CHAPTER 6

The Cultivation Disconnect

Someone once told me growth and comfort do not coexist. And I think it’s a really good thing to remember.

—Ginni Rometty

Introduction

While higher education institutions have implemented successful programs to help individuals enter and finish college, much work needs to be done in order to help students cultivate the level of self-determination required to launch and sustain a career. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people’s inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs.1 The prerequisite for one to practice SDT is a sophisticated level of self-awareness that develops over time. Since SDT examines the motivation behind choices people make without external influence and interference, it stands to reason that college students, both undergraduate and graduate, with all of their career-related decisions to make, should develop a high level of self-awareness in order to engage in SDT.2 Two of the leading SDT researchers, Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan, have identified competence, autonomy, and relatedness as the three psychological needs essential for psychological health and well-being of an individual. To launch and navigate a career in today’s hypercompetitive global marketplace, it is imperative for humanities majors to maintain ongoing self-awareness of their competence, autonomy, and relatedness in order to understand what motivates them. During the last two decades, however, higher education institutions have focused on providing access to college, supported retention and graduation initiatives, and engaged in what David Brooks labeled “a resume race out of control” where students focus solely on doing what it takes to land a job upon graduation.3 Intellectual curiosity, purpose, and depth have fallen prey to the credential race. Higher education institutions now measure success as the percentage of seniors who have a job at the time of graduation, the average salary of recent graduates as well as the average salary of those who graduated 20 years earlier. To increase their marketability in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, colleges have emphasized market share over the cultivation of self-determination. As a result, “students chase success with no greater purpose to guide them. And the universities they attend, which regard them increasingly as customers rather than students, do little to provide one.”4 This cultivation disconnect remains a vital component of demonstrating the relevance of the humanities to the 21st century workplace.

Explaining the Disconnect

This cultivation disconnect is best summarized by Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker who noted, “Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.”5 This creation of one’s self in college through an ongoing process of self-awareness is paramount to the future success of any humanities major. Therefore, it is imperative that higher education institutions help liberal arts students and graduates cultivate their self in order for them to have a successful transition from college to career. As Debra Humphreys, senior vice president for academic planning and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), wrote “we don’t do a very good job in higher education of really intentionally helping students prepare for and make that transition from college to career.”6

Recent evidence supports Humphreys’ claim. A May 2016 study by Adecco Group, the largest professional staffing company in the world, showed 74 percent of recent college graduates felt their schools failed to fully prepare them for the professional world.7 Amy Glaser, a senior vice president with Adecco, noted “students struggle with critical thinking, communication and other interpersonal skills and are not often given opportunities to develop their professional skills.” While recent graduates may be able to use technology well, Glaser noted, “overuse can cause their verbal or written communication skills to suffer.”8 Additionally, colleges need to increase their efforts of talking to students much earlier about the role of self-awareness, what employers are expecting, and the level of engagement by employees. Discussing these three topics earlier in their college careers will avail students with opportunities for personal growth and professional development required to have a successful career launch upon graduation.

Self-awareness can help students make adjustments and improvements, accommodate for weaknesses, and bring into question one’s identity. Without self-awareness, students subject themselves to self-deception, potentially leading some individuals to be misinformed and cause them to miscommunicate, mislearn, and misinform others.9 Unfortunately, many students get entrenched in what Columbia University’s Jack Mezirow refers to as “habits of mind” that blinds them to their own self-deception and stunts any real progress to self-awareness.10 Colleges need to do more to help students cultivate the self-awareness required to identify one’s habits of mind. “The lack of the self-awareness process in learners can create an inability to form relationships with peers, and an unrealistic view of the self is often part of the student persona.”11 Students who lack self-awareness often blame others around them for things that go wrong and block their awareness of their own responsibility for the problems they face, thus preventing solutions or progress. The inflated view that college students have of their professional skills is just one example.

