The Kids are Alright-Leadership Lessons from the Youngest Workers
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Professional Growth
Chances are, we’ve all read about and heard from mid-career managers complaining about the younger generation entering the workforce.
The “don’t want to pay their dues,” and “you can’t pry them away from their PDAs,” and “poor work ethic” laments are in my opinion, lame copouts by managers stuck in their own inflexible ways. There’s good and bad in every generation, it’s just that this one feels different, because it is.
It’s Time to Look Beyond the Hovering Parents and Participation Trophies:
The “glass is half empty” crowd is quick to point out that today’s youngest workers are a product of the “Helicopter Parent” generation, with us hovering over their every move since birth, fighting their battles and cheering them on, win or lose. Others will offer that this is the “Participation Generation,” where endless hordes of children engaged in sporting activities earned trophies just for showing up. First place or fifth place, it didn’t matter, everyone went home with hardware.
You cannot dismiss a generation based on the behaviors and in some cases, slightly aberrant conditioning of the parents. I opt for the “glass is more than half full” view on this technologically savvy generation growing up in a world that is being transformed based on the march of technology. And I’ll throw my support behind a generation that has participated on teams of some sort for as long as they could walk. This is of course, a world increasingly composed of teams and projects, executed by using technology across borders to innovate, execute and compete. Hmmm. Nice training ground.
There are of course those that say that this generation doesn’t know how to lead. Well, although the following story is tinged with parental pride, there are more than a few leadership lessons that we can all learn from in this example. I know that I have.
Reinforcement that the Kids Might Be Alright:
My oldest son came home from his final day of his summer job rather excited at the feedback that he had received on his performance. The statement from the Executive Director of, “You can work here anytime,” was the one that felt good to him. That’s nice for a parent to hear too, but my leadership ears perked up when he started describing some of the more specific feedback.
As a quick caveat, this Eagle Scout and college senior son worked for an organization that sponsors summer camps for children with various developmental and learning challenges. He was assigned a primary child to work with and he multi-tasked in multiple roles as a leader, facilitator, and someone that was able to do whatever needed to get done. While there was a great deal of play involved, it was play with a purpose as he led and participated in activities with his primary child and other groups. Ensuring a positive and safe environment, promoting learning and sportsmanship and leading by example were all key components of the role.
The feedback that warmed my leadership heart included the terms and phrases: adaptability, creativity, ability to multi-task, great use of time and importantly, the ability to form a bond and help lead the child (and broader groups of children). I’ll stop here with specifics in the off chance that my son actually reads this post and questions my commitment to father-son confidentiality. Instead, let’s focus on the relevance of the feedback that he received to leading and succeeding in the emerging world.
4 Core Attributes of Our Future Leaders:
1. Adaptability: While we often struggle with change, this is a generation that has grown up while everything changed (9/11 to ubiquitous internet) to rapid acceleration in the forces driving globalization. Older workers struggle with change and easily see the risks and the negatives. The view from this youthful group is more of expecting change and searching for opportunities and the way forward.
2. Creativity: Given the state of near constant ambiguity that most businesses now wade through, the recognition of the need to be creative…to innovate and to pursue it without regard for convention is a huge plus. Most of us with time under our belts hesitate to delve too far into the unknown, and our hesitation costs us considerably in this fast moving world. A good dose of unencumbered creativity is just what many of our institutions and organizations require to move beyond the muck of this current era.
3. Multi-tasking: this 80’s era phrase should probably be replaced by something like parallelization or a word that describes the ability to engage with many on a variety of topics in real time and keep things moving forward. Watch your son or daughter hold court with a group of friends via the keyboard of their telephone, and you’ll understand that this generation gets how to bridge time and distance with a lot of people on a lot of topics simultaneously. The payoff in the workplace is the ability to process on and juggle many complex activities at light speed. Youth was a training ground for a new reality in terms of speed and work demands.
4. Ability to Bond: interestingly, while this might fly in the face of the more transactional communication described above, it’s my observation that this generation has the ability to identify with and relate to individuals across cultures and ethnicities at a level that earlier generations just can’t comprehend. The ability to accept and leverage diversity in the workforce is of course required, but for so many older workers, it’s been a learned behavior and not something innate. This generation is different in that regard.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
At the risk of being redundant, there’s good and bad in every group and in every generation. I’m not excusing the younger workers that display the behaviors that reinforce the negative stereotypes, but I’m not indicting a generation based on these bad apples. If you’re struggling to gain the benefit of the more youthful workers, I’ll submit that you’re likely a large part of the problem. As a more experienced (read: older) worker and leader, take off your generational blinders and look for the individuals motivated to help take your organization forward. Expect great things, work hard to foster the right working environment, and apply the same tenets of effective leadership that we all know are timeless, and you will be doing your part to secure the future.
Growing Up Globally Aware in America-A Key to Your Children’s Future Success
Note from Art: I don’t often write about parenting, but it is most definitely leadership…and you/we are most definitely responsible for raising tomorrow’s leaders. It’s time we stepped up our game a bit on diversity and global education.
As if parenting isn’t challenging enough for most of us, there’s another task to add to a list that doesn’t seem to lack for things to do. This one may require foregoing a few soccer games, conducting some more of those “talks” and putting the effort forth to create new educational opportunities and family experiences
I’m talking about ensuring that our future generations of leaders grow up globally aware and highly familiar with the rich and complicated level of diversity, customs, practices and subtle and significant variations across cultures, countries and religions.
Six Reasons Why this is Really Important?
- The last time I looked, everything that we understood as children of the 70’s and as parents of the 90’s children has changed. Our context is steeped in the world of our parents and of our youth. Tomorrow on this pale blue dot called earth does not look like yesterday.
