not a cause of age discrimination.
On occasion, one finds older candidates that mistake having an open mindset with mimicking a twenty-year-old’s mindset. There is a difference. Arriving at a job interview replete with the names of the latest bands, dropping age-inappropriate lingo into your answers, and wearing clothes that reveal too much about your desperation by trying too hard, all have the opposite effect of what you’d hope for. Interactions like these reconfirm your interviewer’s fears that you’ll be obtuse, unsavvy, and a management challenge on the job.
No, your best tactics are to communicate, verbally and nonverbally, that you are adept at keeping up with the times, and, even more importantly, interested in doing so. And the best way for you to do that is to show them precisely those behaviors and traits for which they are interviewing.”
Creativity and Inertia are Natural Enemies
With shifting political alliances, worldwide mobility, instant connectivity, global commerce, and the general acceptance of situational ethics, it may seem that there are few natural enemies left anymore. Even in the animal kingdom, we are witness to more species peacefully coexisting in a changing world – sometimes out of sheer necessity. It seems to me, however, that creativity and inertia will (and should) always be natural enemies.
One of the definitions of creativity according to Webster is “the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.” The very essence of this definition is that creativity is an active process. Creativity demands an interested party or parties working on a solution that addresses a unique circumstance or a perceived shortcoming in the status quo. Inertia on the other hand is a passive mindset. Look again to Webster. Inertia is defined as “a property of matter by which it remains at rest; indisposition to motion, exertion, or change.” Common synonyms for inertia include words like idleness, laziness, and sloth. Synonyms for creativity elicit words like imagination, ingenuity, and originality. Could these be more opposite? I don’t think so. Well, so what!
OK, here’s what. In my humble opinion, we are inundated with so much information and so many “expert views”, that it is easy to get lost in minutiae and discouraged about our own “lack of influence.” I heard a productivity guru the other day preaching a philosophy where his disciples ignore most events in the world and instead concentrate only on those things (mostly his books and CDs) that further individual, personal goals. I agree that being an “information junkie” can be both depressing and counter-productive, but being clueless-by-choice is to hand over our natural abilities to be creative. It is the essence of inertia or, as a popular TV commercial says “a body at rest tends to stay at rest.”
And here’s what else. In addition to being an activist disposition, creativity demands exercise. It is never at rest. It may sometimes be restful but it is never completely shut down. Sound daunting and unachievable? Actually, the process is frequently referred to as exhilarating and supremely satisfying. The musician Charles Mingus said, “Anybody can play weird. That’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” The American inventor Edwin Land stated, “Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.” And the famed movie maker Cecil B. DeMille said “Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.”
If it’s been awhile since you’ve experienced a “creativity high”, here are three quick hits to get you buzzed again:
- Get Moving. Remember, one of the synonyms for inertia is laziness. So, don’t be lazy. Explore. Go. Experience. If creativity is your goal and you want to look at things with a fresh set of eyes, then feed your senses by simply getting out. You’ll probably be shocked at how small you’ve allowed your world to become.
- Seek Difference. Fine, you’re moving… but to what? Well, err on the side of the different. Different people, venues, practices, habits, experiences, engagements, challenges. If you want to spark creativity again, it will only happen if you scramble the routine a little. No good high ever came from a look-alike drug.
- Embrace New. Well you’re different now… but what’s permanent? I say it should be a commitment to the new. Don’t toss everything that’s worked for sure, but ‘new’ should not mean ‘bad’ or ‘enemy’ either. It has a tendency to be that in business unless it’s a potential new revenue source. Not every ‘new’ idea or practice that you embrace will love you back, but you’ll be better for having taken the risk.
Finally, remember the old advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer? It never applies here. Anytime. For any reason. Inertia is always the enemy of creativity.
Getting Your Resume Past The e-Gatekeeper
OK, anyone who has embarked on a recent job search knows the importance of getting your resume to the right person. But what happens when the first “right person” is a software program? Executive recruiters and employers both are adopting ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) with increasing frequency to streamline the sifting and ranking process. Knowing how these programs use your data is critical to success in the initial screening of your resume. If you’re good at tailoring your CV to the software, you have a great shot at moving on in the process. If not, no one will ever know you were their best option.
