Millennials Are the New Slackers

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What goes around comes around. Here's another one of those fun HBR blog posts where a blogger from one generation pontificates on the failings of a younger generation, and gets taken to task for it in the comments. In this case, the blogger is Andrew McAfee and his target is the "entitlement mentality" of many Millennials.

A paradox is a seemingly contradictory statement that might nonetheless be true. The deepest one I've come across recently goes something like at a time of high unemployment and persistent joblessness, Millennials are asking for more concessions and perks from their employers. I just came across a CNN story about how new hires at marketing agency Euro RSCG told their CEO that they want to come in at 10 or later, have free food and a Pilates room, and get reimbursed for their personal trainers.

It's horrific, McAfee says, and he goes on to detail out how Millennials should be acting in this dismal economy. His five-point plan sounds like every other piece of advice given by the older generation to the younger generation entering to workplace: play by our rules and you'll get ahead when we decide the time is right.

The comments are a fun read--more fun, in fact, than McAfee's post. There are some impassioned and frustrated young people expressing both of those emotions there. One, mocking McAfee's dismissal of the younger generation's use of "e-speak" in business correspondence, says:

Your organization should stop hiring employees who can't write. Then again, I guess you'd be jobless.

Ouch. But there is a larger point to be made here.

Millennials are the new kids on the block when it comes to the workplace. And like the Xers that preceded them, they are coming of age in a time of massive joblessness and economic uncertainty. They have youthful enthusiasm and a fresh way of seeing things, and we're witnessing what happens when ideals like that collide with the powerful status quo, protected ever more preciously by an older generation not quite ready to let go.

Although McAfee never uses the word, reading what he says about Millennials, it was hard for me not to sympathize with them and see their plight as similar to the one GenX fought and is in some measure still fighting. It's not fair to call us "slackers" anymore--us Xers with our mortgages, college savings accounts and flirtations with the alternative minimum tax--but it is such a tempting description, that I fully expect it will be recycled with abandon for these Millennials. After all, they have no true sense of how the real world works.

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It is probably appropriate to use this post about generations in the workplace to announce that at the end of this year I will no longer be posting here at The Hourglass Blog. I started this adventure almost three years ago with the intention of exploring the impact of generational shift on the leadership of our organizations and, while I have certainly done that, I have explored a number of other topics as well. These topics have been of great interest to me, but they have clearly been outside the scope of the original manifesto.

Because of this, and because of my desire to continue to explore the ideas that interest me most, I have decided to set-up shop at a new blog, one molded around all of my interests rather than one narrow subset of them. The new blog, at www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, is in beta-testing now. If you've enjoyed what you've read here, I would encourage you to read, subscribe or otherwise follow my activities there. From now until the end of the year, I'll be posting jointly in both places, but I expect all the sand will run out of this Hourglass by the end of December.

We're All Millennials Now

It's been a while since I talked about generations on this blog. Isn't that what this blog is supposed to be all about? It's almost as if the themes of leadership and innovation have taken over. I wonder if I'm getting better at either as a result?

But here’s an interesting article Shelly Alcorn pointed me to. It's about the multi-generational workplace, and how some organizations are experimenting with management models based on democracy--giving workers of all generations an equal vote in how things are run--to better balance and leverage the talents of all.

It's a good read. But here’s what gets me, and what’s tempered my enthusiasm for the generations biz. The article defines the generations this way:

Veterans: Workers who preceded the baby boomers tend to be authoritarian and loyal, and they value wisdom gained from experience over technological expertise.

Boomers: Known for their workaholic habits and need for status symbols, they’ve sacrificed a lot for their careers. They often expect their junior staff to do the same.

Generation X: They are generally comfortable working within the systems established by their employers and, like the boomers before them, are more willing to let work cut into their personal lives. They have no problem using technology, having entered the work force just as computers were becoming mainstream.

Millennials: Tech-savvy, entrepreneurial and independent, they tend to value work-life balance and meaningful work more than a large paycheque. They are less likely to be attached to an employer than other generations and tend to stay only a few years before moving on.

Huh? GenX is comfortable working within the systems established by their employers? They're willing to let work cut into their personal lives? What strange alternate universe have I found myself in?

You know, I used to be happy being GenX. Then for a while I decided I wanted to be Generation Jones. Now, with the definitions listed above, I think I'm going to start being a Millennial.

Care to join me?

