Coaching For Leadership, Third Edition

August 2011. I’m in Tel Aviv, strolling down Rothschild Boulevard—this city’s answer to New York’s Park Avenue. Lined with fancy restaurants and boutique stores, the street usually throngs with well-heeled women walking their poodles, businessmen laughing over al fresco lunches, and lycra-clad joggers pounding the manicured flowerbeds.

Today is different. The boulevard has disappeared under a thousand tents; what’s left of the sidewalk is literally crammed with excited young people. Some brandish placards bearing political slogans, some are playing musical instruments; most merely mill about, talking and smoking. They’ve been here a month, protesting against the high cost of living.

Beneath the balconies of disgruntled gray-headed residents, the campers have set up kitchens, portable toilets, lecture rooms, and makeshift cinema screens—huge canvas sheets that hang between eighty-year-old ficus trees. Every Saturday night the residents of this new Tent City march through Tel Aviv. They are joined by tens of thousands of supporters in a huge public demonstration of deep discontent.

The protesters have much to complain about. Mostly in their twenties, they somehow never got the opportunities they were promised: they feel disappointed, let down. From their slogans and banners stream global concerns: the plight of doctors, nurses, and teachers; the lack of private sector jobs; the cost, and probable uselessness, of education; the growing gap between rich and poor; the prohibitive cost of a beer; a deficit of Good Men.

The main gripe is that the older generation, the baby boomers, screwed up our chances for the good life, recklessly partying too long and too hard, leaving my generation to pick up the tab and nurse a colossal hangover. All the stability, safety, and generous institutional comforts taken for granted by our parents’ generation simply vanished into recession. It’s no longer clear where to turn. While it’s easy for the young to protest about what we don’t want, it isn’t at all clear to us what we should strive for, and what is truly valuable.

These days I live in Israel, but I’m originally from the United Kingdom, where the situation is similar. Many of my bright, hard-working, and well-educated contemporaries have wound up in their late twenties staring at a brick wall, watching daytime cable. Top-class graduates from first-class schools, they were ironically first in the firing line during the economic bloodbath. Many who had left home have since moved back in with their parents. Those who were most expected to move up are moving down.

Here is a frustrated generation. The product of an affluent global middle class, this cohort feels a strong sense of undelivered entitlement. They studied hard for degrees in industries that no longer need them; the lucky few who do find jobs collect salaries that don’t pay the bills. Unable to support themselves, let alone fulfill their career dreams, these young people are at the point of losing all confidence in the future.

What can sovereign governments be expected to do? Do they hold those structural levers that are in need of adjustment? What can business organizations be expected to do? Global corporations have omnipotent reach, but can the necessary “fixes” be expressed in terms of implementable programs? Who will foot the bill?

What sort of questions are these? They cannot be merely questions of management, for isn’t it clear that management of existing systems is part of the problem? We are in a crisis situation. Isn’t the remedy for a crisis the domain of leadership? Where is this leadership to come from?

On the other side of the coin, we have a unique opportunity to start fresh. All the negatives, the chaos and discontent, only highlight a delicious subtext: there is no option for my generation but to try something new. We can’t retreat to a shack in the country and complain about “the mess we’re in”—at least not for another four decades!

Unsurprisingly, youthful expressions seem impossibly idealistic: Equality and opportunity for all. Universal health care. World peace. The breakdown of antiquated nation-state, open borders, and open source.

Let’s clarify: we’re not hippies—we may share their ambitions, but not their starting point. Now is a different world. The first task of leadership is an articulation of values.

Until now, my generation has never been hard up. We simply don’t know what that means. Even when we’re technically broke, it’s abstract. Sure, sometimes we’ll forgo the gourmet pasta sauce in favor of the supermarket brand. Maybe I’ll buy those designer jeans next month when I’ve cleared my bank overdraft—or on second thought, my credit card can take the hit. We grew up comfortable enough, entertained enough, cushioned by Nintendo on a rainy day. Nothing really bad happened when you overspent your pocket money.

We’re just not motivated by money. We expect it—that’s for sure—but the raging lust for money for its own sake seems the crass preserve of the very poor, the very rich, and shiny, grasping people in New York City.

More than money, we want you to agree we’re brilliant. We’re going to achieve goals, become famous, get on television, write a by-line in the papers. We’re going to get photographed holding degrees and winning sports medals and clasping our life partners in wedding ceremonies. We want recognition for being uniquely and completely ourselves.

With the current dips and depressions, we’re not really sure what success is. The banking crisis gave the impression that the “glittering prizes” were presented to whoever wore the Emperor’s New Clothes. Financial achievement built on shadows and dust seems morally reprehensible. When I hear the sentiment “the markets will rally, we’ll all go back to business,” I feel a twinge—not of excitement—but of disgust.

