This is a follow-up on Simon Sinek’s famous talk on the problem with millennials. It is excellent. How does it relate to Legitimate Leadership? Simply: empathy is a subset of care. It means understanding where the other person is at and acknowledging their thoughts and feelings without judgement. Legitimacy comes when leaders care and grow those in their charge, but care is primary. And finally, is not about changing our people, but about changing ourselves as leaders – the project is YOU!

OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO EXCERPT: How do we practice empathy with someone we don’t understand? How do we practice empathy with an organization or a group that we’re struggling with?

It breaks down to four things: parenting, technology, impatience and environment.

On parenting: millennials have grown up subject to what has been described as a failed parenting strategy. Too many of them were told as they were growing up that they were special, that they could have whatever they wanted just because they wanted it. They got participation medals for coming in last.

The science on this is already good: it devalues the feeling of somebody who works hard and comes in first place, and it actually embarrasses the person who comes in last because they know they don’t deserve it. So it actually makes them feel worse, it doesn’t help.

There are a lot of kids who got into honors classes not because they deserved it but because their parents complained and they got As – not because they earned them but because the teachers didn’t want to deal with the parents. Then those kids graduate and they start a job and in an instant they find out that they’re not special, that you don’t get anything just because you want it, you get nothing for coming in last, and your parents cannot help you get a promotion.

And in an instant their entire self-image is shattered; in an instant the way they view themselves is completely turned on its head. So an entire generation is growing up with lower self-esteem than previous generations.

Remember they have grown up in an Instagram-Facebook-Snapchat world in which they are very good at putting filters on everything, they’re very good at curating how they want to be seen.

We think they’re full of confidence – they seem to have all the answers, they seem to be telling us what to do. But at the end of the day it’s just not there, it’s just not true. In fact their confidence is a lot weaker than before – they don’t know where they’re coming from and where they’re going, and they’re unsure of themselves and they lack the courage to ask. We say things like ‘my door is always open’ assuming that they have the courage to walk through the door.

On technology: dopamine is responsible for the feelings we get when we find something we’re looking for or we accomplish something we set out to accomplish – that great feeling you get when you cross something off your to-do list, when you win the game, when you hit the target, win the client, get the promotion. That elation comes from dopamine. Other things that release dopamine include alcohol, nicotine, gambling – that’s what makes us feel good when we engage with those things and it’s the root of a lot of addiction. In fact almost every alcoholic on the planet discovered alcohol when they were a teenager.

When we’re very young the only approval we need is approval from our parents. Then as we go through adolescence, we crave the approval of our peers (very frustrating for our parents, very important for us, it allows us to acculturate outside of our immediate families).

When we go into the larger tribe, it’s a time of high stress and high anxiety and we’re supposed to learn to rely on our friends. Some people quite by accident discover alcohol and the numbing effects of dopamine to help them cope with the stress. That becomes hardwired, and then for the rest of their lives, when they suffer some kind of extreme stress, they don’t turn to a person but to the bottle.

We also know that dopamine is released with cell phones and social media. The bing or flash or beep that we get from our phones and which feels so good, releases dopamine. Yes we all hate all the emails but we love the bings. We’ve all been in this position: we’re feeling a little bit down, sorry, sad, so we send out 10 texts to 10 friends – hi, hi, hi, hi, hi … – and we hope that they write back because it feels good.

So now we have a younger generation with basically unfettered access to social media and cell phones. We have age restrictions on alcohol, age restrictions on smoking and age restrictions on gambling. But we have no age restrictions on these other dopamine-producing devices called social media or cell phones. It’s the equivalent of throwing open the liquor cabinet and telling our young adolescents: ‘I know this is a stressful time, try the vodka to get you through.’

That’s basically what we’re doing and it’s becoming hardwired. Our young generation isn’t learning the coping skills and coping mechanisms to turn to another human being when they’re struggling or stressed; they’re turning to social media or their cell phones. Their self-worth sometimes becomes wrapped up in how many likes they get. They obsessively check how many likes they get and actually will get depressed if they don’t get any. You see them going out with their friends and instead of connecting personally they sit and talk on the phone.

If I were to hold my phone while I’m giving this presentation (I’m not checking it, it’s not buzzing, it’s not beeping, I’m simply holding it), would you feel that you’re the most important thing to me right now? No!