Upon graduation, most recent college graduates believe their skills are polished, their experiences deep, and their readiness strong at the time of launching their career. According to the 2018 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey, employers think otherwise. The NACE survey uncovered a stark difference in how the graduates viewed their capabilities compared to how employers found them. In almost every one of the eight categories measured, a high percentage of students indicated they were proficient. Employers disagreed. “This can be problematic because it suggests that employers see skills gaps in key areas where college students don’t believe gaps exist.”12 For example, the largest divide was around students’ professionalism and work ethic where 90 percent of seniors thought they were competent but only about 43 percent of the employers agreed. Additionally, 80 percent of students believed they were competent in oral and written communication and critical thinking, while only roughly 42 percent and 56 percent of employers, respectively, indicated that students were successful in those areas.13 If the humanities are to remain relevant to the 21st century workplace they will need to identify, explain, and develop a sense of self that forms the foundation of their career launch following graduation. To that end, higher education institutions need to implement a variety of strategies to help each humanities major and graduate develop the sense of self required of a young professional to successfully launch their career in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.

To address the cultivation disconnect, higher education institutions can help humanities majors and graduates increase their self-awareness in today’s hypercompetitive, dynamic, and ever-changing global marketplace by implementing five strategies. First, colleges need to introduce and then explain, the five areas of well-being as students make the transition from campus to career. Second, institutions must incorporate more discussions of the relationship between self-awareness, self-discipline, and the development of one’s self. Third, schools have an obligation to create programming that allows humanities majors to engage in self-determination. Fourth, colleges and universities need to include the theory and practice of positive uncertainty as part of the student experience. Finally, higher education institutions must provide lifelong learning opportunities for their humanities alumni.

Well-Being

To address the cultivation of the self-disconnect, colleges and universities need to discuss the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Doing so can help humanities students better understand the complexities of well-being. In a world focused on starting salaries as the only thing that matters for a college graduate’s happiness, students from all majors could benefit from realizing that financial compensation is merely one aspect of a much more complicated discussion on one’s well-being. College students and recent graduates should also know that according to the latest data, overall well-being among U.S. adults declined substantially. In 2017 the index was 61.5, down 0.6 points from 62.1 in 2016 and on par with the lower level recorded in 2014. According to Gallup, this decline is both statistically significant and meaningfully large.14 The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest possible well-being and 100 represents the highest possible well-being.

The Well-Being Index consists of metrics drawn from each of the five essential elements of well-being:

• Purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals
• Social: having supportive relationships and love in your life
• Financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security
• Community: liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community
• Physical: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily

This well-being discussion is critical since four out of five of today’s college graduates want to find purpose in their work yet fewer than half say they’ve done so successfully.15 Research on more experienced workers find similar results as 34 percent of U.S. employees report being engaged, 16.5 percent “actively disengaged,” and the remaining 53 percent of workers are in the “not engaged” category. Thus, the purpose gap experienced by recent college graduates comes as no surprise.16 The majority of American workers are simply not engaged at the workplace. Therefore, their well-being indicator is low. College students need to know that most Americans may be generally satisfied at their job but are not cognitively or emotionally connected to their work. In other words, their job pays the bills but lacks significant meaning in their lives.

This lack of engagement will confront new realities in the near future as advanced technologies introduce new ways to create value and disrupt current industries and organizational models. According to the Future of Jobs Report 2018 of the Forum’s Centre for the New Economy and Society, while 75 million jobs are expected to be displaced in the next five years, another 133 million are expected to be created across 20 key developed and emerging economies.

Many other jobs that are not outright displaced will change dramatically due to automation, requiring major worker retraining and adjustment. In what should be a wakeup call to anyone teaching today, one report suggests that at least 54 percent of all employees will require reskilling and upskilling by 2022. Of these, over a third will require more than six months of additional training. However, only around 30 percent of employees in the jobs most exposed to technological disruption received any kind of training in the past year, and most companies say they intend to target retraining programs toward high-performing employees.17 This implies that the employees most at risk of job or skill disruption are also far less likely to be provided with retraining to cope, potentially increasing inequality. If national and global actors, including multinationals as well as the education sector and policymakers, fail to support workers attaining and upgrading skills, the outcome could be a true “loselose” scenario—rapid technological change accompanied by talent shortages, mass unemployment, and growing inequality. Yet that’s a plausible outcome, particularly given the existing shortfall of skills essential for a tech-driven future reported by enterprises around the world.18

By understanding the level of engagement by workers, the well-being index, and the future necessity of learning new skills, humanities majors can go a long way in helping to manage their expectations. Far removed from the classroom managed by a liberal arts professor who has only worked in a university setting, and who most likely has the promise of a lifetime job known as tenure, the humanities graduate operating in the real world outside of the academy needs to rely on a strong sense of self. That sense of self, when coupled with a dedication to lifelong learning, will long prove the relevance of the humanities to the 21st century workplace.

