David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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The School’s Values Are Not Enough

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Schools have their own values, but those values alone are not enough to guide our kids to fulfilling lives and work. Actively providing students with this kind of direction is something all of our schools should be doing.

When it comes to values, schools most commonly foster environments where I should respect you and you should respect me.  Extraordinary schools extend this by encouraging you to care for me and for me to reciprocate in a caring way towards you. Tolerance for another’s viewpoints is another school value, as is encouraging active engagement as citizens in the community.

What schools are aiming for with these positive values is something that looks a lot like this—with the well-meaning community outreach going on in the distance.

THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM by Edward Hicks

What our schools are not doing is actively helping students identify what is most important to each of them, in terms of their values?

That many of our schools are providing a righteous and nurturing environment is certainly a good thing, but positive environmental factors alone don’t help students connect with their most basic operating principles.  Because most schools aren’t helping students “to make sense” of their education at this level, more and more rudderless young people are leaving our classrooms and stumbling their way into work and into life.

Most school values, like respect and tolerance, don’t leap into the hearts of students, providing clarity around questions of life and work.  Instead, they essentially provide a warm bath where a student can feel safe and supported enough to potentially identify what he or she believes in. While the kind of active, mutual caring championed by education scholar Nel Noddings could lead to purposeful living and working, few schools today can help to ensure that if you care for me I will care for you back.  As a transmittable value to students, mutual caring seems unrealistic in all but the most intimate school environments.

Encouraging civic engagement in the ways that Thomas Sergiovanni has talked about it also would not work as a vehicle for transmitting values from school to student in most of our schools.  For Sergiovanni, students become “virtuous” by actively practicing virtues (like hope, trust, civility and piety) while working with “moral teachers.” As with “mutual caring,” a student’s own value choices are more actively encouraged in “the virtuous school,” but this model also seems unworkable in all but the smallest and most elite institutions.

In most schools, student engagement in civic affairs is limited to activities that leave everyone “feeling good” about themselves at the end of the day, but encourage neither commitment nor personal growth from the participants.  It’s planting the community garden, reading to the elderly in a rest home: low impact activism that requires minimal effort for minimal impact. Schools, students and parents can pretend that some kind of value training is going on here, but everyone knows that it’s not.

So while schools often provide students with a warm Petri dish of tolerance and respect in the hope they’ll flourish, most fail to add the critical ingredient—which is actively teaching our kids how to cultivate their values so they can integrate what they’ve learned in school with what’s most important to them as individuals.

Earlier this month, I talked about some of the things schools can do in terms of building value awareness and helping students plan for their lives and their work. Exercises like this give students a roadmap that can help them to seize their futures instead of wandering aimlessly into them.  We’re doing a very poor job providing our kids with this kind of preparation. It’s a problem for students leaving school at all education levels, and as I’ve written about before, even for the best and the brightest among them.

This is a tragedy that can be avoided.

It has profound implications for families, employers, communities, and most importantly the students who are graduating into life unprepared for its most basic challenges and opportunities.

Why are we so passive about this as parents?

Why aren’t we more concerned about this as teachers?

Policymakers and business correctly provide financial support and expertise for our non-performing schools.  Why aren’t they also concerned about the purposeless students coming out of our performing schools, and the associated opportunity costs for our nation and our economy?

These aren’t just rhetorical questions.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts.

 

Vocational Training

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Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

People who go on to make a real difference have one thing in common.  They have prepared themselves for it by becoming more “thoughtful” and “committed.”

The process begins by developing your value awareness, discussed in the last post. While our schools can provide an ideal environment for deepening your understanding of your values, values training can be undertaken at any time or place in your career.  So can planning for the transition from where you are today with your work to where you want to be.  You plot your course to energizing and fulfilling work by making a plan, and then following it.

I learned about personal business planning from a mentor in the venture capital community early on in my career.  I was getting ready to launch a start-up, and kept talking to him about how I wanted my business to help people. He pulled no punches when he said at the time: “make your money first, and once you make enough of it you can do all the helping you want.”

