The more I work with young professionals in addition to executives, the more fascinated I am by the generation gap. Personally, this is the first time in my career when there has been a defined generation younger than me… and while in some ways I can relate to Millennials better than Gen X–which maybe isn’t so surprising, since the way Gen X and Gen Y are being defined, with their respective lower and upper cutoffs in the mid-30′s, I’m right between them–in general I relate very little. I was never one for the Xer slacker culture of the 90′s, and I find myself now baffled by the acceptance of celebrity-for-celebrity’s-sake
In the workplace, I have been watching how issues of loyalty (both to the organization as well as the team), work ethic, problem solving (including both intelligence and common sense), and communications (including the fundamentals of grammar as well as awareness of impact) differ across generations. These are the areas I often hear business leaders talk about when describing strong hires. Below are a few of my observations. These are gross generalizations and not backed by research. They hold up only anecdotally when I have been able to apply them to groups; individuals are harder to peg. These are areas I would like to explore further, because I think they would help explain many of the challenges business organizations find themselves facing with respect to Millennials:
Loyalty. Gen Me came of age during the internet boom, when anyone with half a brain seemingly got rich. This was followed by an era of scandal, in which one corporate leader after another was paraded into court to answer for egregious abuses of power. Meanwhile, the very companies that now employ them were marketing to them, selling them a hyped reality that never quite materialized. So now here comes this generation into the workplace, conditioned by the media to doubt the claims these companies make and wondering which bucket their bosses fall into: idiots who couldn’t make it in the dot com, or crooks who have yet to be caught. So when you start in with, “When I was your age…” they complete the sentence this way: “…anyone with half a brain became a millionaire.” When you say, “I want to help you,” they respond, flat out: “Bullshit, I’ve heard your company’s promises before.” This is the foundation upon which loyalty is now supposed to rest, and we wonder why it’s so hard to establish!
Work ethic. The good news is, perfectionism did not die with the Baby Boom. The bad news is, our economy’s incredible growth during the 1990′s sucked many people into the workforce who many shouldn’t have been there… and elevated many others beyond their level of competence. As a result, this generation has spent 10+ years accommodating awful customer service, billing errors, rude sales people, mis-packed products, software “releases” with fatal bugs… in general, a truly stunning array of incompetence. Work ethic? Try this: “If that crap was good enough for me, then the crap I create will be good enough for the next person.” Layer this mentality on top of mass dreams of easy fame (it’s not just the waitstaff who are trying to make it in Hollywood these days…), and it’s easy to see where the work ethic issues are.
Problem solving. This is a weird one. I see a lot of creative intelligence in the younger generation. (I can’t tell if that creativity is a function of youth or this generation itself, but my guess is that it’s generational. My cohort may have rebelled “against”, but we were far less creative in our solutions.) I also see a lot less patience with formal problem solving methodologies, and less respect for knowledge already gained. I don’t think this is entirely bad–questioning is good–but the pendulum does seem to have swung a little too far for my own comfort. I am a bit concerned about Millennials lack of research skills… indeed, about their lack of research appreciation! I would love to see more of a balance between their rapid, intuitive creativity and a more formalized, let’s-make-sure-where-focused-on-the-right-problem process on the other.
Communications. Many in business like to bemoan the lack of grammatical skill shown by the younger generation, myself included. However, let’s be honest about two things: first, we ourselves are worse writers than our recent ancestors; slipping writing standards were not invented by the generation now coming up. Second, the English language is a poor way to communicate generally. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” highlights the challenges of the written word nicely. Moreover, there are many areas in which we simply lack sufficient jargon to communicate well… for instance, most of the words we have to describe political savvy carry negative overtones. It is difficult to talk about the need to draw a crowd to your side without conjuring images of snakes, political animals, backstabbers, spin doctors or Machiavelli. The more we can move to a world in which we can express ourselves visually, and use intonation and body language along with speech, the better. In the meantime, the one thing the younger generation does not yet seem to have grasped is that communications always occur on two levels: there is what you say, and then there is how you say it. Nobody seems to have yet taught them that second part, but I think that is something they will learn in due course as they progress in their careers. I think that’s how we all learn it, they’re just learning it later because their parents’ success has precluded them from needing to have learned it yet.
The upshot. I’m highly, highly optimistic about the next phase of business. The issues above are far from universal. They are also not bad. Even their work ethic, when viewed as feed back on previous generations’ policies, has value in shaping future approaches to work. The trick now is to avoid pointing the finger, a practice that has no productive use. Instead, we need to ask ourselves the question: how can I use this information to shape my organization’s, team’s, and even my own behavior for the better?
