The Little Dog Licked Her Leg

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....",

She was as mad as I’ve ever seen her. Telling me the story about taking a break from her new job, in the bathroom stall, minding her own business. Where she thought she was safe. And alone. That's when the small dog appeared from under the next stall and licked her leg.

Here's a quiz. What was the correct response?

• Jump up and hope for the best
• Scream bloody hell and scare the mutt away
• Give the dog a gentle kick sending it back from where it came
• Pat the doggy on the head.

What would you do?

In the old kind of company

My wife is a young Boomer who started a new job working in a high-tech software company populated mainly by Millennials and Gen Xers. For the first six months, she was completely lost feeling as if she had landed on a strange and distant planet. Actually she had come to rest on either Tatooine, Alderaan, Hoth, Bespin, or Yavin in the Star Wars Galaxy. She had just entered a mixed marriage she just didn’t know it at the time.

She would go to work every day arriving promptly at 9 am, sitting at her assigned desk, and wait for her boss to tell her what to do. She had a vague job description more or less describing her work and a title she was told to choose for her business card. She picked Amazing Award-Winning Copywriter. With a successful career writing brilliant marketing copy for well-known companies. she was used to being managed. And that meant being told what to do, by whom, when, and where.

She learned how to be an employee — as we all do — by spending most of her working life in organizations created to meet the needs of the 19th-century Industrial Economy when keeping a close eye on workers was the key to management success. Her previous organizations were all about command and control with a very clearly delineated hierarchy.

Her old business cards had been carefully written by the company to describe an exact and often unchanging function on the org chart. These were companies in which knowing what was going to happen or to whom meant you had power. Knowledge really was powerful in organizations with a “Need to Know” policy.

Her old workspaces were whisper-quiet where people rarely spoke to one another and only then in hushed tones. Desk phones never seemed to ring more than once. Plugs for charging mobile phones and laptops were hidden somewhere behind her desk. People without names or visible personalities lived inside cubicle farms. Managers ringed the perimeter in small offices with doors that always seemed to be closed.

Welcome to the new world of work.

By contrast, in her new software company, all the old rules, habits, and ways of working were gone. Yet she was frozen in time, suffering from a massive “Paradigm Shift.” She felt as if she woke up one morning, went to work, and everything had changed.

Because everything had changed.

It’s a problem that no one talks about. There's no manual or training program to help older workers used to functioning in old stodgy industrial model organizations adjust to the new hip and cool post-industrial organization.

It took six months before my wife realized she was on her own. Her own time. Her own choice of where she wanted to work. Work that she defined as related to her vague job description, planned and executed by her. Meetings with her manager were no longer a frustrating experience leaving her and the manager trying to figure out the problem. Command and control were replaced with communicating, cooperating and collaborating. Her time was spent listening and figuring out what needed to be done and just getting it done. Sharing knowledge was the real source of power in this new organization.

Her new office was always noisy, music playing, her new noise-canceling headphones a must if you needed to concentrate and think. The dress code seemed nonexistent except for the brilliant office skateboarder engineer who always wore a dress and sneakers. The CEO, CIO, and CTO all sat with everyone else. The energy in the open office was electric without cubicles or closed offices. There were also innumerable sockets in which to plugin and charge any of your many mobile phones and laptops. Only conference rooms had doors and names like Tatooine, Alderaan, Hoth, Bespin, or Yavin.

In, as she learned, the Star Wars Galaxy.

People learned all the time and learning was the hallmark of the new organization. The old workspaces had morphed into the new open learning spaces. If you were starting a project and needed to learn something there were always people you could talk with or a course you could find. Permission not needed from above. Pull what you needed to learn and go. Get it done. Move on. Next.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served in the office at tables near the coffee, beer, and wine bar. Everyone was invited and you sat family-style next to anyone where there was an empty seat. Cliques still formed but they tended to be people who played the same online games, watched the same Marvel movies, discussed the different brands and amounts of alcoholic drinks they drank, and argued over the merits of one type of ramen over another.

And the dogs. Dogs were everywhere. The dogs of all shapes and sizes brought their owners to work. They enjoyed leash less freedom to roam, plop onto dog beds, play with loud squeaky toys, and have dog birthday parties. They also followed their owners into the bathroom where, if they were small enough, they would slink under the stall wall and lick any leg they could find.

And that’s where this story started.

In this new workplace, the correct response was not a scream or a kick but a gentle pat on the friendly dog’s head.

There is a serious point to this shaggy dog story

My wife had climbed a steep learning curve without any help from the hipsters or coders, managers or HR folks. She had traveled from the 20th-century Industrial Economy into the 21st-century Knowledge Economy. Her co-workers had no idea there was even a problem. All they saw was an older person with lots of experience, interests that were different than theirs, and a background they had no way to identify with. Her references to classical literature, poetry, and art were as foreign to them as their Star Wars and Avengers references were to her.

To this day they have no idea that the cost of the transition to being an older post-industrial employee was six months of pain, fear, confusion, anger, frustration, annoyance, and disruption by squeaky dog toys.

Greater numbers of older people are still working as the population of companies becomes younger. It’s time to understand where the disconnect really is. These new mixed-marriage, hybrid, future of workplace organizations — and the Millennials and Gen Xers who manage and work for them — must realize that older employees are often locked into the Industrial Economy work habits that made them successful. Change does not happen overnight.

Jumping from the 20th to the 21st century takes time. Unlearning can take as much energy as learning. The value of their experience and proven talent are more than worth the effort. Be gentle. And for heaven's sake when you go to the bathroom keep your dog on a leash!