Now think about how often the phone is out while we’re talking to other people. We go out for dinner or lunch with our family or friends, we have meetings and we put the phone on the table – which sends a subconscious message to everybody in the room that you’re not that important to me (and by the way, putting your phone upside down is not more polite)

My favorite one is where the phone rings in the middle of a meeting and somebody says, ‘I’m not going to answer.’ So magnanimous!

Put it away, keep it away, because it actually hurts our ability to relate to each other.

Young kids these days are on them all the time. I don’t blame them it is addiction. We yell and scream at them but it doesn’t help – it’s a chemical addiction.

So you take an insecure generation that now, through no fault of its own, struggles to cope with stress. They don’t know how to deal with stress and, as many have told me, they struggle to form deep and meaningful relationships. They admit that many of their friendships are superficial, that their friends will cancel on them if they get a better plan; that they wouldn’t really know who to talk to if they got depressed, and maybe they would turn to an online support group (which is not a real thing, it’s not human).

And we’ve seen the impact of this. We’re seeing more depression in this generation, more suicide and more accidental death due to drug overdose. Universities are currently dealing with an epidemic that they’ve never dealt with before: the number of kids requesting leave of absence due to depression.

Those are all extreme examples. The less extreme and more likely example is that someone will go through life just never really finding joy or fulfilment. And everything’s just ‘fine.’ ‘How’s your job? ‘Fine.’ ‘How are your friends?’ ‘Fine’ – but no joy because joy and fulfilment come from human interaction. We are social animals and we need it. We have to learn to rely on our friends, but that skill is desperately lacking.

On impatience: this generation is often accused of being entitled and if you’ve worked with any of them, it sure seems that way. But I argue that we’re not reading the tea leaves. They’re not entitled, they’re impatient.

Again, let’s practice empathy. How did they grow up? They grew up in a world of instant gratification. You want to buy something? Go onto Amazon, it is delivered the next day. You want to watch a movie? You don’t check movie times, you just log on and download it whenever. You want to watch a TV serial? Don’t wait week to week, just watch for the weekend. Want to get hold of somebody? Don’t leave a message on their machine and wait for hours for them to get the message and call you back – just text them and they’ll get back to you instantaneously. Want to go on a date? Just swipe right – never learn the skill set of ‘What are you doing ..?’ You can have four dates in a night.

In other words everything comes instantaneously. But they have falsely applied the instant gratification model to life fulfilment and career fulfilment. They want it all instantaneously.

The problem is that life relationships and career are not destinations like ‘look I found the job I love.’ That’s not how it works, it’s not a scavenger hunt. No, it’s a journey.

It’s the same with love. They say, ‘I found love’. No, you work hard every single day to stay in love. It’s a journey.

It’s as if they’re standing at the foot of a mountain, they know exactly what they want, they can see the summit. What they don’t see is the mountain.

I talk on a regular basis to some recent college grads who are in their entry-level jobs. I ask them things like, ‘How’s it going?’ They’ll say, ‘Yeah, I think I’m going to quit.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I’m not making an impact.’ ‘You know you’ve been here eight months right?’

This is the problem. They see it as destination. ‘I’m not making an impact’ – I hear it all the time. But they don’t even know what that means. Yes, we all want to make an impact. But what kind of impact? What you want to do? When and how do you want to contribute to the world – that is vision, that is the ‘why.’

It’s become generic and abstract but the problem is they’re wafting around, they’re looking for the right jobs or relationships. They’ll go from job to job to job, hoping that the next one sticks. They’ll go from relationship to relationship hoping that the next one is ‘the love that that I’ve been looking for.’ They don’t know how to ask for help and it makes them feel even worse – because they can’t find the thing that they’re looking for, so ‘maybe it’s me.’

So its an insecure generation that doesn’t have coping mechanisms that wants everything resolved and resolved now – ‘I haven’t thought, let me just send a text,’ as opposed to, for example, ‘Let me wait an hour, when I’m done with lunch with you, I’ll send a text.’

On environment, the fourth and most egregious of the four observations: we’re now taking this wonderful, smart, idealistic, ambitious, hard-working, good group of people that were dealt a bad hand and we’re putting them in corporate environments that do not care about them as human beings.

