What Do We Tell Our Newest Workers?
The business world operates on the notion that people are
ethical and trustworthy, and conveyed that to young employees. Then Trump
destroyed the idea that trust and ethics actually mattered.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
I used to be mainly concerned about the unfortunate but deeply
ingrained attitudes of the upcoming and incoming workforce, and how these
overly entitled kids would fit into the newly serious and heads-down culture of
those startups and growth stage businesses that had dodged the bullets and
stayed alive for the last three years. These kids had been indoctrinated from
birth by helicopter parents, with first-place trophies for all, and convinced
by college faculty that their generation would be a gift (and a bargain at any
price) to the working world.
But I'm afraid that over the last few years, the
"real" world has taught them some even more pernicious and dangerous
lessons. I was worried about the "work" part of their work ethic, and
I should have been paying more attention to the ethics part.
Work isn't going to be a picnic for anyone who thinks the next
two years are going to be fun, easy, or anything but a difficult slog with
plenty of bumps along the way. If they believe that, they've either been asleep
for a couple of years or has their head somewhere the sun don't shine. Most of
the management teams I'm talking to these days aren't rushing headlong into the
new world. They're plenty happy to regather and re-energize the troops, move
forward at a reasonable pace, and make sure they're on sound footings before
they take the next big leap.
This newly cautious and conservative environment will be a
challenge for every returning employee, but finding their way and navigating
the complexities and confusing social and moral signals in the working world
is gonna be hardest on the newbies. They
have no history, war stories, culture, or prior experience to fall back
on. For folks who have never even been in the office, trying to master the ebb
and flow of everyday activities and figure out directions and priorities, which
are hard to come by in most startups in any case, won't be simple or
straightforward. I feared that, having never fallen flat on their faces, having
never seen a real bear market, or faced any real adversity beyond sheltering
from Covid-19, this new group who were happily bringing their whole selves to
work -- whatever that means -- would be very difficult to integrate post
pandemic. They've been taught to believe that the business world is forever up
and to the right.
How easily could they slot into any growing business even
without the additional challenges of a remote and hybrid working environment,
the constant pressure to "catch up" after two years of stasis, the
understanding they are "free to be you and me", and the idea that
they could take a job, make a job, leave a job, do several jobs at the same
time, or do a lot of nothing and still thrive and survive. Wishful thinking,
hope rather than hard work, taking shortcuts instead of putting in the time and
paying the requisite dues, and living in a world of screens acting as mirrors
rather than windows was a very likely prescription for disappointment all
around. The gig economy and the great resignation could turn out to be very bad
and sad jokes on many of these feckless folks.
But I've come to believe that there's a far greater worry than
merely the work ethic of the woke generation, largely due to the impact of four
years of the Trump plague and its continuing persistence and toxicity., These
upcoming young adults have been subjected to Trump's horror show of corruption,
self-dealing, the systemic undermining of our institutions and democratic
processes, and bald-faced lie after lie. The only two object lessons that they
can draw from the experience are that: (a) nothing is sacred any longer and (b)
that there are no consequences for even the worst behavior because our legal,
legislative and enforcement systems are themselves impotent, corrupted and
virtually useless.
This is the lesson our kids are learning every stinking day as
the stench of Trump remains potent and pervasive.
Trump's initial electoral triumph and his administration's
flagrant and overt criminal behavior taught several generations of our youth
that if you're shameless, aggressive, and completely without morals or ethics,
you can succeed grandly and get away with almost anything. That's as long as
you carefully and continually engineer Faustian bargains with millions of MAGA
morons, autocrats such as his buddy Vladimir Putin and ambitious and craven members
of Congress looking out solely for their own interests and reelection
prospects. Perhaps worst of all is the example set by at least three lying
justices of the Supreme Court, who willfully and repeatedly perjured themselves
in public to secure their nominations. A sad truth is that people who will lie
for you will eventually lie to you. We thought these jurists to be the
caretakers of our Constitution; instead, they've become its undertakers.
Worst of all, because Trump is a virtual illiterate and a
Freudian nutcase, he told us over and over who he is -- right to our faces --
what he planned to do, and how he would do it. He can't help himself. Like the scorpion who stung the frog, it's his
nature. At his rallies, he loves to recite various butchered versions of a
poem/song about a vicious reptile called The Snake, as he attempts to slander illegal
immigrants. He loves telling the story and, according to him, the MAGA crowd
eats it up every time, even though they clearly can't understand what it has to
do with anything else he's ranting about. Watching the people in the audience
behind him as he bumbles through this overlong tale is a study in stupor.
Clearly dazed and confused, they sit there waiting and wondering when the laugh
line is coming (there is none) or where they're supposed to smile and applaud.
It's abundantly clear that neither he nor his raving rally fans
seem to appreciate the relevance, moral or irony of the tale. Was he really so
stupid that he didn't understand the story's message, or so cynical that he was
actually proclaiming that he was a duplicitous crook and a complete fraud who
we were stupid enough to consider inviting into our homes and lives?
I realize that the man has no sense of humor or irony. But the
story of a devious snake whose poisonous bite was its only reward for the care
and generosity of the tender-hearted woman who took the half-frozen reptile to
her bosom was frighteningly close to home -- a stunning and overt
admission of just what people were signing up for in voting for him. That's
what makes it hard to believe that millions missed the obvious message. The
snake's only rationalization -- largely lost in Trump's fumbling and sloppy
syntax -- is that the woman "knew damn well that he was a snake before she
took him in." Trump, being the arrogant egomaniac that he is, couldn't help
himself from telling America that he was the snake.
The leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion - regardless of who
did it -- is in some ways the dying canary in the coal mine demonstrating yet
again that there are no longer any agreed-upon or basic behavioral limits, no
unbreakable laws of decency or ethics, and, in a Trumpist/MAGA world, there's
no bottom. Deals with the Devil never end well.
As employers, this flagrant and painful breach may be our last
clear warning that we have to take immediate steps in our own businesses -
especially where we have millions of newbies coming on board without anchors,
reference points, or any real ethical guidance. We need to help educate the
people we work with every day that there's actually a better, brighter way to
do business and to live, but that it's going to take patience, difficult
sacrifices, hard work, and even some faith in each other to pull ourselves out
of this horrid downward spiral. Trying to rebuild trust is tough at any time,
but it's even harder in the social media sludge and sensationalist media world
we live in today.
If we don't help ourselves to right the ship and set a better
course, then we'll all have to live with and suffer the consequences of the
lessons Trump has sadly taught us all. If you don't think that the risk of this
infection is alive and ongoing everywhere, and ultimately far worse than
Covid-19, then think about this selfish reminder: when you lie down with dogs,
you wake up with fleas.