My expression then (and after similar exchanges) must have told him I was unconvinced. As a last resort, he suggested I prepare a personal business plan to get a better grip on my motivations. Maybe that exercise would straighten me out.

Well it did, but not in the way he intended.

Values are your fuel

The deeper I got into this planning exercise, the more my initial goals were confirmed, and the clearer my future direction became.  What did I most want to do and why?  What am I “best at,” and what were the most revealing demonstrations of the “highest and best” roles I had played—both at work and outside of it?

The goal of the plan was the job I was seeking. To identify it, I needed to know why it was the right job for me. In other words, that I’d be accomplishing something I felt was important and that I’d feel fulfilled at a very basic level while doing it.  While this required familiarity with my principles and improved “value awareness,” it also required identifying real world opportunities where my values could fuel my work.

What was my right job?  Could I find it or would I have to create it?  This required research.  What are people I admire doing? How did I see myself helping people? What is the work that’s already being done to help in this area, and where are the opportunities for me? What do I need in terms of salary and job security? Questions like these:  I needed to find answers to all of them.

My skills would be my work tools.  For me, advocating, organizing, visualizing, problem solving, all were on my skill list, so I had to come up with examples of each that demonstrated my qualifications for the work I wanted to do. I needed to take my best shot proving the first part of the equation: that I could do it.

Experience (the flipside of the equation that said “I had done it—or something like it—already”) would be described in terms of roles I had played.  Times when I had had some success as a coordinator, prime mover, creator, or gatherer of resources to get something done—often after work, since many of us spend more time excelling in our personal lives than we do in our working ones.

Planning plots your course

Skills and experience: two different ways to illustrate what I had to bring to the party.

A personal business plan aims at lining up what you’re best at and what you’ve done in your life that you’re most proud of in order to demonstrate your suitability for a job that will bring you similar measures of pride and satisfaction.

Instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a job you don’t want to do, you are actively pursuing work that you have already been getting ready to do during the most centered and accomplished moments of your life.

That may well be your definition of work that matters.

As such, it is work that is worth striving for.

Learning how to become more “thoughtful” about the work you should be doing, and more clearly “committed” to its goals has everything to do with preparing yourself for it.

Personal business planning is a valuable way for you to become more thoughtful about your work.

 

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which is taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

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How do you decide what you should do with your life?  How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do?  After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

–       Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

–       They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

–       They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

–       They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday:  about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

image/kolenya

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose.  And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too:  a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

 

Let the Crowds Fund Your Work

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We all want to do work that matters. But, as often as not, you won’t find that kind of work in the want ads.  It’s rarely work that somebody else gives you to do.  As often as not, you need to give yourself the kind of work that will change the world.

Early on in my forthcoming book WorkLifeReward: Following Your Values to Fulfilling Work is the line:

 If you want the world to be a better place, you need to help it become that better place.

The main way to do so, of course, is through the work you do.  So if you don’t think the work you’re doing—that is, your selling whatever it is that you’re selling today—is making the world into the kind of better place you want it to be, maybe it’s time to think about working at something that will make that kind of difference.

These posts are about encouraging you to think differently about your work.  They aim to raise what I call “value awareness,” so you have a clearer view of the color and texture of the better world you’d like to encourage with your efforts.  Sometimes they aim to help you become the most effective spokesperson you can be while striving to achieve your goals.  And sometimes the discussion here is about ways to make the productive work you want to do easier.

This post is about one of those booster rockets. Something has gotten a lot easier.

SEED CAPITAL

Creating a business model for a better world, where you and your co-conspirators are doing work that matters, takes energy, creativity, vision, tenacity, luck.  And it takes money that either you provide, or that people investing in your vision of a better world put in your hands.

In the good old days the money came almost exclusively from your own bank account or from friends and family.  (It was the era when those who already had money were usually the ones making more of it.)  On top of that, only a tiny percentage of new ideas—whether promising to change the world or not—managed to find venture capital.  So if you or a rich uncle weren’t providing the cash, even your brilliance, best intentions and limitless energy were often not enough to overcome the funding constraints all new companies that produce work need in order to survive.

