Just Hit the Reset
Button
If shopping malls are a cultural
reflection of the society in which they exist, then the sea of
chain stores, fast food courts, crowded parking lots and
lovely teenagers smoking cigarettes and hanging out at the
front entrance is not the representation of
the America
that you or I might prefer. Nonetheless, it is what it
is.
A mall in Des
Moines, Iowa;
Richmond,
Va.;
Modesto,
Calif.; or
Coral Springs,
Fla. has a look of sameness
and a lack of diversity that transcends time and space. There
may be hundreds of stores in the mall but somehow they all
look alike. One mall in South Florida
has, at last count, over two dozen womens shoe stores.
Granted, visiting womens shoe stores is a cultural mandate in
America,
but are two dozen of them really necessary to achieve shoe
immortality or to discover where the real sole of
America
lies (Sorry!)?
Another common feature of the mall
besides shoe stores and food courts is that they seem to
contain at least one video arcade, required by the mall
gods.
Much like the way many people allow
their children to be raised by default and abdication by video
games and television, the video arcade takes on an image, at
least to the HR Doctor, of a warehouse or cloak room where
people deposit their children while they shop and then come
back later to claim them.
A quick walk through an arcade in a
mall, or for that matter a conversation with many kids
in America
on their gaming skills, allows you to observe some of the
video game industrys impact on the development of the next
generation of our society. The HR Doctor urges you to spend
some thoughtful time playing video games with your child, or
at least observing what goes on. Many of the games have very
violent content. You win by killing characters in the games
or by amassing the largest and most deadly collection of
weapons. Its not a matter of playing Space Aliens on an
antique Atari machine from the 1980s. Its a matter of
hijacking cars and killing other people while suffering little
or no apparent harm or danger to the player.
If you lose the game, all you have to
do is hit the reset button and you get to start all over as if
the killing in the previous game never happened.
It has long been a contention of the HR
Doctor that when you expose vulnerable young people, in the
prime period of their social and thought process development,
to anything in excess, you set in motion dangerous trends that
affect their own future as well as the futures of those around
them including relationships with coworkers and
clients.
This over-exposure takes a primary form
in America
when we realize that the average person watches about four
hours of television a day. It also results in a pattern of
relationships where, at least according to a recent survey by
Los Angeles-based Kelton Research, a person spends more time
with their computer than they do with their
spouse.
On television we see a constant
flooding of information about food and the joys of eating,
interspersed (ironically), with an endless stream of diet
commercials.
Our societys over-exposure may take
the form of an I want it now entitlement society, perhaps
exemplified by the regular stream of commercials tantalizing
all of us to take out loans that can be approved in less than
10 seconds online and to get into debt to buy what we want
right now.
Once again, with similar irony, the
very next commercial may be a get-out-of-debt credit
counseling service. Hardly a day goes by at the HR Doctors
house without a pre-approved credit card offer clogging my
mailbox. In life, its good to be
pre-approved.
All of these social and societal
anomalies are not healthy for the development of the next
generation. Perhaps the saddest and most troubling of the
anomalies is the constant stream of violence with attendant
subtle messages of how to solve problems between people and
how to address complicated issues.
The ease with which violence equates to
winning and satisfaction in the world of video games, or the
correlation between the degree of extreme violence and the
profitability of movies, is not only a reflection of whats
going on in the society but arguably a cause as well as an
effect.
Here is a challenge to consider: Name
something that you can expose a young person to hundreds of
thousands of times as they are growing up without having some
kind of significant and sustained effect on their behavior,
their thinking and their relationships with others.
The HR Doctor is hard-pressed to come
up with any single thing that you can do that often without
having an impact except hugging, praising and making
expectations clear.
Some of the impacts of
hyper-involvement can be absolutely wonderful, such
as exposing a young child to the joys of learning and
playing music, perhaps through the Suzuki Music program. It
seems easier for young children to learn to play the violin or
to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese or Spanish, if not English,
than it is as they grow older. These are the kinds of
exposures that lead to a broadening of outlook and a sense of
appreciation of a wider world.
Sitting at home for hours at a time,
however, engaged in activities centered around tallying the
amount of destruction you can wreak upon an opponent, or
learning your behavior from role models such as Jerry
Springer, Don Imus or the World Wrestling gentlemen
represents to this author a very negative effect of the
abdication of responsibility by parents.
Fast-forward 15 or so years and many of
the inhabitants of the mall video arcade or the gaming
consoles in their rooms now find themselves at work, perhaps
for a local government. If they are not working for one, they
are very likely to be the clients of a local government. This
can be for very happy reasons such as when you buy your first
home or visit the county clerks office for a marriage
license.
Frequently, however, it is under
unhappy circumstances such as when you are booked into a
county jail or when behavior or performance trouble on the job
is moving you toward termination of
employment.
The point is that in real life it is
extraordinarily difficult and often not practical to just hit
the reset button and find that everything has been returned to
the way it was before.
We all make choices in life, but we
often look for the ways to avoid or blame others for the
consequences of some of those actions. This type of Im a
victim attitude in local government leads to a workplace
arrogance and entitlement philosophy, which ends up hurting
the taxpayers and clients of government service. It
contributes to workplace bullying, unlawful discrimination and
personal trouble at home as well as at work. It leads to
personal health problems as well.
On the other hand, it is refreshing and
a real joy to be able to work with and mentor persons who come
to the office with a broad world view.
These are the people who come with
a sense of optimism, a sense of compelling urgency to make a
difference, and a sense of being curious and ready to explore
new projects and take on additional responsibilities. A
typical corollary to this philosophy is a strong sense of
humor.
The difference between these two types
of employees is increasingly clear as the search for great
employees becomes harder and harder. The differences are also
affected by the behavior encountered in the workplace. It
certainly is a factor of how well supervisors provide
leadership, role modeling, mentoring and opportunities. The
foundation received as a child while growing up plays as
important a part in their success at work as any intervention
after the fact by a supervisor.
It may be possible to hit the reset
button after something goes wrong at work. However, things are
very much better for everyone if the reset button is pushed
much earlier in the life of a growing young person than when
that person is now an adult who arrives in the Human Resources
department.
In HR, the reset buttons are not always
plugged in!
Phil Rosenberg The
HR Doctor http://www.hrdr.net/
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