Leaders Eat Last

positively affirming kids’ talents and encouraging their attempts is indeed good for them. But that doesn’t mean that telling our kids they are great at everything is necessarily better. The use and overuse of extrinsic rewards follow the same logic. Giving out awards is good. Giving out awards to everyone who participates is not necessarily better.

children see the reward as the only reason for doing something, studies show that once the reward is gone, they will have even less interest in the activity than they did when they started. This is the same reason why extrinsic, dopamine-based rewards systems, like hit-the-goal-get-bonus, when used as the primary means of incentivizing behavior in a work environment, can’t and don’t breed trust, loyalty or commitment.

They also provide some context for why so many Millennials in the workplace seem to struggle with criticism. A group raised to think they are special, used to having their parents guide, support and intervene at any sign of struggle or setback, and accustomed to regular praise and rewards find few of those things in corporate culture. At work they are not treated as special. Their parents can’t get them a promotion. Their bosses do not shower them with praise and aren’t always there to guide them or explain everything. In other words, work isn’t giving them the very things upon which their self-esteem is built. Fully aware that their bosses aren’t necessarily giving them what they need, many Millennials are leaning on their connectedness to help cope or vent about their experiences. They text with friends, they take little breaks to see what others are up to on Instagram or Snapchat while finding things they can share about what they are doing. However, their “advanced technological skills” may only be making things worse.

So, if we take the life-and-death part away, why would we think that we can do our work, check our phones, write a paragraph, send a text, write another paragraph, send another text, without the same damage to our ability to concentrate?

According to brain researchers, true multitasking does not actually exist. Rather, what we are doing is “mental juggling” or “rapid toggling between tasks.”

Multitasking, it turns out, does not make us faster or more efficient. It actually slows us down. According to the American Psychological Association, “shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.”

When a worker is interrupted, it takes them around twenty-three minutes to return to their original task.

The more external interruptions we experience, like a text or an e-mail alert, the more we engage in self-interruption, that is, interrupting ourselves mid-task to check our e-mail or phones without any notification from a ring or a bing.

In a Stanford University study of college students, self-proclaimed chronic multitaskers made more mistakes and remembered less than those who considered themselves infrequent multitaskers.

If e-mail is down or if we leave our phone at home, many of us actually start to get anxious. It’s not just that our behavior seems to look like that of addicts, it may be that we actually are addicts. The biology is the same.

More than 40 percent of children who discover alcohol before age fifteen will become alcoholics later in life.

thirteen-to-eighteen-year-olds are left almost completely vulnerable to the addictive qualities of dopamine-releasing activities online and on their devices at the very moment they are most susceptible to them. Of course, not all kids who use smartphones or engage in social media will form addictions, but the risk is real and significant. And even if they don’t form addictions, their developing brains will, without question, be affected.

“How a young person chooses to spend their time will have a profound effect on what their brain will be like for the rest of their lives,”

Again, the biology and the mechanics of addiction are exactly the same for most other dopamine-producing things, like gambling, smoking, texting and engaging with social media. When our children are conditioned to look for a digital hit when they are stressed, for the rest of their lives, when they suffer social stress, financial stress or career stress, they will turn not to a person for support but to a device.

After only a few months in their jobs, many were considering quitting. Rather than questioning their expectations or giving things some time, they assumed the job was the problem.

When Millennials stand at the foot of that mountain, looking up at the thing they want to achieve, they, like all of us, must remember that the summit serves only to set the direction in which we will march. Opportunities to lead and feelings of safety and belonging do not suddenly appear when we reach the mountain peak. These are the things we find and develop on the journey up.

Not only are virtual relationships a poor substitute for real ones, but social media can actually make us feel lonelier.

When we are immersed in a Facebook-Instagram-Snapchat world, where everyone’s lives are on display, it’s hard not to compare ourselves to others. And it’s easy to become envious and doubt the quality of our own lives when our friends’ posts come off like a highlight reel of the year’s best movies.

Millennials have become well practiced at curating their lives. They know better than anyone how to manage their personal brands and present themselves as they want to be seen . . . not necessarily as they are. They may look confident. They may sound like they have all the answers and know exactly how to navigate their lives and the world. However, behind the filter, many are plagued by more self-doubt and uncertainty than they let on.

I do not believe that there are digital solutions to these very real issues that Millennials, and the generation to follow, face. There’s no app to fix addiction, depression, suicide or other anti-social behavior. These are human problems that require human solutions.