Has "Wokeness" Come to Your Workplace?
How to make political convictions audible and shareable at work
Are you a millennial manager? Then, you probably deal with a confusingly moveable boundary. At one and the same time, your Gen Z employees tend to sharpen the line between work and personal life while at the same time blurring the line between work and politics.
In other words, Gen Zs go to work so they can have a personal life. They don’t live to work; they work to live. But at the very same time, work can’t just be about work; it also has to be about the world. Work/Personal. WorkPolitics.
How do you walk that boundary when it keeps appearing and disappearing at disconcerting intervals?
Journalism on Gen Z workers isn’t always helpful on this point. Some journalists, writing for Harvard Business Review, hint that Gen Z activism, when it comes to work, can bring positive results, even if those same politically active Gen Zs are disengaged from the work itself. But the advice they give isn’t super helpful. It’s things like, ask for feedback and cultivate honest dialogue and practice transparency, etc. But how do we talk about the role of climate change and parental rights and racial equity in the life of the company? Far worse, though, is this article that makes it sound like kids these days are just hard to work with. Rikki Schlott writes, “Because Gen Zers are bringing their politics into the workplace, more and more employers report that they’re walking on eggshells — and even fearful of their own subordinates.” Well, that’s a little silly. It seems to me that these older managers should have figured out by now that everybody’s pretty hard to work with. Whatever their generation, humans are labor-intensive, full stop.
The sense I’m getting from such journalism is that professionals are supposed to treat personal political convictions like AirPods. Younger generations leave their politics in place while they work. Older generations pop them out as soon as they clock in.
We need a mode/switch away from inaudible politics at work.
Make the commitments of your organization speakable. It can be hard for Gen Zs to think institutionally, when so many institutions have failed them over the years. But if you act as if your company is somehow politically neutral, they’ll see through that faster than you can say DEI. Your company has values. While those values may not have partisan tendencies, they do have often unspoken commitments regarding gender, sexuality, race, and religion. One thing you can do for your Gen Z coworkers is to bring those commitments into the zone of the speakable.
I’m thinking here of a woman professional I’ll call Violet who has worked in corporate sectors (for Chase Bank), where she wasn’t allowed to bring up politics or religion. In her two subsequent jobs, she found that politics had more of a place, if she started a committee. She told me that wherever she goes, she starts a committee. Maybe that doesn’t sound very political to you. It’s not like flying a flag in the back of your pickup or running for office. But politics is about talk, about compromise, about negotiation, about naming things with other humans. Violet’s committees do that. They make politics audible in the life of her organization. (She also has, she claims, a very fancy tea cabinet, which makes me wonder about the political usefulness of Earl Grey.)
Make the marginal voices of your work community hearable. One argument for keeping politics out of professional life is that, geez, work’s hard enough already. You have to close all thirty of your accounts by the end of the month, right? Politics just gums up the productivity. But sometimes, in the rush to get sh#$ done, we become deaf to those around us.
One of my interviewees—let’s call him Brian—told me a story about how, after the 2016 election, he sensed that his Black and Brown coworkers were feeling discouraged. In contrast, the attitude of Brian’s White colleagues was let’s just keep moving and getting stuff done. “I think anyone could have understood that everyone might not be OK the day after,” my interviewee noted. “You might feel lost. You might feel angry. You might wonder if your coworkers have this totally different view of the world than you do, or this vision for the way the world should be. I think that not acknowledging those fault lines can get you into trouble quickly.” Precisely.
Practice political courage with company clients. This is the trickiest area, as it’s the area where you and your Gen Z teammates have the least control—and, financially speaking, the most to lose. There seem to be two kinds of mistakes to make here: let’s call them same-page conversations or the wrong-page conversations. Same-page conversations over-estimate similarities: we’re reasonable people, so we must agree on everything. Wrong-page conversations assume that differences are always radical: you and I disagree about things, because you’re, well, wrong. End of exchange. The better goal is a fresh-page conversation. To coordinate with others, we don’t need to be on the same page, because entering a relationship always entails some kind of transformation. Fresh-page approaches exhibit curiosity and amenability.
I remember hearing a young vice president of a UX company in Chicago—call him Trevor—telling me during a research interview about his company’s decision not to work with a client that sold firearms. But if you talk to similar companies long enough, you’ll also hear them tell stories about deciding to work with the dicey client. That’s politics: the art of compromise. The point is, rising professionals like Trevor benefit from more senior colleagues who say quiet parts of their political intuitions aloud.
I recently rewatched a Harrison Ford movie, a 1993 film called The Fugitive. There’s a scene in that film when a U.S. Marshall played by Tommy Lee Jones and his team are listening to a phone call their tap picked up and recorded. As they lean towards the speakers, straining to hear everything, one agent notices an elevated train sound. They start listing off which cities in the U.S. have elevated trains. Then, they give the recording another listen, and this time they can just make out a voice announcement. They filter out all the other noises and home in on that voice. To their surprise, the phone call is from a train station one block away.
I think that’s how political convictions operate at work. They’re only barely audible, but, thanks, to your Gen Z teammates, they’re not far away. It’s a good thing that your rising professionals bring their commitments with them to work, like folks listening to their music on AirPods while they work. It’s a good thing for your company they try, at least, to move with the cadence of their convictions. If you can mentor them about how politics interacts wisely with brands, workplaces, and clients, then civics-at-work just might become a shareable playlist.
-craig
Speaking of playlists, Andrea Munday has more music for you this week, and Max Zhang has made the tunes shareable. LWYW, with or without the AirPods.
Each week, the Mode/Switch Team gets together around a table of mics to talk in deeply personal and therapeutic terms about the issue of the week. So look for Emily, Craig, LaShone, David, and others to chat up politics in the workplace.