Maybe economic conditions will improve. But if success means spotting and riding the next technology or communications bubble, pioneering in the moment, parasitic in hindsight, and I slip into my opulently manicured suburban grave, I’ll be kicking all the way down, cursing that I’ve missed the bigger picture.

My generation was always told “be yourself.” We’ve been encouraged to say what we think, follow our hearts, aim for our dreams. Money is portrayed as a helpful means, never as the reason for that journey. We know that a large part of our life will be time spent at work; we’d like that experience to be fulfilling and enriching.

Searching for meaning, we want to arrive, belong, make our mark, be appreciated and indulged. There is a strong element of self-discovery along the path to find the right workplace, to create a satisfying way of life. For those who haven’t landed on both feet, it’s perfectly legitimate to sling that knapsack over your shoulder, traveling off to the horizon, seeking value.

I want my job to help people, make the world better—and certainly not make it any worse; do something real not abstract, and good for the people I work with. I want colleagues I would have as friends outside of work; I want to be part of a team. I want, I want, I want . . .

It’s unrealistic I know, but . . . I want to get paid slightly more than—and certainly not less than—my peers; I want my work to nourish me intellectually, train me, and provide skills I can trade later on down the line; work should connect me to a network of like-minded people and fresh ideas; nonnegotiable are health care, a car, an office where everybody knows my name. I want responsibility for part of a business; I want to be trusted; I want to feel that my efforts have some effect, even minor, in a bigger picture.

Case Study: The Triceratops

I am lucky to have Mark Levy as my mentor. When I last spoke to Mark, I confided that I felt out of my depth writing a chapter for Coaching for Leadership. The intention of the chapter is to provide a slant on leadership from the Generation Y viewpoint. Now, what do I know about Leadership? I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. We were speaking on Skype, so as I talked I could see Mark nodding, questioning, and encouraging me. Then his smile gradually grew into a huge mischievous grin.

“Nathan, your readers are experts in their field,” he said in a matter-of-fact manner. “Imagine they are paleontologists. They’ve just discovered a triceratops, a Generation Y specimen with three horns. Only a handful of people have ever encountered one, and you can’t go study one in a zoo. The world knows nothing about the Triceratops apart from the fact of its discovery.”

Honestly, in that moment I thought he’d lost it. But then he continued, “Now just stop and consider that for a moment. You’re out there in the wild, their subject is your real-life experience. You are one of those young Hi-Pos they’d love to study. Nathan, they’re talking about you!

“You, my friend, are the triceratops.”

Mark is right. I am a fairly typical product of my generation. I’m twenty-nine and I don’t have a mortgage. I’m proud of my allegedly useless history degree, I’ve worked all over the world, in various industries, traveled a fair bit and done some serious soul-searching. I hope my story can provide some insight into what starting a career looks like, down here in the murky twenty-first-century mud.

I’m a triceratops charging through the world of work, living on diet of Meaning and Fulfillment. With that thought in mind, below I have sketched a rough outline of my personal experience of work, the lowlights and highlights of an eight-year journey.

Work as a Journey

My first real job was a posting to Gurgaon, India. In other words, the first time I put on a suit and walked into an office was in forty-degree (Celsius) heat on the outskirts of New Delhi. Aged twenty-two, I found myself with two other Oxford graduates, also in suits, acting as mouthpieces for a finance start-up. The local analysts were magnificently overqualified and had fantastic ideas, which confusingly came out in garbled “Victorian” Indian English—it was our task to “translate” and “modernize” their insights into The Queens’ English for consumption by American banks.

If I’m honest, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

One Friday, for no particular reason, I clocked off uncharacteristically early, cancelled my personal driver, and walked the five miles to my hotel. I took my sweet time, watching seemingly endless chains of manual laborers carry masonry and scaffolding between rickety construction sites. Huddled groups of women cooked stew by the roadside, cows idled on the tarmac, forcing traffic to veer around their bulky rumps and swinging tails.

Then something happened that I will never forget. A tiny man wearing a simple orange tunic appeared out of nowhere, directly in front of me. His forehead was daubed in thick white marks, in his hand he held a simple wooden cane.

I noticed this holy man walked barefoot on the hot uneven ground. I looked down at my own patent leather shoes, shirt, and striped tie, wondering what impression this Western man-child must make on the wandering mystic. He simply smiled and walked on.

I later learned that this otherworldly apparition was a religious Jain in the final years of his life: renouncing all worldly goods, leaving family life, he was making a pilgrimage of holy sites, and will end his life at a shrine by a sacred riverbank.