But there’s some good news.  It’s a brand new day!

Today, crowdfunding websites give you the ability to make a direct appeal to individuals or groups who may be interested in supporting what you’re doing—because your kind of work is work that matters to them too.

You tell your story.  You identify your goal. The crowd decides whether to invest in it.  Usually harvested in small dollar amounts, it is hundreds, even thousands of small investments funneled through the crowdfunding site that can put the financial fuel in a new company’s tank.

As an entrepreneur, you promise to give your investors a tangible return on their investment.  It could be a letter from a grateful child your company has helped, a picture of the tree planted “because you invested,” or, if you are producing a brave new product or service, periodic updates on solutions to problems no one had gotten around to tackling before.

You get the idea.

For providing the conduit between you and your new investors, crowdfunding websites like MicroVentures, peerbackers, and IndieGoGo are generally paid a small percentage of what you collect—sometimes as little as 5%, when you hit your fundraising target.

LINE UP YOUR INVESTORS photo/John Cooper

What’s news this week (according to the Wall Street Journal) is that crowdfunding has its first “poster child.”

The Cinderella story is about how a little company called Pebble Technology developed a “smart” wristwatch that can display apps and connect to your smart phone to notify you about incoming tweets and Facebook updates.  But 26-year old Eric Migicovsky was almost out of money, living and working with his only employee in a rented condo, and ready to call it quits.

He took his case for financing the manufacture of his smart watch to crowdfunding site Kickstarter, looking for $100,000.  The ROI: everyone investing $115 would get one of his watches.

In its first 28 hours on Kickstarter, Pebble raised more than a million dollars. By mid-May, it had taken in a total of $10.27 million from 68,929 people!  Now Eric’s problems involve things like working with a manufacturing facility in China to produce all those watches.  But it also looks a lot like his work dream has become a reality.

Everybody needs to make a living.

What sometimes seems like the impossibility of getting both a paycheck and fulfillment from your work makes many of us reluctant to leave our paychecks for work that gives us the opportunity to make a living and to truly live.

Crowdfunding is reducing that risk.

Your Pictures Help Tell Your Story

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I’m moving from my ungainly house of 25 years to a flat in the sky. It’s a misty time, leaving the ground. Among other things, I’m saying goodbye to lots of flowers outside, and to many sweaty hours helping them grow.

The arc of this gorgeous spring has turned it into a long and very satisfying goodbye. Almost every day brings camera-phone pictures that will one day be joined into a visual feast of yard things from the final year.

(It also makes me sad to think that one day soon I may use these smiling flowers as part of a sales pitch – that advertising our home’s value in this way will turn these children of mine into pretty little prostitutes. Only over time does this saner parent admit the many contributions they still make, and how happy they’ll be if they can help me to find them another caregiver for those seasons when I’m gone.)

I’m outside again this morning, just returned from a conference where I kept being pulled into the orbit of people like Matteo Wyliyams (@mouselink) and Alan Weinkrantz (@alanweinkrantz) talking excitedly about how they are using their phones like wands to tell Stories That Enrich Their Own with Instagram.

Every picture you share tells some of your story, they said.

(A few weeks back this same flowering spring, the story was that Mark Zuckerberg determined the price he’d pay for that photo-sharing company by naming the pizza delivered into his living room negotiations “Facebook,” and then figuring out how big a “slice” of its value Instagram should command.)

A lot, they agreed. And worth every penny according to my new conference friends: way more than a thousand words.

(But for Instagram’s founders, the story never told and the pictures never shared were about how saying good-bye to a company you grow is not so different from saying good-bye to a flower. The irony: that we never got to see the play of light, or their unique point of view at that moment in time – and what it would have told us about them.)

Today I’m working on the final curation of my yard, and of my last days in it, through the many screens of nature around here.

I’m calling the pictures I’ve started sharing “screentests”.

TODAY’S PAPER – SELLING SOMETHING

They’re another part of my story.

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