For some reason our work world has changed in the past 20-30 years. We are suffering the side effects of business theories left over from the 1980s and 1990s which are bad for people and are bad for business. For example: the concept of shareholder supremacy was a theory proposed in the late 1970s; it was popularized in the 1980s and 1990s and it is standard form today. Talk to any public company and ask them their priority and they say: maximize shareholder value.

That’s like a coach prioritizing the needs of the fans over the needs of the players. How are you going to build a winning team with that model? But that’s normal today.

It is outdated. Remember the 1980s and 1990s were boom years with relative peace and a kinder, gentler Cold War – nobody was practicing hiding under their desks in school anymore. We are no longer in those times. These are no longer boom years, these are no longer peaceful times, and those models cannot work today.

Another one is mass layoffs – using someone’s livelihood to balance the books. It’s so normal in America today that we don’t even understand how broken and how damaging it is. Not only to human beings, but to business. Companies talk about how they want to build trust and cooperation, then they announce a round of layoffs.

The quickest way to destroy trust and destroy cooperation in a business – in one day – is to lay people off. Then everyone gets scared.

Can you imagine sending someone home to say, ‘Honey, I can no longer provide for our family because the company missed its arbitrary projections this year.’

And think about the people who actually kept their jobs because every single decision a company makes is a piece of communication and the company has just communicated: ‘This is not a meritocracy, we don’t care how hard you’ve worked or how long you’ve worked here. If we miss our numbers and you happen to fall on the wrong side of the spreadsheet, sorry we cannot guarantee employment.’

In other words we come to work every day afraid. And we ask our younger generation to work in environments where they can never stand up and admit, ‘I made a mistake.’

We’re constantly being told, ‘You have to be vulnerable, leaders are vulnerable.’ What does that even mean?

It doesn’t mean you walk around crying ‘I’m vulnerable’ right? No, what vulnerability means is you create an environment in which someone feels safe enough to raise their hand and say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ ‘You’ve given me a job and I haven’t been trained to do it,’ ‘I need help, I made a mistake, I screwed something up, I’m scared, I’m worried’ – all of these things.

No one would ever admit these inside a company because it puts a target on your head for when there’s another round. So we keep it to ourselves. But how can a company ever do well if nobody’s ever willing to admit they made a mistake, they’re scared or they don’t know what they’re doing.

So we’ve literally created cultures in which every single day everybody comes to work and lies, hides and fakes.

And we’re asking our younger generation to work and succeed and find themselves and build their confidence and overcome their addiction to technology and build strong relationships at work. We keep saying to them, ‘You’re the future leaders’ – but we’re the leaders now, we’re in control, what are we doing?

This is what empathy means: it means if there’s an entire generation struggling. But maybe it’s not them. It’s like the only common factor in all my failed relationships is me. So if we just can’t get the right performance out of our people, maybe it’s us …?

It’s not a generation, it’s not them. They’re not difficult or hard to understand, they’re human beings like the rest of us, trying to find their way, trying to work in a place where they feel that someone cares about them as human beings.

That’s what we all want – so it’s not even generational, it’s all of us.

I’m tired of people saying to me, ‘How do I get the best out of my people?’ – like they’re a towel to wring and get the most out of them.

No, we should ask, ‘How do I help my people be at their natural best?’

We’re not asking these questions, we are not practicing empathy. We have to start by practicing empathy and relate to what they may be going through, and it will profoundly change the decisions we make. It will profoundly change the way we see the world.

You are driving to work and someone wants to cut into your lane. Do you pull your car up or let them in? Most of us pull our cars up and signal to them, ‘You wait your turn.’

What if we practiced empathy here? I don’t know, maybe they’ve been out of work for six months, maybe they had trouble getting the kids out to school this morning and now they’re running late for a really important interview, or maybe they’re just a bastard. I don’t know.

But that’s the point: we don’t know. And the practice of empathy says, ‘I’ll let them in and I’ll arrive to work one car length late.’ We don’t always have to be right, we don’t  always have to be in charge, we don’t always have to be the one who succeeds. It’s not about winning or losing.

Which is where I go to the second point: perspective (the Finite and the Infinite game: to be continued – editor).