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A Modern View of Leadership

Here's a short, 5-minute video from HBR where a group of "expert thinkers" discuss the crucial skills needed by tomorrow's leaders. As near as I can tell by listening to their comments, those skills are:

• Trust
• Authenticity
• Empathy
• Devotion to others
• Explaining why
• Curiosity
• Mindfulness
• Clear sense of purpose

Hmmm. Does that list look familiar to you? It certainly does to me. Let me quote one of the thinkers, Ellen Langer, who says in the video:
 
"Not surprisingly, since I've been studying mindfulness for over thirty years, I believe that leaders of the future would prosper enormously by becoming more mindful."
 
Thanks, Ellen. That's almost as good as Bill George telling us to be authentic after publishing a book called Authentic Leadership.

My thoughts are summed up well by one of the commenters, Mitch McCrimmon:

I found this video very disappointing. It is supposed to be about leaders of the future, but most of what it says could have been said 30 years ago and probably was. Much of it consists of the usual motherhood statements about trust and purpose characteristic of a very old-fashioned concept of leadership.

So what is a more modern view of leadership? Well, I like what my fellow Hourglass blogger Jamie Notter often says. Leadership is not a skill to be learned by an individual, it is a system that is to be established by an organization and successfully implemented over the multiple comings and goings of individuals. A modern leader, in other words, is not someone who surrounds himself with followers, it is someone who builds the capacity for leadership in her organization.

And in today's multi-generational environment, I think that means multi-generational leadership systems. Boomers, Xers and Millennials all have a role to play in creating new systems of leadership, and each brings a unique perspective that, when integrated, can make the system stronger and more sustainable that any system based on a single generation's ideals.

Trust, authenticity, mindfulness. There all good attributes to have. But they have to exist across your organization, not just in your leader.

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The World Database of Innovation--CLOSED!

I first stumbled across The World Database of Innovation in this HBR blog post from a few months ago. Like I often do when I find something interesting, I email it myself with a note to investigate it more deeply when I have time. The blog post is by Uri Neren, and it says:

The World Database of Innovation we are compiling, as a collaborative effort between my firm, Generate Companies, and several universities, represents over 20,000 hours of work to date. As well as over 200 in-depth case studies, it compiles the ideas of 4,500 or so innovation experts and consultancies.

And the website, when you go to it, says this:

Generate has discovered more than 105 areas of best practices in innovation. We are working in collaboration with innovation thought leaders from around the globe to collect their works in one place on each of best practice area of innovation including:

- Theories and Schools of Thought (14 distinct theories)
- Invention Methodologies (more than 162 discovered so far)
- Conditions for Innovation (17 aspects of culture)
- Tools for Innovation (5208 tools)
- Definitions of Innovation
- Stuctural Types of the Corporate Innovation Function
- Components of a Company's Innovation Function
- Statistics and Research
- Corporate Case Studies
- Myths
- Innovation Team Skill Sets
- Innovation Types Created
- Innovation Tools
- Innovation Tool Types
- and many more...

And I'm thinking, fantastic! Five thousand two hundred and eight tools for innovation! This is exactly the kind of resource I need to tap to help build the model of innovation for the association community I've been discussing on this blog and leading on behalf of the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives. How do I get into this thing?

If you would like to submit your best practice, consultant profile, or other research and materials for consideration to be entered in the database, please begin by using our contact form. All contributors will be given credit and will gain the chance for public recognition and to be matched with Generate's corporate clients.

What? Wait a minute, what's this? I have to apply to see what's inside this thing? The blog post and this website is just a sales pitch? What's on this contact form, anyway?

Please call or use the Generate Companies web form below. We'll get back to you quickly either way.

And then just fields to fill in for your name, email and phone number.

You know, this innovation thing is business commodity. And a proprietary one in some people's minds, evidently.

Arguing for Generational Superiority

This is another one of those posts challenging the assumption that as Millennials storm their way into the workforce they're going to radically change the landscape and force organizations to adapt to their idiosyncratic ideals in order to harness their power and survive. It's a good post as these posts go, and Andrew McAfee throws in the obligatory pop culture reference to make sure you're paying attention.

But what always fascinates me about these posts is how many comments they get. McAfee got 91 comments with this one. 91! The average on HBR seems to be about 10.

Not that I'm jealous or anything.

If you take time to start reading through those comments, you discover that the majority are from a much smaller group of people--people from different generations--arguing back and forth over whether Millennials are special or not. Here's how it typically goes:

Millennial: I'm a Millennial and I'm different!