Our meeting lasted only a moment. Nothing was said. But the experience of meeting him has left an indelible impression. In one direction my mundane road to work lay ahead; his road to meaning went the totally opposite way.

Old Fashioned Start-Up

With a little finance experience to paper over my history degree, it was time to trade up. I applied for a job at G-corporation in London. It was attractive, a great blue-chip brand, well paid, and a thriving young company to boot. It checked all the boxes. Or so I thought.

In my first few weeks as account manager, all the new recruits, including me, were bombarded throughout intensive training days with films of the corporate founders, repeatedly congratulating us, promising creativity and opportunity. They smiled broad grins and asked us to be ourselves.

We dressed down, in jeans and funky T-shirts. Coworkers brought their dogs to work, enjoyed a biweekly massage, free lunches, snack areas with fluorescent bean bags, ski trips to St. Tropez. The office looked like a Generation Y paradise playground, full of colored bouncy balls and computer games. Perhaps here was the sense of arrival I had been craving?

Maybe the early years at G-corporation were truly zany. However, in 2006 the office was run like a Roman galleon. Hierarchically structured, heavily targeted, there was a real threat of disciplinary action if an employee left his desk for an overlong spell. Turning up five minutes after the 9 o’clock start led to a severe dressing down. Worse still was the job itself. Using clunky back-office administrative software, sales teams mechanically logged and processed payments. There was virtually zero client time. It was cripplingly boring.

Imagine this elaborate modern-day torture; forever surrounded by brilliant young people with excellent paper credentials, and even better dress sense, performing the most repetitive and unimaginative of jobs. The system was so beautifully designed, the brand impressed friends at dinner parties; the whole ambiance oozed creativity and splendor. Yet stripped of its sugar coating, here was a cold, plastic environment. I had been scammed, lured by my own petty (and misguided) understanding of value and success.

Fake Equity

Several years later I took a job with a financial events company in the City of London. Founded by former stockbrokers, the organization presented a unique seed-funding offering to employees. Initially training on the job while being paid a salary, employees would eventually establish their own conference series, and share in the equity. You’d end up with your own company, with protection and support from the bigger organization.

This sounded very exciting. Mostly under thirty, employees worked around the clock, eager to prove their creditworthiness. At highly orchestrated monthly meetings, the management echoed the promise “the dream of having your own business,” highlighting and rewarding the staff who progressed along this route.

I too was lured by this promise; a sense of independence, of being my own boss. I was hardly alone; the company attracted entrepreneurial graduates who each wanted to be master of his or her destiny. Although the number of employees who actually “won” seed funding was minuscule, the fact this target was even possible electrified the office into a veritable hive of activity.

On the advice of a lawyer friend, I investigated the company’s public records. With his help I quickly realized the “staff equity” offer was a fraud. The directors maintained complete control, and had in fact recently liquidated the “employee equity” account, now glowing red in negative numbers, to purchase a pair of yachts for their personal use.

Here was another generational scam—the scent of independence, a promise to share the pie. The company continues to perform well, attracting dedicated hard-working staff, buzzing like fireflies around the hope of owning the fruits of their labors.

I resigned immediately, forwarding the incriminating documents to another colleague, who also resigned. This fake equity promise was the total opposite of the value I seek.

Responsibility Incentive

Crashing from job to job in London, I stumbled on a gem. An eccentric finance company, at ten years old too young to be considered a start-up, employing only a handful of staff. The founders, semi-academic visionaries, were driven by the dream of a more open marketplace. I perhaps never understood the heart of their idea, yet in this small team environment I quickly felt valued and keen to make a good impression.

The thrill of responsibility pushed me to work harder than ever. Running events in London and New York, marketing trips to Europe and Canada, I enjoyed taking decisions and standing by them. After producing a successful conference for hedge funds in Manhattan, I was asked to stay in New York City, a one-man sales operation for the long summer.

Trusted to manage my own time, armed with a Skype connection, a fake Connecticut landline, and a smart new suit from Dad, I booked meetings up the length and breadth of Wall Street. I stayed in touch with London via e-mail, sharing my meetings through Google Docs and scheduled weekly calls. I wasn’t earning much money, but woke up each day high on the adrenaline of independence and New York City.

For the first time, it felt like what I had to say mattered. Still, I had no idea how little any of it stacked up in the grand scheme of things.

Riding First Class on the Titanic

The little finance company was completely submerged by the financial crisis. I remember calling a Bear Stearns manager to finalize his keynote speech at our upcoming event. Vaguely aware that his company had been mentioned on the news that morning, he took me by surprise: “I’d love to speak at your conference, but I don’t think I’ll be able. They’ve called in the entire management team. We’re riding on the Titanic, Nathan, and we’ve hit a tremendous iceberg. I can hear the violins playing.”

