As an older worker I cannot be expected to understand company goals?

As an "experienced" job seeker I am drawn like a moth to a light when I see a blog or ezine headlines with content about the job market, older workers, (especially old vs young), worker demographics, worker expectations, and my favorite; the gross generalizations and conversations around what is clearly anecdotal evidence. I am beginning to feel like I should be a protected class! It is inaccurate to describe all young workers as "lacking a solid work ethic", and older workers as "unable to molded to the companies goals." I am not making this up--check LinkedIn or Harvard Business Review. I would cite the reference but it would make me gag.

There is not a single shred of quantifiable evidence to suggest one class or age worker is better or worse than another. What I will suggest is this is evidence of a poor state of leadership, across all sectors private and public, and most organizations inability or incompetence to develop capable ethical leaders. If the leaders cannot get the right people on the bus it will not make any difference what the organizations goals are--it is doomed to mediocrity at best, a prolonged death spiral at worst.

Employee performance is purely an individual behavior. Group behavior is made of the individuals involved. This is stating the obvious. So why make generalizations about a segment of the population and their ability to do work. Beats the hell out of me, except it is the refuge of the brain dead and those who do not, cannot, will not lead their teams. Organizations need to wake up to this rot and cut it out, but they will not because they are lead by people with these flaws. It is not entirely their fault. The insane pressures to meet quarterly or monthly stock values, budget cutbacks, and revenue goals all the while beating back regulatory attacks, rapidly changing IT needs, greater expectations by end users, consumers, and stakeholders it is a wonder the collective brains don't blow up. The result is the snake eating the tail and degrading performance rather than enhancing it and the dumbing down of the infrastructure to "streamline" decision making and stakeholder interface. They refuse to embrace the Marine Corp's rule of three and prefer to do more with less.

I came face with this last week when I applied for a position with a large regional bank. An email was sent with instructions to access a virtual job tryout. Hopefully this is not a trade marked label. It comprised of several sections including financial statement analysis, budget evaluation and performance, customer problem resolution, and staff management issues. Of course it had to include the variant on the good old Meyers-Briggs MMPI. Now I have taken variations on the "personality evaluation" so many times that it is pretty easy to game the system. Unfortunately I still tend to over think some of the answers. Like why in the hell is there a never fifth choice of "IT DEPENDS!" Probably because at least 90% of the responses would be the fifth choice by at least 50% of the participants. When you participate in these inane little exercises you will notice most of the questions are repetitive, just asked differently, -- they are looking for an insidious pattern.

Waaal this one was no different. The questions I over thought were the ones about how I would handle/manage/react to getting involved in "problems" within the entity. Should I seek them out and eradicate the little bastards  or let other people (presumably staff) bring them to my attention. No set of questions ever demanded the FIFTH CHOICE like these. And I did not game them very well. My expectation is the bank wants people to go looking and asking, "Is everything OK?" Now we all know we don't want the real answer, we want the answer to be "Great, Boss, never better!" I think by now you know where this is going. To me this need to ferret out problems by inquisition is useful but be rarely used. The TEAM should be capable and willing to communicate with the leader without fear of reprisal, recrimination, or punishment 'cause the whole team is responsible for moving the organization to its goals. RIGHT? A collective positive response is expected here.

My perception is leaders (managers) in this organization do not grasp the rule of three, do not mentor their managers to build effective teams (they are incompetent to do so) and the front line manager is yanked around by expectations of the organization to meet budget projections, business development expectations, while responding to the needs of customers, staff, and upper level (said with tongue in cheek) management  while on a crappy salary working 70 hour weeks. Sounds like a lotta fun. Needless to say I have not heard from these folks. You can guess my answers.

Actually I think this is a sad thing and I do get preachy don't I? Well this is my blog.

Best of 2014 to you.