(Photo by Jair Lázaro on Unsplash)
I’m doing some assessment research, and one of the steady findings is that students in the program feel less welcomed by the professionals around them at mid-project than they did when they started. This shouldn’t be a surprise. For a lot of people, the day they were hired was the last day anybody told them that they were smart, or that they were valued. After that glorious honeymoon, they’re just furniture. Increasingly familiar, shopworn furniture.
Think about that transition from college or from grad school to workplace. A person goes from having identifiable humans giving them specific feedback on a regular basis to… well, to what? To the mechanical arms of the HR mother, giving annual review notes and a COLA?
That transitional band ought to be a structured adjustment from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, from external rewards to internal satisfactions. But often, it’s just silence. And when the performance monitor suddenly flatlines, we don’t know if the monitor’s unplugged or we’re about to die.
Let’s talk about intrinsic motivation. It’s easy to get all shouty-grandpa about kids needing constant validation and participation medals, but let’s slow down and think about another aspect of that transition from school to workplace, which is the bait-and-switch. I think about this a lot with architecture students, going from a high-design, high-autonomy environment to being the third desk on the left doing endless flashing details for a branch bank drive-thru. Job titles and job descriptions are largely lies. I once had a job called Director of Research that should actually have been called Director of Justification, because the work was to tell our funders that their programmatic investment had paid off and they should give us another infusion. (And friends, sometimes you have to search through a big old pile of horseshit before you find a pony.)
Before that, I’d finished my dissertation to high acclaim and near-immediate publication, only to find myself a spreadsheet jockey telling my boss how many kids the Butte County Probation Department were likely to have in juvenile custody in thirty years. There wasn’t any intrinsic motivation to be had in that job, which is why they ran through a rotating cast of analyst associates for years. It kept the rent paid and the car fueled, but that’s not enough to make you eager to go to work in the morning.
Far too often, we ask young people to go from a high-autonomy, high-feedback, high-growth environment to a low-autonomy, feedback-starved, static environment, in which the rules of business outweigh the rules of intellectual honesty. And we don’t understand “kids these days…”
Learn to say thank you, and to remember to do it. Learn to spot the flashes of enthusiasm in the pan, and find ways for that enthusiasm to be challenged and fulfilled. Just because your own job title doesn’t say “mentor” doesn’t mean that you aren’t one, either through action or inaction.
Herb Childress 