Xer: Oh yeah? Well, I'm an Xer, and twenty years ago I was just like you. Millennials aren't any different.

Millennial: Yes we are! We're more experienced and more marketable than previous generations at our age. We deserve rewards for the skills we're bringing to the table. And we're not content with the status quo. We want to shake things up and create new ways of doing things.

Xer: We wanted the same things when we were your age. Ugh! We still want those things! But we learned that those things don't come without making sacrifices to exitsing power structures. You need to learn the same thing.

Millennial: But we shouldn't have to! We're special!

Xer: No you're not. Now wait your turn.

Boomer: I don't know what you two are arguing about. Nobody's getting nothing till I get mine.

And so it goes. Let me sum up with this comment:

Ninety percent of the talk about the new generation changing the way we work is just that--talk. Millennials will have an impact. Just like Xers did and Boomers did before them. But that impact will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. It won't be realized until Millennials are fully integrated into the workforce and hold a significant number leadership positions. And by that time everyone will be talking about a new generation of youngsters coming into the workplace to shake things up.

The "Well, duh" Generation

I've been following the Harvard Business Review blog now for as long as I've been blogging at Hourglass. I find it informative and insightful. I don't read every post (they have a lot of bloggers over there), but have developed the habit of following certain ones that I find especially relevant to my world and, dare I say it, inspiring. Bloggers like Umair Haque, Dan Pallotta, and, increasingly, Michael Schrage.

But every once and a while I come across a post that leaves me thinking nothing but, "Well, duh. Doesn't everyone already know that?"

Case in point is this post from Robert I. Sutton titled "A Great Boss is Confident, But Not Really Sure." In it, Sutton has a model for those who aspire to be a truly great boss to follow:

...the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

To which I react with a big "well, duh." In fact, tying this more to the theme of The Hourglass Blog, I suspect that nearly everyone in Generation X with any measure of leadership experience would respond with a "well, duh."

Since when is this a revolutionary idea--that leaders don't have all the answers and may in fact be (gasp!) wrong from time to time?

Sutton continues as if he is imparting sacred wisdom, even citing famous innovation consultants who share the view that great leaders effectively balance "confidence" with "doubt."

This balancing act between confidence and doubt is a hallmark of great bosses. The confidence inspires people to follow them and believe in them, but the doubt helps ensure they get things right. They are always listening and watching for evidence that they might be wrong, and inviting others to challenge their conclusions (albeit usually in private and in "backstage" conversations).

As I wrote in my last post about Generation X (dubbing them the "IF" generation because their natural tendency to keep their options open makes them uniquely suited to deal effectively with the uncertainties and "ifs" of leadership), this advice to be "always listening and watching for evidence that they might be wrong, and inviting others to challenge their conclusions," will strike Xers as so obvious as to not be even worth mentioning. And what's this business about challenging conclusions "in private and in "backstage" conversations"? What management era is that idea from?

If this is the level of leadership insight Xers can expect to get from the Harvard Business Review, I may need to stop calling them members of the "IF" generation and switch to the "Well, duh" generation.

Exactly who is this "be a human being not a marble statue" advice for anyway? Maybe the Tom Petty reference at the start of the post is a hint. It seems to me that Xer leaders aren't having any trouble making decisions when the way forward is unclear. What they struggle with is being taken seriously by older leaders when they do.

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Where Have All the Slackers Gone?

Ran across this short item in a recent issue of The Week magazine.

Only a decade ago we were deeply concerned about the meandering fate of Generation X, a cohort of natural-born clerks so unambitious it couldn't even muster a proper name for itself. Swaddled in grunge and flannel, benumbed by rap music ("a great big cultural cancer," as one critic called it), Gen X was marked not only by its unwholesome aversion to work but by its members' vague yet ostensibly crippling anxieties--a result of the latchkey lassitude of their broken families.

It was authored by one of The Week's executive editors, Francis Wilkinson, who goes on to speculate about the reasons why the slackers may not be slacking any more.

For starters, the towers of 9/11 erupted, burying youthful idylls beneath their toxic lava. That eruption was followed by two wars, for which Gen X has provided much of the blood and courage, and finally by a financial collapse brought on by the overreach of just about everyone but slackers.

And he ends up almost grudgingly admitting that perhaps "The Kids Are Alright."

In hindsight, those genial, laid-back slackers don't look like the end of civilization at all, but like its gentlest, most innocent eyes.