Determine Your Self

To stay relevant in the 21st century workplace, humanities majors need to determine their self and then commit to a lifelong process of creating a new self. It’s important to humanities graduates, as well as all graduates, to recognize the ability to create a new self. As Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “I already said goodbye to a few people I used to be.”19 If a college senior reflects upon their current self, they will soon realize their current self is different from their self as a senior in high school. Well, at least that’s the hope! This constant evolution of the self is seldom discussed in university classrooms. To remain relevant in the 21st century workplace, any individual regardless of major, will need to continually reinvent themselves.

This evolutionary process of creating a new self was discussed by Hazel Rose Markus in her 1986 paper “Possible Selves.” Markus’s research redefined how psychologists think of the relationship between self and culture. In that paper she and coauthor Paula Nurius developed the concept of possible selves: the ideal self we would like to become, we could become, and we are afraid of becoming.20

A person’s identity involves more than the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of the current self; it also includes reflections of what a person was like in the past and hopes and fears about what a person may become in the future.21

Each individual has a repertoire of possible selves that serve as the “cognitive manifestation of enduring goals, aspirations, motives, fears, and threats [which] provide the essential link between the self-concept and motivation.”22 To suggest that there is a single self to which one “can be true” or an authentic self that one can know is to deny the rich network of potential that surrounds individuals and that is important in identifying and descriptive of them.23 Possible selves contribute to the fluidity or malleability of the self because they are differentially activated by the social situation and determine the nature of the working self-concept. At the same time, the individual’s hopes and fears, goals and threats, and the cognitive structures that carry them are defining features of the self-concept; these features provide some of the most compelling evidence of continuity of identity across time.

Successful people understand that they have an active role in developing who they would like to become and work hard at doing so. Such a process involves a substantial amount of experiencing, reflecting, and meaning-making throughout one’s entire life. Successful people understand the value of maintaining a high level of self-awareness. They ask themselves important questions and keep doing so throughout their life. One of the most important questions successful people ask themselves is, “Why am I doing what I am doing?” Humanities majors who engage in such self-reflection, and then leverage lessons learned, will serve themselves well as they look to engage in self-determination and remain relevant in the 21st century workplace.

Engage in Self-Determination

Successful people learn how to engage in self-determination. Self-determination theory (SDT) is an approach to human motivation and personality that articulates enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity, arguably the three critical skills everyone needs to succeed, best fostered by an individual developing a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.24 These three traits—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are characteristics often found in successful people. Co-developed by two University of Rochester psychology professors, Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, SDT “focuses on the social-contextual conditions that facilitate versus forestall the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development.”25

Part of self-determination is experiencing failure, disappointment, and discomfort and learning how to work through each situation. Unfortunately, helicopter or snowplowing parents shield their children from even the slightest degree of discomfort. Failure is a distant shore that children of intrusive parents seldom see. Children are sometimes home-schooled to prevent them from being exposed to people, ideas, and material the parents deem inappropriate. Prohibiting children from people or ideas you deem uncomfortable for your child to process and then expecting them to mature into well-adjusted, autonomous adults able to connect with others is simply unrealistic.26 As one mother said, “We need to let our kids chart their own course and make their own mistakes.”27 Competence is one of the three foundational elements of self-determination, but children need to learn that they can’t be good at everything. To learn lessons of failure, disappointment, or discomfort, children need to experience those things as early as elementary school. Such lessons should be reinforced since high school students, college students, and young professionals need to experience disequilibrium but at greater levels. Doing so can equip them with the skills necessary to deal with life’s issues throughout adulthood. The experience of psychological and cognitive disequilibrium produces feelings of internal “dissonance” that manifests itself as uncertainty, and sometimes as conflict and even threat. 28

But it is the experience of such dissonance that opens up the possibility for learning and growth because it nudges students into confronting and considering new ways of understanding, thinking, and acting that help to unsettle the old and integrate it with the new.29

UCLA psychiatrist Paul Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their child experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment.30 Shielding a child from psychological and cognitive disequilibrium, failure, or discomfort provides a tremendous disservice; “with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.”31 “It is essential for students’ learning and growth in college to have challenging stimuli and experiences of positive restlessness because these provide the creative disequilibrium and intellectual foment that drive personal exploration and development.”32 To engage in self-determination in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) global marketplace, humanities majors and graduates will also need to practice the paradoxical principles of positive uncertainty.

