Honor Recognition Coming Soon

I will be recognizing individuals and companies for honorable behavior. I will write about them here as well as on The Honorable Workplace on Facebook .

[I wrote the above nearly a year ago--I'm still devoted to the project, but stepped back first to work on my strategic approach to teaching professional communication, an approach that integrates honorable behavior. And some friends asked penetrating questions about assessing objectively honorable behavior in individuals, let alone companies. My response to all this will be available soon.]

Eckerd students

I wanted to make a few comments about the students I met at Eckerd when I gave a recent talk about protecting one's reputation.

The Career Services center at Eckerd College got in touch, asking me to give a talk to their students, both traditional and nontraditional. The talk in October was for the former; a future one will focus on students in the PEL program, students who usually are older and working. The contacts at the center were particularly keen on my concern with honor--my talk dealt with protecting and building reputation so as to protect and build one's career in the 21st century. I found that the students were entirely aware of the issues. My job--or any teacher's or employer's--really comes down to reminding or refocusing young adults on these issues.

I constantly hit one note: human nature has not shifted significantly in thousands of years. So we should expect that human motivation and action remains pretty much unchanged, including how teenagers and young adults are constituted. Nonetheless, something really has shifted: for the first time since humans lived only in tiny settlements for their entire lives, they must tend their reputations from a relatively young age. Pre-internet, one could mess up in high school, then start over in college. Or do the same in college, and enroll in another one. Or leave for a job and start over. Or move across the country. Now, however, our reputations, whether accurate or not, accumulate from the first words, images, and sounds that we post, or have posted about us, on the Web.

So-called "character education" would seem much more pressing, especially to its recipients, if we made this new world concrete to children from an early age. Otherwise, I fear that we will have failed them.

Is Generation Y Really Lost?

Mark Bauerlein in his “Why Gen-Y Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues (published in the Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574348493483201758.html) makes an initially compelling case that the reliance on texting and other avenues of non-face-to-face communication is creating a generation unable to read social cues successfully. The situation sounds dire, though by the column’s end, Bauerlein suggests that when a teens or young adults fails to respond to facial and other cues, we should not condemn as much as teach them how to respond.

I’ve admired many of Bauerline’s articles, finding them a refreshing corrective to certain politically correct views in academics. However, I think that this article is unduly negative. I have taught a lot of teens and young adults; generally, they aren’t much worse or better at picking up the cues that Bauerlein worries about. Even if texting is pulling their attention away from a particular interaction, with the right priming, teens and young adults can learn very quickly to focus on subtle cues. They just need to know why they should—and one way to answer the question relies on the contrast between weakness and strength.

Once you demonstrate that those who seem to focus on other people by putting aside phones, PDAs, and laptops are judged as stronger, then there is a concrete reason to develop this ability. And if there is no advantage, then why should it be developed?

I’m more worried by older generations who have become pseudo-multitaskers unable to provide strong models of how to act.

Honor in the Workplace

I recently had the privilege of being interviewed by the St. Petersburg Times http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/workinglife/article1019562.ece. The reporter concentrated particularly on the extension of The Honorable Classroom that covers the workplace called, not surprisingly, The Honorable Workplace. I originally placed the latter under The Honorable Classroom's website, but found that doing so was confusing to those who searched the site. But the concept is unitary: The Honorable Classroom can be found throughout our lives and across the lifespan. After all, we often do learn more about our jobs and careers while working, rather than studying in college (though I believe that the later is essential, too). And employers can solve some of their issues with new employees by modeling proper behavior in the workplace.

The reporter asked me one very difficult question: how can employees ensure that they keep their jobs? My honest answer was that there isn't any way to ensure your longevity if your first loyalty is to integrity. I'm afraid that honorable behavior does not guarantee that you will be rewarded. However, walking such a path consciously can indeed help in times when one is let go. There is much to be said for being able to sleep at night.

An Honorable Life and Death

My mother-in-law died on May 23rd. I can't bring myself to use a euphemism--in fact, I've found that everyone who reads or hears that word from me handles it just fine. There's no need to sugar-coat the end, and certainly not for someone as strong as Lula Belle Russo.