I'm not sure where to begin with this. Perhaps Mr. Wilkinson should read Jeff Gordinier's X Saves the World, to get a better idea about what Gen X has been doing for the past ten years and what all that "slacking" was about in the first place.

But what really struck me about the article was the way its tone sounded similar to the way I've heard Xers talk about Millennials. Meadering fate. Unambitious. Unwholesome aversion to work. Crippling anxieties. Sound familiar?

I wonder if ten years from now us Xers will also lift our noses off the grindstones they've been pressed to and realize that those "molly-coddled Millennials" actually figured out how to grow up and take responsibility for the society we've given them--the same way some Boomers seem to now realize that the world may actually be safe in our hands.

Stimulating Work? What's That?

Recently caught this post from Sylvia Ann Hewitt. In it, she references some research she's doing for a new book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down. She says that the number one reason that talented people love their jobs--far outstripping compensation and recognition--is having stimulating and challenging assignments. To help prove her point, she adds:

This finding is backed up by our investigation into the commonalities between Boomer and Gen Y workers: Both groups--who together make up 148 million people, or nearly half of the U.S. population--overwhelmingly want their jobs to provide challenging and diverse opportunities to grow both personally and professionally.

I wonder what her research told her about GenX workers? Perhaps that we overwhelmingly want our jobs to provide simple and repetitive tasks so we can grow stagnant and ossify.

Most Bookends Are Identical, Aren't They?

Jamie warned us that we'd be seeing more articles like this one, and sure enough, he was right. Here's another one, written by the same person from the same organization on the same blog, fifteen days later. The thesis is the same:

Two dominant demographic cohorts--Gen Y and Baby Boomers--are redefining what it takes for a company to be an "employer of choice." The 78 million Boomers and 70 million Gen Ys crave flexibility, personal growth, connection, and opportunities to "give back." The Bookend Generations are remapping old ideals of success as they pursue a "Rewards Remix" that prizes meaning and choice over money.

What strikes me about this thesis, and about several paragraphs in the new article, is the way the author seems to EQUATE Boomers with Gen Yers. Together, they're 148 million strong, and they all evidently want the same thing.

Our study shows that Boomers, as much as their Gen Y children, yearn for a lifelong odyssey, a fluid journey in search of meaning, stretched by challenges, and stimulated by constant learning.

They...

...overwhelmingly want modular work that is deeply flexible in terms of hours, location and even life stage.

This presents a real puzzle for GenX. I mean, here we are, stuck between two gigantic bookend generations, and now we discover that the bookends are identical, and that they're working in concert to reinvent the workplace so that it provides...get ready for it...flexible opportunities to continually learn, tackle new challenges, and find meaning.

Wait a minute. Whose ideas were those again?

Millennials Are Unstoppable

More on the new narrative front for generations in the workplace. I predicted in a previous post that we'd start seeing more stories about how GenX better get out of the way of those Millennials when it comes to the leadership positions being slowly vacated by Boomers.

Here's another, from the Entrepreneur.com blog, entitled innocently enough, "Are Gen Y Workers Good for Business?" It's a mini review of a new book by Michael S. Malone. After reading the first three paragraphs, you might think the answer is, no, Gen Y workers are not good for business. But wait. Let's take another look at those youngsters:

The caveat, though, in Malone's mind, is that Gen Y's fierce independence will accelerate the nation's evolution from a corporate economy of worker bees to an entrepreneurial one of innovative thinkers and rapid change, one where a majority of the Gen Y workforce is self-employed or even part of an ever-widening proprietary class.

"This cohort, many with parents who have always worked at home, has little interest in ever taking an office job, or working for a business that doesn't change," he writes. The Gen Y group will be fiercely start-up oriented, and "by 2013, perhaps two-thirds of all adult Americans will be classified as entrepreneurial."

Get out of the way GenX. Those Millennials have some serious destiny to fulfill. By 2013—four years from now—they are going to comprise a new entrepreneurial class that is twice as large as all the other adults in the country.

Succession Planning

Thanks, Eric, for pointing me to Bob Filipczak's horrendous post about the crappy leaders that all of us Gen Xers are turning out to be(!). That one sets me off. It's interesting, too, because the book that Filipczak wrote (with Raines and Zemke), Generations At Work, is one that I like. I'll have to go back and see if what they wrote about Generation X fits with what he's saying now, because I find his generalizations to be a bit off (and in the Blog post, he doesn't particularly cite data or sources for his conclusions). And while I can tell I have a full-fledged rant coming together inside me about that post, I'm going to hold off and write about just one of the topics he mentioned: succession planning.