Lisa Vaas covers resume writing techniques and emerging technologies for The Ladders. In her post on modern resume writing, she offers 24 tips to make sure you are at the top of the heap in an increasingly machine-driven screening process. I suppose I could be critical that some of the tips might be redundant or simplistic (they are), but on balance this is a very cogent, thoughtful piece. Ms. Vaas has done a good job providing candidates with the “how-to” of tailoring a resume to ATS software while not losing sight of the personal touch. A quick primer and a worthwhile article to keep on hand in your job search.
Reinventing The CIO in the 21st Century
Dan Burrus is a leading technology futurist and best-selling author. His prescription for how the CIO must lead and adapt is both sobering and exciting in these rapidly changing times for every business. There can be no doubt that high achievers will be both rewarded AND stressed as they strive to stay ahead of the competition. The CIO Survival Kit is an article well worth reading.
More basic guidelines for the CIO include watching and understanding where the organization is headed. Listen carefully to the many messages coming from Top Management. It could be all about cutting costs today and limiting the expansion of technology…And tomorrow an immediate desire to have more information readily available for key decision makers. The CIO casualties do not see the changes coming.
Brands, Brains, Crowds, and The Doors
When The Doors released “Break on Through” in January 1967, JIm Morrison sang that “we chased our pleasures here, and dug our treasures there.” That message could be applied to brands as they came into prominence in the early 20th century. How you ask? Well, consider that America was largely an agrarian society and common standards for product manufacturing and consumer safety were spotty at best. Brands promised consistency and big came to mean safe. Brands took pleasure in battering the little guys and dug a lot of treasure out of consumers desire for security. Those days are over now. Retailers are hungry for new profit centers, establishing an increasing presence of store brands that have both the appearance and performance of national brands. The not-so-secret intention of many chains, especially in food categories, is to crowd out the big brands in favor of higher margins afforded by private-label products and niche specialty items that aren’t available everywhere. That philosophy is inexorably marching into other retail spaces as well. Any traditional response by established brands will be both wrong and damaging.
At that same time in the brands’ heyday, all the supposed brains necessary to elevate a brand to national prominence were housed in some big ad agency on either coast. If you doubt the hubris of the agency world of that time, check out a few episodes of Mad Men. That world is breaking apart now and what do the tradtional brains have to say? Again, in Morrison’s own words, they “tried to run and tried to hide.” It’s always easier to rail against new developments and opportunities than to embrace change. Instead of acknowledging the emergence of Daniel Pink’s free-agent nation, the arbiters of all things safe and proper at global agencies chose to label ‘the crowd’ as “DIY designers.” That was a huge mistake because as consumers came to own the brand and the influence of social media conferred credibilty on the real-time recommendations of our peers, many brands were locked out of the conversation. And their agencies simply scratched their heads and continued to collect retainer fees, promising that this wasn’t a trend but merely an anomaly. Wrong again.
The crowd is here to stay and its influence, like the genie, can’t be put back in the bottle. Is this crowd, to paraphrase Spiro Agnew, merely the “nattering nabobs of negativism” exercising undue influence over initiatives of The Gap, Tropicana, and other supposed violators of a democratic approach to design and branding? Or are they, in Thomas Friedman’s words, the “great flatteners and levelers” who will have an increasing say in the upstream image before the product is ever on the shelves? I think it’s the latter. Why? Because the crowd is simply too big and too well-qualified, and the communication tools are getting more pervasive and seamless. The arbiters are us and we don’t hesitate to vote with our feet. If brands and entrenched agency insiders bet that this is transitory, they will be wrong. Again.
So what is a brand to do? Unfortunately the common response, and always the easiest as well, is to increase the volume, wattage, and tonnage. Traditional agency and media types will always recommend a higher spend when faced with new competition. That’s wrong too. Brands must now seek to engage and reinforce their relevance in consumers’ lives. Communications must be grounded with integrity and empathy rather than be riddled with bombastic claims and unrealistic social benefits. The default response can’t be an ever-changing new and improved package design, but should be rather a concentration on delivering real and desired benefits. Consumers are no longer at the end of the chain, and this fragmented society will no longer be lemmings. Pretending otherwise or wallowing in deep denial of permanent changes in consumer behavior will be wrong. Again. To reprise The Doors, it is time for brands to “break on through to the other side.” It is not only the right way, it is the only way.