The Young and The Resistant

[Cartoon courtesy of Grantland Cartoons]

True, Millennials are better at technology than your Boomer and Veteran employees, but they're something else besides—potentially much less amenable to getting knuckled under. So far, corporate executives have gotten their way enforcing hiring and salary freezes, including those that are selective in nature (if you're in the right internal network, your promotion and raise is labeled "strategic," and worthy of execution), but that may be changing.

I'm not a Millennial, missing that distinction by four years, but I sympathize with and admire their worldview, especially the part that emphasizes the importance of speaking one's mind to power. The research I came across this past week, and published in Training magazine's Inside Training e-newsletter (you can sign up for it on our Website, ManageSmarter.com), reports that Millennials, or Generation Y'ers, are comfortable strolling into the CEO's office to tell him or her exactly what the Generation Y'er in question thinks of the company policy on...just about anything. Don't like the new reporting structure that has you reporting to a man with half of your IQ, speak up. Don't like the company's environmentally destructive practices, and would much rather save the white tiger than make shareholders happy, speak up. Don't like the layoffs and recessionary culture that's given executives the idea it's OK to take advantage of all but their friends at the company, speak up.

Well, you get the gist. So, when you're preparing your future leaders, you've got a new problem. In addition to teaching financial acumen and generic communication skills (like hoping Sally listens to you at least after the third time you ask her where her marketing report is), they'll need to understand how to cope with this new confrontational culture. Granted, it helps that the next rung of leaders will be drawn from the X'ers and the Y'ers themselves, but it's one thing to be a big mouth when you're on the delivering end; and quite another when you're the decision-maker receiving the criticism. After all, haven't we all heard how much Gen Y'ers/Millennials loathe negative feedback? The research I summarized in Inside Training contradicts that somewhat, revealing your youngest workers to be a little hardier than you expected, but, nonetheless, I'm not convinced they're as  ready to be weather-beaten as your workhorse Boomers.

The worst part is there's no way to prepare a person for that big moment when an outspoken underling knocks on their door to tell them how awful they are and exactly how long they've been this awful. You can try role-play exercises (apparently everyone's last-resort training regimen), but that probably won't cut it. The first (and worst) impulse will be to fire the person delivering the critique or put him on your enemy's list (Millennials are enlightened and open-minded, but, as is true of all humans, you never know what will happen when they get into power).

Maybe the trick is to establish a corporate culture in which there is a structured system that provides for Millennial madness, otherwise known as that strange urge to be sincere. With social networking, and collaborative technology hopefully at their fingertips (or soon-to-be at their fingertips), your workers can have access to a platform for constant expression of their corporate likes and dislikes. Instead of conducting your annual employee "climate" survey (or whatever you're calling it these days), workforce managers can have access to a constant stream of feedback, which, if you're efficient, you'll work with executives to use towards the enhancement of the company, propelling it into Great Place to Work status.

The key is providing reciprocal feedback. One thing the research about Gen Y'ers has gotten right, based on my own observation, is the need these young people feel for feedback. They're happy to tell you what they think, whether or not you like it and no matter how badly it affects their future career path, but they expect the same from you. When your forward-thinking, constant feedback platform or portal is up and running inside your company, designate a workforce manager (or take turns) responding to comments that come up time and again. If you're a small company, maybe you could even answer each individual commenter. It's essential that in doing so, you provide honest answers, admitting when you don't know the answer to their question, or—gasp—admitting when a corporate policy isn't as fair as it could be. You could say something like, "Sorry about your disgust with the recent executive promotions we've communicated to the company. In light of the announced "company-wide" salary freeze we enacted last fall, I can see how this news would be very frustrating to you. But our management did what it felt was best awarding this new position and opportunity to Kirk Hamstrung. It's still a competitive job market in his field and this is what we needed to do to keep him a part of our corporate family. We think the investment in his promotion and added salary will pay off for us all, with the million dollar ideas and strategy we expect him to come up with paying dividends to us all."

OK, that was most likely way too candid than you'd have the authority to be, but putting that same sentiment in more conservative words, would be better than repeatedly delivering canned public relations, legal department-approved spiel. The candor will be appreciated, and you'll be rewarded with a loyal Generation Y workforce, just as happy to tell you when you've made their day as they were to inform you your CEO was nominated for new arch villain of the world.

Can you think of any other ways to help your company better communicate with Generation Yer's?  Do you think this youngest workforce generation is the same as all that proceeded it, and all this talk about their unique needs is nonsense?  Make your case.

Comments

[Scott Simmerman]

I've done many team building programs (using an interactive game that rewards collaboration between teams to optimize OVERALL results (The goal is to mine as much gold as WE can). But it seems as if any mix of players will generally produce more competition than collaboration and pretty much the same kind of general, "My Team, My Team, My Team" kinds of behaviors.

I've run it in a room full of only college interns and I've run it with Most Senior Managers, in healthcare and in schools and in manufacturers.

My thought is that having a clear sense of mission, pressures on results, limited resources and a small group of people focused on a common task can be more than sufficient to generate high levels of performance and motivation.

Sure there are differences in generations, and there are also differences in "sales" types and "accouting" types and "engineering" types. But it seems that too little focus is on "team" types and generating a real consensus and shared ownership for results.

Sometimes, we make too much of the differences and not enough of the synergies when working with people in organizations. That is some of the same reasoning about why most organizations have so little, real interdepartmental collaboration really is an oxymoron. We need to do things to pull people from different parts of the organization into a high performing whole.