He said it's the hot topic right now, citing a conversation he had with a senior military official who is dealing with a major shortage of middle manager level personnel. We knew this was coming--Generation X is a small generation, much smaller than the Boomers. So if we try to fill all of those mid-level manager slots that Boomers filled with Xers, we'll fall short.

Filipczak's advice? Suck it up. Stay in your job longer than two years, embrace office politics even though it sucks, and work on our people skills (apparently we're bad at that and we don't have networks).

I tend to disagree with his generalizations about Xers, but even if he has data to back them up, I'm most upset with his conclusion about what to do next. He's still telling us how to be more like Baby Boomers. That WE have to change in order to make the current structure work. He says that we have a crisis because we have all these middle management positions to fill and not enough people. Isn't that backwards? We have tons and tons of people. Has it occurred to Filipczak that the answer might be MORE in restructuring the way the work gets done, as opposed to making Xers change the way they do things to fit the structure the Boomers created?

It's easier to think of succession planning as filling slots, and as long as the population is growing, that works. But when things shift, so must our thinking. Succession planning is really just ongoing leadership adaptation. How do we need to change the capacity within our systems to shape the future, given the demographic make up of our system? The demographic and generational shifts that are happening right now are real, and they pose a serious challenge to leadership and to management, but I think we'll do better by actually innovating management (see Gary Hamel), rather than sending all the Xers back to charm school so they can be "proper" middle managers like their Boomer predecessors.

Okay, I guess that was a bit of a rant.

Generation X Unfit for Management?

I think I found a new narrative out there in the "Generations in the Workplace" wilderness. For some time I've been saying that when it comes to generations in the workplace, all the stories I ever seem to find are on one of two topics:

1. Are those crazy Boomers ever going to let go and retire?
2. How are we going to manage those crazy Millennials coming into the workforce?

The Hourglass Blog got started because we wanted to start a new conversation. We recognize that Gen X is and will continue to move into leadership positions in our organizations and in society, and we wanted to explore what their new generational perspective will do to the way organizations are managed and the collective goals they may be directed towards.

Well, thanks to Dave Sohigan and his "The Gen X Files" blog for pointing me to this blog post from the "Managing the Generations" blog about how awful life is going to be under Gen X's leadership.

It's a pretty scathing indictment of GenX's inability to lead—written by Xer Bob Filipczak. He takes a look at Gen X's "core characteristics" and shows how none of them translate into effective management techniques. And guess what one of his predictions is.

At an executive leadership level, most “silo-thinking” Xers will be hard-pressed to succeed when managing large departments or even teams of more than a dozen people. Only those who can look beyond their own inclinations will rise through the ranks, especially in large companies. And because Millennials are so good at big teams, you could see the younger generation leapfrogging into executive leadership positions with tribes of Generation X managers reporting to them.

Yep. That's the new narrative. When will those GenXers get out of the way so those team-player Millennials can run the show?

When Gen X Runs The Show

That's the title of a (very!) brief article on Time.com that is part of 12 stories they bunched together as "The Future of Work." The title piqued my interest, of course, but I was a bit disappointed with the content. According to this five paragraph story, in 2019 Gen X will be in charge.

Really?

Yep. Magically in that year, we will suddenly be in charge. Though only some of us, because they put Gen X as people born between 1965 and 1978 (Millennials get 21 years for their generation, but we only get 13). Then the article goes on to say that Boomers, in fact, won't retire. They'll just start consulting and job-sharing (so how do we get in charge again?). It also states that we'll have a tough time being in charge because the Millennials are different: they don't want to pay their dues or work their way up the ladder in one job (umm, I think that's Gen X you're talking about).

Now I see why Scott Briscoe is anti-generations. I think articles like this make it worse. They throw around loose terms and generalizations, some of which cut across generations, with no explanation (or even links) to back it up. They found the big-name authors and got pithy quotes. The quotes themselves are fine, but stringing quotes together does not give you wisdom. 

They would have done better to take  each point and turn it into an article. How about an article on what Boomers not retiring is going to do to the workforce? Or another one on the shift in the value of "seniority" in terms of compensation and status in the workforce. And another one on the role of video games in preparing workers to better handle work situations moving into the future. Less hype, please, and better conversations about what matters.