Positive Uncertainty

Instead of telling students that all they need is the right college majors at the right institution with the right grade point average (GPA) in order to land their dream job, presidents, boards, and faculty should instead help students understand positive uncertainty. Since success has little, if any, correlation to one’s college, major, or GPA, humanities majors and graduates need to know that the path before them is filled with unforeseen questions, issues, and problems. How one navigates the chaos of launching and sustaining a career depends upon their ability to remain positive amidst the ambiguity. Unfortunately, most institutions market their majors as the right ones leading to amazing careers with exorbitant salaries. This does little to help the majority of humanities majors who are searching for ways to navigate the many issues along the way of launching their career. Institutions would serve humanities majors and graduates a great service by discussing the tenants of positive uncertainty.

Researcher H. B. Gelatt and Carol Gelatt developed four factors—want, know, believe, and do—into four paradoxical principles. These four principles are paradoxical because they are contradictory statements that may nevertheless be true. Each principle embraces conventional decision-making wisdom and contradicts it. It’s not an either-or approach to decision making but a both-and-more.33 Humanities majors who understand and practice positive uncertainty can maintain the flexibility of mind, the determination of spirit, and the necessity of perspective required to land employment opportunities some might consider unconventional.

Be focused and flexible about what you want: Traditional decision theory stresses being focused on your future goals. This strategy is not obsolete but incomplete. Being focused helps you attain goals. It keeps you from getting distracted easily, but can prevent you from discovering new goals. Become flexible with what you want by asking yourself questions such as “What else could I do?,” “What other possible actions are there?,” or “What other choices or options for what I could do?” Being focused yet flexible reminds humanities majors to use goals as a guide and not a governing mechanism.

Be aware and wary about what you know: Information is the hallmark of decision making. When making a decision, we are told to get the facts because collecting information will reduce uncertainty. However, very often the information you have is not what you want, need, or is available. Being aware and wary about what you know helps you to assess what is known and appreciate what is unknown. The hallmark of this principle is to be open-minded where you can leverage your whole brain—the rational, factual side and the intuitive, imaginative side. Imagine a pie chart titled “knowledge” with three slices: (a) the smallest slice (10 percent) is the amount of information we know; (b) the second slice (20 percent) is the amount of information we know we don’t know; and (c) the largest slice (70 percent) is the amount of information we don’t know we don’t know. When engaging in positive uncertainty, it’s important to recognize what you do know and equally vital to be wary about what you don’t know.

Be realistic and optimistic about what you believe: What you believe has always been seen as one of the most important factors in what you decide but seldom the most important factor in traditional decision-making strategies. What you believe determines what you see—and do. To be realistic is not to be totally objective. There is no such thing. Reality is not only what is “out there.” It is also in the mind’s eye of the beholder. The optimistic part of this principle (the nontraditional part) helps you notice how beliefs can be prophecy. Optimism leads to proactive behavior. What you believe may be the most significant factor in creative decision making. Therefore, be sure your beliefs are a bridge not a barrier when making decisions.

Be practical and magical about what you do to decide: This principle is about your decision rules, methods, and your strategy for deciding. Do you know what your decision-making strategies are? Most people don’t know how they decide. To be practical and magical is to be whole brained and bodied. You use both your head and heart when deciding. Start by becoming aware of your decision strategies. Avoid rigid decision rules. Rules are for guidance not obedience. Make up your mind creatively. Every decision is different, and every strategy should be different. Become a versatile, creative decision making. What you do to decide depends on your willingness to decide. Being positive about uncertainty brings about the opportunity for proactive creativity in your decision making. If the future is certain, all you can do is prepare for it. When the future is uncertain, you have the opportunity to influence it. You can be part of the creating your future.

