Sorry for the lack of posts here recently, but tomorrow we leave this house and Sunday we fly back to Japan, so we’ve been quite busy trying to finish everything off here and pack everything up.

But yesterday I had the chance to have a really interesting conversation with someone. They’re part of a organisation which is having a bit of a revolving door problem at the moment: new workers are entering, sticking around for a couple of years and then leaving. The older workers seem to be quite happy, but the younger ones don’t seem to be able to settle. The organisation is haemorrhaging talent, and I’m not even sure it knows it.

This is, of course, very common, and there are two ways to deal with the problem. The first is to blame the younger workers for their lack of commitment; this is tempting because it is the easy option. The behaviour of new workers can be explained by a failure of loyalty. It’s an explanation which is simple, powerful, and supremely lazy. Because I’m reminded of the quote from Jeffrey Pfeffer:

Loyalty isn’t dead, but toxic companies are driving people away. There isn’t a scarcity of talent, but there is a growing unwillingness to work for toxic organisations.

I think this is as much a point about generations as it is about toxicity: whereas older generations, particularly in areas like mission work, would be widely expected to tolerate bad leadership and respect the appointed (anointed?) leaders whether or not they agreed with them, younger generations will not put up with bad leadership and will simply vote with their feet. Commitment has to be earned, not expected.

I said there were two ways of dealing with the problem, and the second is to try to understand it and then do something about it. So here’s a really interesting question that I want to put to the leaders of organisations I come across:

To what extent have you adapted your policies, principles and practices to meet the needs of a new generation of workers?

If they have a good answer for this, then learn from them, because they’re on to something. If they don’t, then look for a revolving door problem either already happening or about to.

I’m aware of the argument that the principles are what makes an organisation what it is, and they should never be changed. Yes, change the practices, but not the principles. (Faith-based organisations like churches and mission agencies are particularly fond of this argument - yet most of them don’t even change the practices!)

In short: rubbish. The world changes, and if your organisation is still what it was when it was founded, it is likely to be way out of touch. Organisations similar to the one my friend is part of have an almost fanatical conservativism which is guaranteed to inhibit retention of new workers. A lot of the Evangelical organisations you come across these days were founded around a hundred years ago and are now being led by the second or third generation - people still close to the original vision and with a generational instinct towards loyalty and following the party line. In other words, they will be set up according to societal and cultural standards which made sense a hundred years ago and are now presided over by people who think those standards are the right way, if not the only way.

But policies, principles and practices produced by Veterans and policed by Boomers will be irritating to Xers and incomprehensible to Yers.

As I mentioned, faith-based organisations are the worst at this because they tend to believe that their institutional principles reflect the way that God wanted the organisation to be run, (which may be the case) with the subtext that God would never ever want the organisation to be run in a different way and so there is no need to reinvestigate or reimagine those principles. (which is certainly not the case) It’s the organisational equivalent of this:

The members of the toxic faith system make claims about their character, abilities, or knowledge that make them ‘special’ in some way. Challenging the authority or correctness of the leader is equated with challenging the very Word of God. Who would want to be pitted against the Word of God?

- An Unhealthy Faith System, C McLaughlin

As generations change, organisations must also change if they want to have a hope of retaining younger workers. (Similar things to the above can be said about organisations which are internationalizing and having to support workers of diverse cultures, but that’s not my concern here today.) I hope we can all agree that working practices and policies must change. I would argue that underlying principles must also change - or at least, be appropriately recontextualized - such that they are not merely a reflection of the founders’ society but also make sense in today’s society as well. An organisation which isn’t changing, or isn’t even thinking about these changes, will rapidly find itself wondering why its new workers are “disloyal” and “lack commitment”. Here’s that question again for such organisations to ponder:

To what extent have you adapted your policies, principles and practices to meet the needs of a new generation of workers?