Inheriting the Disenchanted

Christine Nowik recently published a piece that has been scratching at my brain for the last several days. It’s about what she calls employee disenchantment, which she usefully distinguishes from burnout. Burnout, in her telling, comes from too much work; disenchantment comes from losing faith that their best efforts matter. A disenchanted employee may be perfectly functional in the obvious, measurable ways, but won’t go above and beyond to offer risky insights or extra effort because they’ve seen those efforts either backfire or come to nothing too many times. They withdraw. Over time, the organization loses the insights it could have gained if the employee had felt like there was some point in trying.

She’s on to something; the piece is well worth reading in its entirety. (The gardening metaphor works particularly well.) And I’d be lying if I said I had never felt that way at various points in my career. But I’ll build on her insight by coming from a different angle.

Several times in my career, I’ve moved to a new institution. When you arrive as a dean or a VP at a new institution, you “inherit” the people who are already there. Some are relatively new, but many will have been there for some time. It feels like joining a show already in progress; you see people responding to history you don’t have access to, and you have to piece together narratives in real time. Part of the “drinking from a fire hose” cliché that new managers often say—I’ve said it myself—is precisely that: You’re trying to read the unwritten rules even while getting things done. It takes time and a lot of mental energy.

That doesn’t mean that hiring from the outside is always bad. Hires from the outside can bring different experiences and fresh eyes. It just means that some amount of learning curve is to be expected.

I once arrived at an institution just a few months after a major reduction in force (RIF). It was the first major layoff in its history, and the culture was reeling. Many terrific people were feeling betrayed or worse, and the background level of trust was suffering. In some ways, it felt like a sort of organizational PTSD. Coming in immediately after that was more difficult than I had realized at the time. An entire cohort had been disenchanted at the same time. Getting traction for good ideas was much harder than it should have been, because nobody wanted to be accused of being complicit with The Administration, even if the new guy had nothing to do with the RIF and the idea made sense.

Sometimes the issues are more idiosyncratic. At a couple of places, I’ve inherited people who—seemingly for reasons of their own—had crossed over to a kind of toxic cynicism bordering on nihilism. They would assume bad faith almost as a reflex and would immediately ascribe the worst possible motives to nearly anything. Coming in as a new person, it was jarring; I was guilty until proven innocent, and any proof was suspect. Sometimes they would eventually sense that the culture had moved on without them, and they’d leave; others just dug in for the long haul, spewing bile whenever approached. At a certain point, I had to learn to work around them if I wanted to get anything done. I’d reflect on the Dr. Seuss story about the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax, sigh, and get back to work.

Re-enchanting the disenchanted is a serious challenge. (Nowik’s “losing the clubhouse” borders on suggesting that it simply can’t be done.) I have to believe it can be done, and I’ve actually seen it happen to a limited degree. But it’s hard, and victories tend to be partial at best. I’ve said for years that the job of administration is to establish the background conditions in which people can do their best work. That happens within the limits of public funding, local demographics, and all manner of variables, of course, but over time, people can usually sense direction.& They can tell when someone is motivated by ego or careerism, and when they’re motivated by a desire to do the right thing. Sticking to the latter can be difficult, especially in the early stages when the toxic ones are testing you, but it matters.

My thanks to Nowik for labeling something real. It’s a helpful reminder that what seem like immutable character traits are often learned, and, I have to hope, can be unlearned. The task of leadership is to foster the environment in which that’s possible.