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The entitlement complex
This blog recently reflected on how, in bribing students to attend class, American schools are encouraging and exacerbating the overweening sense of entitlement that, unfortunately, has become a marker of American youth. Shortly afterward, InsideHigherEd.com published a piece on how the "all must have prizes" mentality of American youth sports is corrupting an entire generation's understanding of when it is and is not appropriate to be recognized and rewarded--and how, as a result, it has become quite difficult to educate that generation. Now, Fast Company reports on what happens when the entitlement complex enters the workplace:
Beverly Hills psychiatrist's office is an unlikely triage center for the mash-up of generations in the workforce. But Dr. Charles Sophy is seeing the casualties firsthand. Last year, when a 24-year-old salesman at a car dealership didn't get his yearly bonus because of poor performance, both of his parents showed up at the company's regional headquarters and sat outside the CEO's office, refusing to leave until they got a meeting. "Security had to come and escort them out," Sophy says.A 22-year-old pharmaceutical employee learned that he was not getting the promotion he had been eyeing. His boss told him he needed to work on his weaknesses first. The Harvard grad had excelled at everything he had ever done, so he was crushed by the news. He told his parents about the performance review, and they were convinced there was some misunderstanding, some way they could fix it, as they'd been able to fix everything before. His mother called the human-resources department the next day. Seventeen times. She left increasingly frustrated messages: "You're purposely ignoring us"; "you fudged the evaluation"; "you have it in for my son." She demanded a mediation session with her, her son, his boss, and HR--and got it. At one point, the 22-year-old reprimanded the HR rep for being "rude to my mom."
The patients on Sophy's couch aren't the twentysomethings dealing with their first taste of failure. Nor are they the "helicopter parents." They're the traumatized bosses, as well as the 47-year-old woman from HR who has been hassled time and again by her youngest workers and their parents. Now the pharmaceutical company that employs her has her in therapy, and she's on six-month stress leave.
Fast Company's focus is necessarily pragmatic. Noting that the 76 million children of the baby boomers are simply going to be the workforce of the future, the article reflects on how the corporate world can adjust to the kinds of expectations, limitations, and abilities that Generation Y is bringing into the workplace. The assumption here is that the personalities of Millennials are already formed, and that the employers have no choice but to find ways to work with those personalities, however disruptive and unproductive they may sometimes be.
But educators need not--and should not--approach the problem in the same way. Their willingness to pander to the entitlement complex has much to do with why companies are finding themselves devoting significant time and resources to coddling workers and their parents.
As Margaret Spellings' commission continues to debate what must be done to ensure the effectiveness of American higher education, its members might want to consider carefully the link between graduates' lack of preparation for the workplace and the relaxed standards, grade inflation, and taboos against causing offense that characterize vast swathes of undergraduate education, particularly in the humanities. We already know that skills are not being taught and that knowledge is not being imparted; we now need to ask how our collective attitudes about self-esteem and our hesitancy to give honest feedback figure into the problem.
Via Joanne Jacobs.
Posted by acta online at February 15, 2006 09:08 AM
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