Day Care for Adults

Originally published on my other blog.

When my brother was about 24 and working for a small machining company, the owner passed away suddenly. My brother inherited/bought the company. He has now been in business for himself  with a handful or employees for almost 15 years – no small feat; I am so proud of my brother!

Before he passed away, the former owner told my brother that employing people was (more often than not) Day Care for Adults. Many times, over the years, my brother would repeat this to me while ramming his head against the wall because of some sort of employee who wasn't doing his or her job. His first successful hire was my *other* brother; probably because after 25 years of knowing each other, the familiar relationship overcame what they lacked in people-wisdom.

A few days ago, my current boss muttered the same Adult Day Care line under his breath. I've been thinking about this ever since, through the filter of 1) my years as a stay at home mom and 2) the strange position of being a "green" employee in my 40s.

In my current life situation, I find myself with younger bosses who are frequently childless. Most of them have risen to their management level by their operational success - in other words, they figured out how to get a job (or multiple jobs) done and done well. But they've rarely had the depth of interpersonal experiences to understand how to motivate PEOPLE, especially people who are different from them. They've always been in the situation of being able to walk away from people they don't like. They haven't been forced to the reckoning table by an irrational toddler who has an entirely different temperament and perspective in the middle of Target's candy aisle in a crowd. These young managers are THINGS-WISE, PEOPLE-DUMB. Like first time parents, these managers often seem to think that they will issue an edict without explanation and everyone will follow suit. They (unfortunately) don't have the patience to teach, or the flexibility to see the multiple perspectives among their employees, or even the wisdom to use employee buy-in motivationally. They are caught in a top-down, autocratic mindset which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you think your employees don't need to know the information that you know, so you don't tell them anything, then you can't expect them to behave responsibly and with wisdom at the right moment.

And to return to the day care quote... if they think are running an adult day care, the problem might be they have no clue what day care really entails. The best day cares are extremely invested in empowering the children to be independent. The best day cares will teach children how to get dressed themselves, use the bathroom, write their own names, clean up after themselves, etc...whatever the case may be. The best day cares are not just a parking spot for the kids while the parents work. Or a warm place to spend a cold winter day. The best day cares find developmentally appropriate ways to talk about problems and ask the children how to solve these problems (themselves). German has a saying for this type of thinking, "Pick up (the children) where they stand." (Die Kinder) dort abholen, wo sie stehen. We want, not just children, but employees, to be invested and informed appropriately, because with understanding comes buy-in and problems are actually changed and FIXED.

But that type of strategy is far too rare in most offices. My current office has a mix of management: some who understand how to be empowering and some who are issuing edicts. Between these two types, there is not only a parent/nonparent divide but also a generational difference in how the higher up are choosing to manage. Recently, I find myself identifying and strategizing about those managers who don't have a very good handle on people skills.

I found myself pretty disappointed, in particular, at one of the managers who has a top-down mentality. I quickly began accessing my ability to either influence her into a more productive mindset or to isolate and minimize her influence on the parts of the firm that are operating in a more open, empowering manner. WHICH, BTW, IS NOT MY JOB, BUT IT IS PART OF MY BRAIN THAT DOESN'T TURN OFF. I pushed her a little bit on information sharing, to see how she would respond.

That's right; I was a toddler testing her boundaries. But then I also backed off and told her some funny stories afterwards to disarm her and, ideally, to help her to reconceptualize the stance she was taking in a non-threatening, anecodotal sort of way.

It was...manipulative. In large part, it's manipulative because I adopt a goofy awkwardness when I am doing these assessments. My awkwardness smooths almost everything over, I think; but the truth is, I know that by acting awkward and I can get more information. And I feel - not transparent, not honest. I came home and I felt bad about it. And for the 100th time I wondered 1) if I was going to get myself fired, 2) if I am ever really going to be able to work for someone else, 3) if I am really just doomed in the corporate world. I don't know.

And with all the boundary testing that I'm up to: maybe the workplace isDay Care for Adults - just not in top-down way that most people think it is.