Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER FIVEGIVE THEM THE GIFT OF CONTEXT

It was my very first job and I was definitely trying to make an impression, but I guess the impression I made wasn't too great. I was taking the wrong things for granted and I guess I seemed clueless about how much I needed to learn just to be able to really understand a lot of what was being said in meetings. It took me a while to learn the players and their roles and a lot of the unspoken rules of being part of this team.

—Twentysomething

The following story was told to me by a senior executive in a large automobile parts supply company: “We were downsizing the organization, but we were trying to do it through controlled attrition. We were offering buyouts for senior people in certain categories who were willing and able to leave the company inside of twelve months. When some of the younger people got wind of this, we were inundated with requests from them. They wanted to know why they were not being offered the buyout. [Because] I fielded some of these requests myself, I had a chance to say, ‘But you are ineligible.’ They would say, ‘Why?’ I'd say, ‘You've been here less than a year.’ And they would say, ‘That's not fair.’ They honestly didn't get why they were in a different position from the employees who had been here for twenty or thirty years.”

We see this sort of thing in our research all the time. Managers often tell us that their new young team members seem to suffer from a fundamental lack of context. This is partly a ...