Who Are Your Teachers?
How They Influence Your Identity
Issue 182, October 17, 2024
Several years ago, we attended a thought leadership conference that explored emerging trends. At the end of a session on sustainability (not just climate change, but resilience and prosperity) Chief Oren Lyons, the Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Onondaga and Seneca Nations of the Six Nations of the Grand River, looked straight at the audience and asked us, “Who are your teachers?” It was one of those moments in time when a profoundly provocative and unexpected question caught a room full of adults off guard.
Wisdom Lifeline
It reminded us at the time that teachers transcend the sixth grade. If we are paying attention and actively listening, we have teachers our entire lives. Chief Lyons went on to explain that in the Native Peoples culture there is a natural progression of leadership based on age and wisdom. The next generations in his culture definitely want their voices heard along with their peers worldwide, but they are brought up to have respect for their elders recognizing them as wise teachers and leaders.
Experience results in perspective and wisdom. Young people are the evolving sums of their parts just as any young organization is the evolving sum of its own parts. In both cases, teachers play a formative role. There is always a benefit personally and professionally in considering what others, older and wiser, have experienced and taught.
Chief Lyons has been an ardent defender of the health of the planet. For more than 14 years he has been a member of the Indigenous Peoples of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and has had other leadership roles. In his words, “What you people call your natural resources our people call our relatives,” adding, “If you don’t have a moral question governing your society, then you don’t have a society that is going to survive.” For Lyons, life is full of teachable moments.
Teachable Moments
The more popular term for teachers as adults, especially in business, is a mentor. How does this play out for organizations seeking to change, adapt and transform to meet the moment and prepare for the future? It’s a legitimate question to ask — philosophically and practically — who your teachers are and what can be learned from them.
As adults, we continue to look up to others whether they be our public leaders, sports stars or heroes who have braved all challenges to rise to the occasion. They are also our mentors. We are inspired by them to learn and emulate their actions and perspectives.
Michael Gonchar writes in The New York Times, “Who are the teachers who supported and encouraged you the most? How about those who pushed you to think deeply? Has a teacher ever made a real difference in your life?” He adds that anecdotally, teachers have the power to build or destroy, to plant or uproot hope. To put that into a professional context, think of the teachers/mentors you have had in your own career who have been positive – or negative role models.
We all admit that we learn the most from our mistakes, so it’s possible we learn the most from the worst teachers in our lives. With the fast and furious move to digital communications and knowledge transfer, AI may become our teacher by default — within 12 months. That should be a terrifying thought for you and our entire society. However, just look at how quickly and voluntarily we have been trained to google information. Add to that, learn to prompt AI and its many manifestations including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Meta AI. Are these teachers real? Are they role models? Clearly, they are fact-based…most of the time. And many individuals across our society have already developed relationships with AI-generated bots. Who’s to say these are not legitimate teachers, with the exception of physical behaviors that humans can model?
What Is Your Identity
Here’s a different nuance of adult learning. In the process of lifelong learning, we fine-tune our origin stories and then codify them into our life legends. So, harkening back to Chief Lyons’ question, how do our teachers help shape our identities? He also advised, “Define for yourselves your directions.”
Which brings us back to the focus of this newsletter: How do we identify who are teachers are and what they are teaching us? Then how do we take these teachings to help us establish and agree on the collective identities of ourselves and our organizations? How do these identities evolve? And more challenging, what do we choose to embrace and what do we choose to let go of as these identities change over time?
There are libraries filled with books on finding, establishing, retaining or even transforming identity. According to reporter Roland Fryer in The Wall Street Journal, “Social scientists often segment identity into three different types: personal (Who am I?), social (How do I want others to see me?), and collective (Who are we?). This categorization is helpful in understanding why people change their behavior to fit their identity and why they submit to peer pressure or pressure others when their behavior seems out of line.”
We have often written about the hazards of groupthink and bending to peer pressure to conform caused by the personal anxiety of taking a contrary stand. Establishing consensus for the collective identity of an organization is a cornerstone of its health and effectiveness. But in a digital marketplace defined by individualistic entrepreneurialism, a collective identity is not always so popular. Many startups, for example, are defined by the personalities of their owners; think of the transformation of X/Twitter to conform to Elon Musk’s outsized ego and personality and Facebook/Meta’s Metaverse as the mirror image of Mark Zuckerberg. That said, successful organizations are fueled by shared purpose and consensus on market orientation among their workforce. This is the ballast that keeps an organization operating effectively without internal distraction and disruption. It remains challenging for organizations to evolve their shared identity as the marketplace continues to dynamically shift and change, impacting those identities.
An Economic Identity
One novel perspective is how identity from a financial perspective may be overlooked as an all-important aspect of an individual’s or organization’s identity. “Identity may be the most important economic decision people make,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof and his collaborator Rachel Kranton. Fryer added, “How you view your role in the world will affect your choices. Yet even the great economic thinkers hadn’t incorporated identity—a concept well known to sociologists and psychologists—into a formal economic model.” He adds, “The economics of identity adds nuance to our understanding of human behavior. What seemed irrational under a traditional economic lens can often seem obvious once identity is taken into account. This simple addition to traditional economic models has greatly expanded our understanding of economic behavior and outcomes.”
An organization, if nothing else, is an economic engine. Achieving consensus on the economic model self-defines the behavior of a workforce. The Akerlof-Kranton model “posits individuals gain from both material outcomes and actions that conform to their identities. In the labor market, workers are motivated by wages as well as by how well their jobs align with their identities. A corporate job might offer financial stability, but if it conflicts with an individual’s identity as an environmentalist, the mismatch can lead to dissatisfaction and underperformance. In this vein, trying to train coal miners to be nurses may be futile.” They add, “Lab experiments prime subjects to see different parts of their identities as salient, demonstrating that people may opt for lower-paying jobs if it means greater congruence with their social group, or might choose consumer goods that signal affiliation to a particular identity despite higher costs.”
Take a moment to apply these thoughts and concepts to your organization. We often see organizations seeking to change and transform into an identity that is far different than their core and purpose. Any change can be uncomfortable but when the clothes simply don’t fit, they will remain uncomfortable and become a hinderance. Harkening back to identifying our teachers, it’s important to seek out organizational teachers’ counsel and wisdom with an understanding of the organization’s identity to help identify what capabilities and capacities it has.
Multiple Identities
The layer of an organization’s economic identity aligned with individual identity has become an increasingly difficult challenge. Some organizations are pressuring their employees to agree to their brand’s political, ethical and cultural affinities – even whom to vote for in the national election. Many younger consumers have put a stake in the ground alienated by certain brands’ policies and procedures. DEI is becoming less attractive to organizations when they base it on ROI. With the speed of digital communications amplifying or calling out an organization’s behavior, it has become a field day for the media and activists.
The fractious dialogue makes the need for teachers all the more important. Chief Lyons would be the first to assert that we need wisdom and long-term thinking for sustainable success. Identities charged with political or divisive orientations are not destined for long-term outcomes. If we take a page out of evolutionary theory, natural selection means not the most powerful or aggressive, but rather the most collaborative for the long-term collective existence of a species. Thus, if an organization’s economic identity is based on sustainable success, not opportunistic short-term gains, its workforce has a better chance of aligning with an economic and collective identity that has a longer life.
So, one last time, who are your teachers? What value are they bringing to you and how can you leverage their experience and wisdom for your higher purpose and goals? For your organization’s success? And pay it forward by role modeling yourself as a teacher.
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