- The global economy is more interconnected and infinitely more complex to navigate and compete in than ever before.
- The stakes for jobs, careers and even the prosperity of countries and regions are now very, very real.
- The world of work involves collaborating and cooperating and building bridges with people across cultures, religions and geographies. You must be a boundary and culture spanner to survive and succeed.
- The people your children will be both collaborating with and competing against are well-steeped in languages, cultural issues and understanding and they are most definitely aware of the opportunities. They are also aware of the relative ignorance of their American counterparts on these issues.
- The world of work involves identifying and successfully competing in far away places that don’t look like Most Towns, U.S.A. This requires insight, knowledge, context and skills that our parents would not understand.
The Problem: We Don’t Think Globally
Most of us…and especially our children have no context for where things come from…how they got there and what the implications are for the entire value chain backwards from the retailers to somewhere in the world where the materials and labor came together. We buy and consume mindless and heedless of our connection to a complex global economic value chain and ecosystem.
My observation is that there is a naïve idealism born of parental sheltering in some of our youth that life unfolds easily and predictably. You go to school, a good job waits for you on the other end and you exceed the life achievements of your parents. For a reality check, see also the note that everything changed.
An initial instinct is to point at our education system and wonder what they can do to solve this issue. School is an important part of the opportunity to improve, but the primary responsibilities for adding a global dimension to our children’s life experiences is ours as parents. Easy words, I know.
Seven Ideas for Helping Improve Your Child’s Global and Cultural I.Q.
1. Make a conscious effort to teach your children about the broader world at an early age. This transcends looking at maps and involves actually spending time studying different cultures and creating related experiences including trips to libraries, restaurants, museums and different types of cultural events. And yes, this means you might be challenged to learn yourself. Remember, you just need to stay one lesson ahead of your child.
2. Teach your children about economics and politics and help them stay abreast of current global events. Discuss these at the dinner table.
3. Encourage reading activities or create reading lists that draw on global authors and sources. Your librarian will be happy to help you with this.
4. Increase the emphasis on learning foreign languages (plural) at a young age. Don’t wait for 7th grade Spanish. There are resources available on the web or via other service providers and tutors. Yeah, this takes money and time. So do soccer, hockey, football, dance, music lessons etc.
5. If your financial conditions allow, skip the third trip to Disney and go somewhere that requires travelling over an ocean. Spend time reading and preparing for the visit and try to build an itinerary that includes something other than the usual tourist stops.
6. Host an exchange student. Better yet, do this several times.
7. At the right age, encourage your children to become exchange students or to take advantage of study abroad programs.
The Bottom-Line for Now
It’s easy to get lost in this big country and in our daily family lives in our communities and lose track of the world around us. It’s more important than ever to create a broader global consciousness in the minds of our children or they are in for a rough wake-up call. The distance from soccer field in Sometown, U.S.A. to expectant job seeker and erstwhile professional is very short, and global preparation is now a prerequisite for survival and success.
Leadership Development: “This is Squishy Feely” Stuff
The “Squishy Feely” statement was on a recent comment card for a workshop that I conducted. The follow on note to that very technical phrase was, “We’re not going to do this.”
The “stuff” and the “this” that this individual was referencing included things like:
- Providing growth opportunities for the firm’s associates by structuring assignments for developmental purposes.
- Working to identify the firm’s high potential talent and ensure that these individuals are gaining the experience and exposure that they need to develop into leaders in the near future.
- Increasing mentoring, coaching and improving feedback practices. A survey of the firm’s associates indicated that this is generally absent from the environment.
- Involving people outside of the senior staff in providing input for strategy assessment and formulation. It is presently a closed-door process.
- Taking time as a senior team to identify the attributes of future leaders and to begin forming a practical leadership competency model.
And a few other “Squishy Feely” things like the above.
It’s not uncommon to run into resistance from the senior members of an organization that has just recognized that it might be good to professionalize and improve talent development and acquisition processes. I can even understand the “Squishy Feely” comment coming from a grizzled functional veteran that grew up in a world where the topic of talent identification, development and retention was not as front and center as it increasingly is today. However the statement: “We’re not going to do this,” is impossible to fathom. It’s a lot like saying, “It’s good to be ignorant.” Or, “It’s OK not to breathe.”
Without launching into a diatribe on the need for organizations to become great at identifying, developing and retaining talent (I’ve co-authored a book and composed about 130 blog posts on this topic), I will instead encourage the professional dealing with the subject of leadership development to recognize the reality of the resistance that they face. Ignorance and apathy are powerful adversaries and their cousin, fear of change, is perhaps even stronger.
If you are leading or involved in driving the topic of leadership/talent development in your organization or with your team, it pays to understand what you are up against and to steel yourself for the resistance. If you are doing this at the senior level, expect a marathon, not a sprint and take heart in the small, incremental victories.
My post of a few months ago, Teaching a Senior Leadership Team to Dance with Leadership Development, includes what I believe are some useful tips for anyone involved with this issue at the top levels. In it, I propose 8 Steps to Mastering the Leadership Development Dance, and frankly, upon further review and after considering the “Squishy Feely” comment, I stand behind the steps. I am hopeful that they also have something for the mid-level manager seeking to strengthen practices at his or her level as well.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I can’t imagine not doing everything possible to arm myself and my company with the best possible talent at every level of the organization. The day that the “We’re not going to do this” types retire or are otherwise invited to do something else is a victory for the rest of the organization. Some will see the light…others will go on happy in their ignorance and narrowly focused on their minute to minute mission. If you are about creating the future, don’t let the resisters slow you down.
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