I've written a newspaper column about her struggle with the after-effects of treatment for mouth cancer (http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/27/50plus/Savoring_life_s_most_.shtml). I started a new one about her continuing struggles with the medical bureacracy (including sometimes uncaring and even cruel treatment), focusing on the one doctor who volunteered words that formed themselves into a sort of life-raft: "I will take care of you." That's what Belle, as she was known, needed--someone to take responsibility for her care. But she died in a few weeks after being diagnosed with cancer for the third time, too soon for me to finish the column so that she could read it.

My main purpose here is to reflect on what we really can achieve through an honorable life. Certainly not ultimate happiness and contentment: Belle--an intellectually inquisitive person--at times felt unfulfilled by her life. To me, this was a sign that she really was living an examined life. Philosophy, once engaged in, can make one unhappy, I'm afraid. But before, during, and after her funeral, the outpouring of support from so many people made me certain that she was near the central hub of a wheel whose spokes radiated out to hundreds of people. That wheel still turns, with her memory keeping the place that her physical presence once did.

I tend not to use the word "honor" as a verb. A business woman who is member of my local chamber of commerce (as I am) applies the word quite sensibly in this latter way--she honors some particular characteristic in people. I, on the other hand, prefer its use as a strong noun. Honor is something that one maintains, increases, or decreases. If one is honorable, then in general one should seek to maintain or increase the dignity of others (unless those others are unethical, in which case one might seek to decrease their dignity in a sense). Belle by her very nature was honorable, using an ethic of care toward friends and family, and leavening her actions with a dose of self-deprecating humor.

I don't have much use for death. But I do try to recall the myths of the Greek gods, how they were jealous of mortals--unlike those who could die and thus display true bravery (and other virtues), the gods were reduced often to silly bickering. The final punctuation mark that death adds to our human sentences forces us to consider whether we were correct in calling ourselves honorable.

It is some comfort to me, at least, that Belle's life will remain a model of honor.

The Myth of Self-Esteem

Just yesterday, a well-meaning public school teacher remarked that a student's difficulties were traceable to a lack of self-esteem. The underlying hypothesis here--that low self-esteem leads to poor behavior and high self-esteem leads to "good" behavior--is just that: a hypothesis. And it is one that has been tested by psychologists such as Roy Baumeister and many others. The findings seem unequivocable to me: behavioral, athletic, or academic excellence is not caused by raising someone's self-esteem. In fact, trying to raise self-esteem directly can lead to worsening performance, a result that is in keeping with a great deal of anecdotal evidence, at least in my daily life.

Baumeister, among others, has found that those who habitually mess up--bullies and criminals, for example--don't suffer from low self-esteem. Rather, they may display an especially inflated, self-regarding form, usually referred to as narcissism. Insofar as students have been encouraged to become raging narcissists, they have been cheated. They are walking on a path that leads to progressively weaker behavior.

Effective training or teaching--as has been known for a few thousand years--should focus on the result, the concrete behavior or accomplishment. Complimenting for objective accomplishment can increase future excellence. However, we live in the 21st century, not some past in which children or apprentices could be treated like trash until they proved themselves. Though we need not constantly compliment the inner person just for being a person, we should be reluctant to hand out abuse under the guise of toughing up students.

Compliment the behavior, not the person or personality. Refrain from negative reinforcement when it insults human dignity. But remember that people--particularly children and teenagers--are a lot more resilient than we often acknowledge in these paranoid times. Some struggle is essential.

The Power of Straight Up Apology

A straight up apology is one in which someone does not say, "I apologize if anyone was offended." One apologizes for actions or words simplicter. If done quickly, then, as suggested by authors down through the centuries--including the author of the Hagakure, the book that describes how the samurai ought to act--the offense may seem to vanish. The listeners or readers now have an obligation to accept the apology, or at least seriously consider doing so.

If one waits too long (and this is a necessarily elastic concept of "too long), then the straight up apology may not help at all. We use a complex code of timing and appropriate content.

All this is brought to mind by a written apology offered by an officer of a civic organization I belong to. By writing the apology, he really is committed to its promulgation. The offense may not really involve any ethical or legal matters--thus, he may not have committed an offense at all. But rather than draw out the arguments, he just sent an apology to all the members. I thought that was well done.