What do we do with these kids? They are high maintenance, operate in a different model, and often leave our organizations before we get much value out of them. I myself exited college in a rather severe economic downturn. Waiting 5 months before I scored a commission only job, there really wasn’t much around for me. The most talented graduates (usually by GPA, thus not me) could get offers from the investment banks or consulting firms, but these were rare and highly prized. Now, it’s not uncommon for a decent but not great student to get multiple offers about $60K and have a choice of where to go. I don’t mind this, but the current job market combined with several other factors is making this a rather unbearable generation to manage for the short term.
Each and every talented Gen Yer out there knows that they can leave a job at any time and get another one. Commitments to an employer are extraordinarily low, and the common practices of professional services firms where you come in as a new grad and do “grunt work” while learning the trade bores most people in their 20’s. They are used to a much faster pace of growth and learning than this.
They are used to their helicopter parents who are constantly hovering and whisking them from soccer to piano to ballet. They are used to being involved in many activities, learning quickly and being in collaborative settings. In our old model work worlds, we simply don’t work this way yet. We give new people a mundane job and expect them to attack it with vigor, happy for the opportunity to learn. That’s not the way it is.
We don’t understand how Gen Y employees often need constant gratification and instantaneous positive feedback. They live in an instantaneous world. Forget about voice mail and e-mail. This is too slow. They want IM. Everything happens real time and when they want/need it.
Here is the message. It is not Gen Y that needs to change. It is the rest of us.
Business is real time. Business is collaborative. Business needs to involve talent when they are ready, not on our timeline. Business requires agility.
So my question to all of you. What do we do, not with these “kids” but with the transformation of our selves?
13 responses to “Gen Y’s Entitlement Employment”
Gen Y?s Entitlement Employment
Our good friend Tony Marzulli, the CMO over at Workscape sent usa great posttoday. We don’t understand how Gen Y employees often need constant gratification and instantaneous positive feedback. They live in an instantaneous world. Forget about voice mail and e-mail. This is too slow. They want
Your comments are dead on. I do a fair amount of speaking and writing on the generations and this post captured my message perfectly. Gen Ys are who they are. And they are the next workforce whether we like it or not. But the fact is they are not so bad – they are smart (even if inexperienced), willing to learn what’s worth learning, collaborative, and socially minded. That’s a lot more than I can say for many currently holding jobs!
Bravo for a great article. Organizations large and small adapted the changing needs and wants brought to the workplace by Baby Boomers yet now that it is those Boomers who are in managerial roles they somehow think that it is an entire generation of future workers and leaders that should adapt, not their organization.
Those Boomers can fight that battle and score some moral victories but they will surely lose the war and their organizations will be forgotten as quickly as the Commodore 64.
Great article. I am Gen Y and I agree with everything you say, which is unusual because I end up laughing at most articles on Gen Y. It always worry me when organisations are scared of people coming in having high expectations. Surely it is better to say “if you want to achieve something then go ahead and do it with us, we will support you when you achieve your goals”. As you say though that could be quite confronting to previous generations if these new kids bring in new ideas that might step on other ‘comfortable’ people’s toes. These change agents are what we need in today’s business environment.
Yes and no. While true that Gen Y communication & information transfer happens at a much faster pace, instant gratification is, and always has been, fools gold. Ask the Gen Y’ers, or any generation for that matter, that worked at Enron and WorldCom. Success is, and always has been, built by solid, consistent committment to proven values. A business, or an employee, that feels entitled to the quick and easy – will not last in the business world.
Very true. I agree that change is urgently needed.
But I would argue that it is not “us” that need changing, it is the organizations we work for. These were designed very much according to 19th century assumptions ! And we as leaders and managers have been trained and developed to lead and manage this kind of organizations.
As persons, we understand and agree that an organization that could provide GenYers with great jobs and motivate them is a nice place to work. But as managers, our job is to make our organization succeed (not change drastically)
So, what’s needed is change management, of a new sort I agree, but change management all the same.
We do this kind of collaboration-based change management at our clients and it is indeed rewarding ! The roles that GenYs can play in these change management project is by the way amazingly interesting : they can teach their elders about communication in a 2.0 environment – but at the same time, they learn the business as they go with changing our workplace.
The way we see it, it is a great opportunity, as we have new openings for GenYs: change agents !
Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs. Where I said: There are posts all over the web about Gen Y. Most of them are uninformed rubbish. This one is solid gold.
http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2008/04/02/4208-a-midweek-look-at-the-business-blogs.aspx
What’s the old saying? Sheep get sheared, pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.
I graduated at the height of the dot-com boom, and heard all the same stuff now being said; within a year or two of graduation many of my peers had paychecks and titles that were every bit as inflated as the Nasdaq. When the whole edifice of that age came crashing down, they were often the first sent to the curb, and the last to get back up.
My experience as an employer and manager of a number of these kiddies is that the good ones will give you as much as you give them, and while they may need a little more emotional involvement on their managers’ part, this isn’t a bad thing per se. Talking with my father, whose management career spanned roughly from 1965 to 2000, he said that great managers throughout his career had always taken the effort to reinforce their peoples’ emotional wellbeing, and that to him, management was a service that was provided to the employee, and not vice versa.
Most high-achievers would rather build cathedrals than dig ditches, but when you make them see that much of cathedral-building is in fact ditch-digging, and that their ditches are dug for a higher purpose, then they dig with that much more enthusiasm. As I’ve never been a fan of digging holes only to fill them back up, I’ve never objected philosophically to having to explain the situation to my folks.
Interesting post – I’ve just blogged about how to manage Gen Xs and Ys in a changing workforce. I’d love to include a link to your post – I believe they complement each other. See it here at http://www.eskridge-associates.com/2008/04/managing-next-generations.html.
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