A major benefit of writing this column is the way it sharpens my teaching life. Blessed to remain active in the online classroom, I welcome the challenge to unpack “business ethics” and other fundamentals with a fresh crop of explorers — a while longer.
This month, let us consider values, personal and institutional.
Lou Cartier (Courtesy/Lou Cartier)Whether as spouse, parent, neighbor, or citizen, values inform our choices. Influences such as gender, age, ethnicity, education, and experience play a role. However, one factor looms large: locus of control — how people perceive their ability to manage their lives.
Consider how this plays out in the workplace. An internal locus of control, the sense of self-agency, fosters resilience. An external locus concedes to outside forces greater sway over the future. Business leaders who recognize this difference guide more skillfully.
Enterprises that study human motivation appreciate the stakes. For they strive to weave such factors into a cohesive shared culture. They do so by reinforcing behavioral norms, promoting organizational values, and holding folks accountable, managers and worker bees alike.
In my classes, companies that students admire often resemble well run nonprofits. That is, top leaders embrace the interplay of principles, virtues and values.
Principles might include commitments to foster a leadership culture, empower people and prioritize institutional order over “destabilizing self-interest” (Harvard Business Review). Virtues are another term for character traits such as humility, loyalty and trustworthiness.
In this context, think of values as everyday workplace behaviors like showing up on time and doing “whatever it takes” to please a customer or finish a task.
Fortunately, my students can tap the wisdom of accomplished business pros, conveyed in free, interactive educational resources that we faculty are encouraged to curate. For example, through “LinkedIn Learning,” Jack Welch urges new employees to overdeliver and keep learning. Howard Schultz emphasizes belief in one’s capacity to succeed. Oprah Winfrey touts the power of vision.
Through this same college-underwritten learning tool Kevin Hart — yes, the comedian turned entrepreneur — offers a compelling reminder: Put action behind your words. His riff on overcoming inertia is a vivid example of internal locus of control (bit.ly/4nsPr76).
How do these workplace ideals — traits most desired by employers — align with what younger generations actually value? Here recent findings by a top-ranked business school’s research center on “purpose and flourishing” paint a stark contrast.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, New York University management professor Suzy Welch reports that employers most value achievement, commitment to visible goals; scope, enthusiasm for learning, action, and stimulation; and work centrism, identity with one’s work and career that is basic to well-being.
Gen Z, by contrast, (those born between 1997 and 2012) puts eudaimonia, a sense of fulfillment and well-being; voice, authentic self-expression; and service, talent used for the good of society, not just personal gain, at the top. None of the employers’ priorities (using their terms) made it into Gen Z’s top 10!
Her business advisers at NYU fret: “The bodies are out there. The attitudes are not.” Research reflects the youthful response: “What has achievement gotten us but anxiety? Who wants endless stimulation in an already unstable world?”
Welch likens the dismay of her community board to the axiom, “water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” This mismatch has consequences.
Values, after all, are choices, and choices shape behavior. Evidence can produce frowns. David Brooks, among social commentators whom I admire, argues that Western culture has overemphasized self-expression and individualism at the expense of community. The result, he says, is a social and spiritual price we are now paying.
Urging caution, others question the prudence of weighing the values of 20-somethings who have barely entered the workforce.
In response to Professor Welch last week, a Journal subscriber posted this advice to employers: Take Gen Z seriously, but not literally. “Values are not abstractions plucked from thin air; they are forged through experiences and challenges.” Among the pressure points are demands of colleagues, need to support a family, and “the hard lessons of trial and error.”
So, might a deep breath be in order?
Employers may find Gen Z’s entry level values puzzling, even frustrating. Yet values evolve, and the workplace can be part of that formation. My hope as an instructor and engaged citizen is to provide space for credible data, prudent reflection, and meaningful interaction.
Over time, may employers and employees (and faculty) discover the gap between “bodies” and “attitudes” shrinking, or become less wide than it first appears.
Cartier has enjoyed a 55-year career in journalism, educational advancement, and teaching. Not yet committed to formal retirement, he values opportunities to explore ethical leadership and personal behavior that underlies success at home, in school and at work.
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