Throughout the crisis I heard the roll-call of dozens of former clients on the evening news. Each name, each bailed-out bank, brought visions of offices visited in New York; vast mahogany rooms halfway up skyscrapers, decked out in designer furniture, gold-framed doors, and impeccably dressed secretaries, marble paperweights and magnums of champagne resting on capacious desks.

I still wonder what happened to all those offices, secretaries, and paperweights. Sometimes I imagine them floating down Park Avenue, out into the Hudson river, all that high-rise value evaporating into city smog.

Community Initiative

Back in London, the newspapers spread doom and gloom, prophesying financial meltdown. From the early morning bus I saw long lines at the unemployment office trying to shake off the rain. My friends were out of work, I was barely making ends meet as a copywriter, with the presentiment of a very drab end of the world.

I fantasized opening up the shuttered shops, using the premises as a café or wireless hotspot or soup kitchen, anything but a derelict space. By chance I came across a fledgling art project; a group of design graduates living in a council estate earmarked for demolition. Housed by the construction company, their presence acted as a deterrent to illegal “squatters,” who might otherwise interfere with the site.

We came up with a bold plan, to occupy the entire site of four hundred apartments with a living arts festival named for the estate—The Market Estate Project. After submitting funding applications, appeals to the local council and the construction company, we amazingly won the right to occupy the site for five full months.

The project quickly took over my entire life. I slept on my teammates’ floors, day by day assembling a legal and practical infrastructure. We recruited over a hundred artists to redesign the estate, offering them the blank canvas of empty apartments and total creative freedom. With one condition: artwork was to reflect on, and include, the local community.

Gradually my winter fantasy came to life. Setting up an office in a nearby building, we were soon joined by enthusiastic locals, artists, and an army of volunteers. We won enough funding to hire sound, light, and security experts, and even a few of my out-of-work friends. When the project opened to the general public, 2,500 people visited the one-day event.

Three kitchens heaved to feed hungry visitors, local school children flocked to visit a flat converted into a blue vacuum-packed bubble. Bands entertained guests from a specially constructed stage, a drama troupe performed Othello in the car park. As night fell, a laser show lit up the estate.

Gazing around during the event, having barely slept for two weeks, I was overcome with emotion. We had made something happen.

On a site of dereliction and poverty, powered by goodwill and a volunteer spirit, our small team had carried the momentum for a community project that, for one day at least, brought light to this dark corner of London. We brought creative, visionary young people, and given them space to practice their utopias.

The newspapers celebrated the festival, a week later the buildings were torn down, and everyone went home. This felt to me a truly valuable project, albeit completely unsustainable.

Working Community

For the past year, I’ve been working for an innovation company in Tel Aviv. They pioneer cultural change in large and small organizations across the globe. Experts in new product development, with a strong pedigree in problem solving, the company is commercially successful—but that’s perhaps the last reason I work for them.

Before long I realized that this organization had some incredible cultural differences. For example, the CEO divulges to clients his exact profit. He spells out costs, staff time, resources, then indicates his profit margin. It is up to the client to agree or disagree. This story impressed me; breaking the façade of business as a game that’s either won or lost, approaching the client as a fellow human being, and with absolute honesty.

S.I.T.—the company goes by the acronym for Systematic Inventive Thinking—is self-consciously an experiment. Privately owned by founders and staff, it is principle-led, and strongly values-oriented.

There is a sense of equality. The top level of management earns just twice the secretary’s salary. Loyalty is valued above personal achievement: there is no sales commission; any bonus is shared equally by the whole company. Each person contributes as best they can to the overall team.

There is a distinct lack of ego; most assignments are in pairs; rewards are given for teamwork. The company takes an extremely flexible approach to child care; mothers bring babies to work, employees leave early to pick up kids from school. The office is overwhelmingly female.

S.I.T. is a business paradigm unlike any I’ve encountered. The company seeks to understand cultural differences, to accept and find space for difference. These sound like buzz words, but the reality is striking. For example, I don’t speak Hebrew very well; at any meeting I attend, large or small, the entire room switches to English to accommodate me, so I don’t feel left out.

My colleagues show up to work because they love the experiment, the way of life, the intellectual excitement of constantly questioning and improving the business. They feel emotionally invested, both in S.I.T. and in their work with clients. There is an office mantra: we work with people, not clients.

This environment thrives on mutual trust and pride in a job well done. Helping a colleague achieve his best has become the highest form of work. There are ups and downs, but for me, the excitement of being a part of this team, operating commercially but with a moral and social heart, makes me love my work.

If a company can create and sustain this working climate, surely the sky is the limit. People actually smile in this office. Surely, this shouldn’t be so rare?