Let’s talk about hair. I’m not certain I’m
the best qualified to do that, by the way, seeing how little I have of it on my
head (and no, I’m not going bald, but the dictates of propriety and convenience
mean that it is much easier to keep a closely-cropped head than to try and
figure out what style to maintain from one week to the next). But hair became
an issue last week, in a way that illustrates a divide in opinion in society
and in Kenya generally. The same debate is starting to show up in companies the
world over, and causing many human resource managers to, well, pull out their
hair.
It all began in court in the middle of the
week. A parent instituted a lawsuit against Nairobi’s Rusinga School, claiming
discrimination in the way the school had refused to admit her son to class
because he sported dreadlocks. Her contention is on two fronts – that the
little boy had dreadlocks all through kindergarten, and only now is the rule
being implemented; and that banning dreadlocks on boys and allowing them on girls
is ipso facto gender discrimination. She rests her case on article 44 of the
constitution, which guarantees the enjoyment of cultural rights.
I will not pretend to know the
constitutional or legal merits of the case (and wouldn’t even be allowed to discuss
them if I did), but cultural arguments, Kenya’s fraught history, memories of
school and the experiences of the workplace meant that this is a matter that’s
got too many touchstones to pass up.
School life in Kenya has always had the
loud undercurrent of the struggle between conformity and rebellion. High
school, especially, is a well-worn battleground. You wouldn’t expect any less
from institutions in which young people are trying to break free of the
stifling carapace of childhood, and attempting to discover their individual
personalities. You see this in gestures large and small – a school blazer worn
just so; an attempt to wear different coloured socks that always gets caught at
parade time; the battles at opening day when girls and boys are compelled to
change their holiday hairstyles.
In Kenya, for the most part, we hew to the
traditional and the conservative. School uniforms are de rigeur, because to
allow ‘civilian’ clothes in a school environment would be to introduce far too
much variation, and status signalling, that little actual learning would take
place. Teachers would be saddled with the additional task of policing fashion
choices, where there is no easy way to set hard and fast rules.
This is rapidly colliding, though, with
life as currently lived today. In a world where you can make individual choices
from your choice of breakfast bread to the news outlets you will patronise,
some are starting to ask fundamental questions of what age individualism should
begin to be expressed. In addition, larger questions are arising on what
traditional learning environments mean in a world where we’re in global
economic competition.
Of course, if you’re a parent, especially
of teenage children, you must be reading this with a world-weary sigh. The dread
of familiarity doesn’t make this easier to digest, but it does induce a knowing
look. But if you’re, at the same time, in charge of your company’s future and
strategy, the knowing look is even more present, because you have seen this
very issue arising in the workplace. Young people are getting into the
workforce with a demand for individual self-expression that is bumping up
against the need to drive a simple, unified agenda.
What workplaces are having to figure out,
on the fly, is whether allowing self-expression will lead to a flowering of
creativity, which leads to greater financial results. Creative industries –
advertising and the like – long realised that the very people who would be
misfits in any other industry are the very ones who create the greatest amount
and variety of work. In small corners of traditionally staid industries, such
as investment banking, there is also an allowance for quirkiness and
idiosyncrasy which supposedly leads to greater creativity. But what happens to
the airline pilot who wants to maintain a luxuriant beard? What happens to the
male cabinet secretary (or even chief justice) who wants to wear an earring?
Even more important, what happens when your
twenty-four year old salesman tells you they only work best in the afternoon
(and they prove it by meeting and exceeding their numbers)? What happens when
your thirty-year-old middle manager decides that they need a sabbatical every
three months to recharge (and this falls right in the middle of a major system
upgrade)?
Should corporations acknowledge that their
workers are a bunch of distinctive individuals and alter their work around
that? Or do they stick to the tried and true – get in, stick to the rules and
rise up the ladder?
There are no simple answers, of course, but
don’t assume that this absolves you from fairly difficult questions. They are
rushing at you at a hundred miles an hour. Or at the speed of a dreadlocked,
seven-year-old boy.
Also published in the Business Daily on September 16 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/-/539548/2453506/-/15hk5rbz/-/index.html
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