David J Paul Project Management Professional, Management Professor, Author and Small Business Manager
Today we will post a little bit about what people in the 20 to 40 year groups want at work and how they view caring at work. Next time (hopefully two weeks) we will address the business case for caring at work. Stay tuned. This information, nowhere else researched, is good for you at work, at home, and at church.
Caring and the 20 to 40 year olds in the workplace.
In a major work that interprets data from the 2002 U.S. Bureau of the Census results, the National Academy of Sciences (2006) concludes that the people in these year groups are characterized primarily by their penchant for learning. The world is new, changing, and exciting for them. They expect work to be new, changing, and exciting as well. As a result, the expectation of immediate gratification can produce intergenerational tensions at work. Read another way, you older supervisors and managers need to open up your minds a little to understand younger people. You can begin by really listening and hearing the meaning behind the words. The study finds, moreover, that feeling cared for, as expressed in good relationships with people around them is expected in a Gen-Y working environment. The report found that other elements of the workplace important to this generation include:
1. Good relationships with bosses and co-workers
2. Income
3. Opportunity for growth
4. Opportunity to show off skills, and receiving recognition of a job well done
5. Challenging daily work
6. Flexible schedules for social and personal time
7. A casual dress environment.
As a result, the study recommends steps to Gen Y retention which include: Encourage their values; Train them; Mentor them; Show them how their work will contribute to the bottom line; Provide full disclosure; Create customized career paths and provide access to technology (National Academy of Sciences, 2006). This could take some work on your part, and that work is sometimes termed “emotional labor”
Caring Beyond Cognition
Affective leadership almost always entails an element of emotional labor. Arlie Russell Hochschild used the term ‘emotional labor’ to mean the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display intended to produce a particular state of mind in others: “Emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value. Not to be understood merely as a facet of personality, it has exchange value” This is not faking a smile or pretending to care when you really don’t care. That is NOT an ethical approach to management or leadership. In our world, this result happens because you are genuinely providing caring to others in ways that are meaningful to them.
Caring, especially caring that is important to the other person, is the key to affective leadership and takes leadership out of the domain of management into the arena of the inspirational. Your job is not how to make work more efficient but how to make it more humane and caring!! We encourage you to understand both ‘caritas’ and ’emotional engagement’. These terms are central to the results of my research. ‘caritas’ captures the caring function in human services and ‘emotional engagement’, is the ability to connect with the other and empathize (Hochschild, 1983). In recognizing the importance of emotional engagement, Hochschild’s work fits nicely with later researchers, including the work of Daniel Goleman.
Goleman (1997, 2006) cites his own and others’ research on social awareness and social facility. He coins the term ‘relationship management’ in order to create a cognitive rather than an affective attribute for that concept, but then continues to identify characteristics such as listening as key to good managers’ performance. “Listening well has been found to distinguish the best managers, teachers, and leaders. Among those who are in the helping profesions, like physicians or social workers, such deep listening numbers among the top three abilitites of those whose work has been rated as outstanding by their organizations” (Goleman, 2006, p. 84). He does, however, recognize the work involved in relationship management by referring again to emotional labor.
“Emotional labor comes into play during communication between worker and citizen, and it requires the rapid-fire execution of the following: Emotive sensings, analyzing one’s own affective state and comparing it to that of the other, judging how alternative responses will affect the other, behaving such that the worker suppresses or expresses an emotion in order to elicit a desired response from the others.” (Goleman, 2006, p. 84)
In taking caring beyond mere cognition, other researchers have been able to focus on dimensions of leadership that relate to relationships. Hersey and Blanchard (1969) reflect on the situational approach to leadership through behavioral flexibility, social performance, perspective taking and social perceptiveness—adapt and match your style to the competence and commitment of the workers. Hershey and Blanchard (1988) further posit that the Leader-Member Exchange Theory works—good exchanges generally engender good work. Our next article will go further into how your leadership style really matters.
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