Intergenerational challenges at work: how to create harmony and foster cooperation?
Positive Minds | Positive Stories | Edition 023
The story of a young woman who discovers the harsh reality of the workplace.
Fatim (not her real name), a 22-year-old young woman, returns to her home country after her Master’s degree in project management, majoring in data and information management. During her studies, Fatim mastered new techniques of data management and the latest generation of information technologies. She was eager to apply her new knowledge and skills.
Quickly, a large INGO in the country offered her a six-month internship. At the end of her internship, Fatim was hired as a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer under the head of the unit’s direct supervision, a man 37 years her elder. To make matters worse, she was the only woman in the M&E team whose youngest was 45 years old.
During her internship, Fatim was the star of the team and cherished by all. Everyone admired her positive energy and her overflowing creativity. She was in demand everywhere and contributed to Everything.
The honeymoon was short. After three months on the job, the enthusiasm of the early days faded. The beautiful atmosphere in the monitoring and evaluation unit started to fade away. Fatim’s ideas for improving the work were now seen as a challenge to the past work of this club of men with interdependent fates and interests. She was no longer welcome, and she could feel it.
Like many other young women and men entering the labour market, Fatim faces the harsh reality of intergenerational conflict. But she also faces another major challenge: gender relations at work.
Desperate and looking for solutions in the face of this double challenge, Fatim contacted me for coaching. We have planned three sessions. The first session was a listening session. I spent the time listening to Fatim, asking questions to encourage her to say more and develop her own solutions and approaches to the challenges she faces.
At the end of a session full of emotion, I shared with Fatim the story of “A Peacock in the Land of Penguins”, a fable of creativity and courage that tells the story of Perry the Peacock who has challenges to integrate into the land of the Penguins.
Just like Fatim, Perry’s story evolves in a jagged pattern. Welcomed by the Penguins at first, Perry soon fell from grace. However, over time, through patience and perseverance, Perry won back the hearts and minds of the penguins and established herself as a leading expert in the uniform and traditional penguin world. As the saying goes: “good things come to those who wait.”
“Good things come to those who wait.”
After the coaching session, I shared with Fatim an animated presentation summarizing Perry the Peacock story; a story adapted from the book of the same name by BJ Gallagher Hateley and Warren H. Schmidt.
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Good Sunday to all.