There is no doubt that life is uncertain. When navigating their career most people want to obtain some level of certainty that their position, department, and organization will be around for an extended period of time. This is difficult in today’s economy. When navigating your career today, you need to look beyond those positions that are probable and challenge yourself to consider those that are possible. Developing a career path based on the probable will severely limit your options. Charting a career based on what is possible allows you to travel down paths previously unimagined. Acknowledge that the future involves ambiguity and paradox. Once you accept that the future is full of ambiguity and paradox, you can then realize that

one does not know some things, cannot always see what is coming, and frequently will not be able to control it. Being positive and uncertain allows one to be able to act when one is not certain about what one is doing.34

Practicing positive uncertainty allows you to navigate amidst the chaos, adjust to the disruption, and live a life of intention and purpose. As an illustration of just how uncertain the future is, one study estimated that 47 percent of the U.S. job market is at risk of being automated by 2034.35 In less than 20 years, close to half of the jobs in America could be subjected to algorithms, robotics, or yet to be invented technologies. Entire industries are subject to change in the future. All the more reason to practice positive uncertainty as it will help you navigate such disruption.

Commit to Lifelong Learning

Higher education institutions can also help address the cultivation of the self-disconnect by providing lifelong learning opportunities for humanities majors long after graduation. Since 70 percent of today’s Millennials quit their jobs within two years, there is a need for career guidance for humanities majors, as well as all graduates, during their 20’s and into their 30’s. It’s important for institutions to recognize that their graduates require additional training throughout their life and then develop programming to support alumni when and where possible. After all, everyone is a work in progress. In their 2012 book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, authors Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha realize that great people, like great organizations, are in a state of perpetual growth. “They’re never finished and never fully developed. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, and grow more. This state of permanent beta is a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.”36

As today’s dynamic global marketplace continues to present organizations with new challenges to address, problems to solve, and questions to answer, executives and human resource managers are going to need people dedicated to personal growth. Stressing the relationship between personal growth and professional success, Robert S. Kaplan, Emeritus Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School, observed that “fulfillment doesn’t come from clearing hurdles others set for you; it comes from clearing those you set for yourself.”37 Throughout his career, Kaplan realized that ambitious professionals spend a substantial amount of time thinking about strategies that will help them achieve greater levels of success. By striving for a more impressive job title, higher compensation, or increased responsibility, ambitious professionals often allow their definition of success to be influenced by family, friends, and colleagues. Despite their achievements and high level of success, Kaplan found that many ambitious professionals lacked a true sense of professional satisfaction and fulfillment. Kaplan wrote that he met a large number of “impressive executives who expressed deep frustration with their careers. They looked back and felt that they should have achieved more or even wished that they had chosen a different career altogether.”38

In one study of human resource directors conducted in the United Kingdom, 91 percent of respondents think that by 2018, prospective employees will be recruited on their ability to deal with change and uncertainty. Over half of the respondents said one of their key attribute for future business success is finding individuals who are able to deal with unanticipated problems.39 In today’s volatile and uncertain global economy, if you lack personal development, it may be difficult to move forward because protectionist measures from governments, companies, and unions are disappearing. Professional development is directly linked to personal growth. If you want to grow as a professional, you will need to grow as a person. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. “Just showing up will not cut it.”40 As Jacob Morgan wrote in The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization,

knowledge and experience are no longer the primary commodity. Instead, what is far more valuable is to have the ability to learn and to apply those learnings into new and unique scenarios. It’s no longer about what you know, it’s about how you can learn and adapt.

Higher education institutions can go a long way in helping the humanities remain relevant to the 21st century workplace by offering lifelong learning opportunities that graduates will need as they look to sustain a long-term career growth strategy in an ever-changing global marketplace.

Conclusion

In his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph Aoun wrote that higher education should prepare students by teaching them sought-after soft skills such as creativity, ethics, and cultural agility along with technical literacy. Cathy N. Davidson’s book The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux echoes Aoun’s observation. Davidson suggests that higher education institutions need to support students in learning skills “that will make them not just work-force ready but world ready that include soft skills, including strategies, methods and tactics for successful communication and collaboration.” Students and graduates need new ways of integrating knowledge, including by reflection on what they’re learning—not more “teaching to the test.” In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) global marketplace, Davidson argues that a student’s greatest skill to develop is the ability to navigate a world in flux. If higher education institutions are committed to the humanities, then they should address this cultivation disconnect in order to better prepare liberal arts students and graduates to remain relevant in the 21st century workplace.