Gen Y, This Is The Boss, Do You Read Me?

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2006
MANAGING FOR SUCCESS
‘Gen
Y, This Is The Boss, Do You Read Me?’
Twenty-something employees are top performers, but careful managing is needed to bring out their best
BY GARY M. STERN
FOR INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Call it chutzpah. Pure impudence.
On her first day on the job
at a big food packaging company, the intern told her
boss that she had developed
a new cereal.
She wanted to know when
she could show it to the
product development director, related Bruce Tulgan,
author of “Managing Generation Y” and president of
Rainmaker Thinking, a
consulting firm in New
Haven, Conn.
Brash, confident and inquisitive, generation Y
members, born between
1978 and 1989, believe they
can take over the world.
They don’t believe in paying dues. Get experience
first? Fuggedaboutit!
Why is gen Y fixated on
moving up fast? “We’ve
been told to be a step ahead
of our parents. In order to
accomplish that in an everchanging economy, it has to
be done quickly. Slow
progress isn’t progress,”
said Michael Schulte, a
26-year-old sales manager
at Circuit CityCC in Westbury, N.Y.
He added: “Nobody knows
what tomorrow will bring.
My father’s generation held
jobs for 20 years, but that’s
not our reality. We don’t
have pensions like their
generation.”
Since gen Y now numbers
22% of U.S. workers and is
multiplying, learning how
Global law firm Greenberg Traurig challenges gen Y attorneys by having them work on major cases
from the time they’re hired. Young lawyers in firm’s New York office from left: Monty Steckler, 27;
Adam Rosen, 27; Samuel Cahn, 28; Gaston Kroub, 29; Astrid Schmidt, 29; and Elisabeth Bernard, 29. AP
to manage that group is critical to any company’s success.
To get the most out of gen
Y, managers “need to be
savvy, capable and engaged
enough to customize their
style one person at a time.
Generation Y can be high
maintenance. It also can be
your highest performing
work force.
“They’ve already checked
out your company and
checked out the industry,”
Tulgan said.
Managers who can harness young people’s energy
and knowledge can turn
them into peak performers.
Managers who are defensive, reluctant to change the
status quo and don’t want to
answer their questions will
likely lose them, faster than
a free agent switches teams
in baseball, Tulgan says.
Gen Y workers bring high
expectations into the workplace. “They arrive on day
one, think they could do
whatever they want, expect
to identify and solve problems no one else has solved,
and expect the boss to know
who they are and help them
succeed,” Tulgan said.
“They are the true children of the information revolution,” he added.
Reared on Google and
Yahoo, gen Y has unearthed
answers to questions on
nearly every subject and
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brings that know-how into
the work place.
Gen Y “doesn’t respond to
command and control authority,” noted Trudy Sopp,
who co-wrote “Managing
Generation Y” for the May
2006 HR magazine and is
co-executive director of
The Centre for Organization Effectiveness, a
San Diego-based consulting firm.
“They don’t respond well
to authority. It has to do
with how they were raised.
There weren’t many authority figures around since
both parents were working. They’ve learned to do
things on their own,” Sopp
said.
(Continued)
Despite the many strengths
that young people bring
to a company, they have
their limits and can clash
with baby boomer managers.
“The hardest thing for
baby boomers to accept
from the Y group is Y’s
don’t want to engage in
organizational politics,”
Sopp said. Y’s “miss the
nuances that you need to
engage in to develop relationships.”
Focused on instant success, the Y generation
doesn’t engage in “quid
pro quos,” but wants to
be entrepreneurial and
make things happen as
quickly as possible.
The companies that do
best in retaining those
from gen Y are the ones
that are flexible, respond
to their questions and
reach common solutions.
Sopp consulted for the
nonprofit Centre City Development Corp. in San
Diego. Several of its
20-something staff members confronted its president, Nancy Graham, requesting flexible work
hours and casual attire.
Rather than resisting
them, Graham compromised by relaxing the
dress code and introducing limited telecommuting
into the workweek. “As
long as they feel like man-
agement listens, they’re
happy,” Sopp noted.
At Greenberg Traurig,
a full-service global law
firm with 1,500 attorneys
and 29 offices, luring gen
Y attorneys has been critical to the firm’s growth.
The firm had only 300
lawyers in 1997, says
Carol Allen, its chief recruitment officer, who is
based in New York.
“They want lots of action, speak their minds,
operate collaboratively,
like change and act creatively,” she said.
Many Y’s start full-time
jobs having already had
and are savvy abdemanding internshipsout workplace protocol. Already
they have been “stretched
beyond their years,” Allen
said.
Greenberg Traurig challenges them, even if
they’re recent hires.
“Their expectations are
they want to control
their destiny, don’t want
to do tedious work and
want to use their talents,” Allen said.
Associates are empowered to write briefs and
work on major cases
from the time they are
hired at the firm, says
Allen. “There are no prerequisites to having brilliant ideas, our CEO
Cesar Alvarez likes to
say,” Allen said. “If they
have a great idea, we encourage them to let our
CEO know about it.”
Allen says that if managers empower gen Y employees, they respond and
contribute. What the
young people hate is getting involved in excessive
red tape and participating
in groups that are only
window dressing and
exert no influence.
Certain managerial styles
won’t work with gen Y.
“They don’t want to be
micro-managed,” Allen
noted.
“They don’t care about
seniority,” Sopp said, suggesting they don’t want
to go through the lengthy
process of paying their
dues and starting as a glorified copy clerk.
“They want to be given
opportunities to shape
their career in their own
direction,” Allen said.
Given their tendencies
and sense of self-entitlement, what are the best
ways to manage them?
Experts offer some suggestions:
00 Spell out expectations
every step of the way, Tulgan says. If the manager
wants them to succeed,
making expectations explicit will help them achieve
success.
00 Don’t leave them alone,
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Tulgan says. That won’t
work. They want feedback
and guidance, not laissez
faire.
00 Customize your management style to each gen Y
worker to reap maximum
performance. “One size fits
all” doesn’t work effectively
with this generation, Tulgan said.
00 Stress collaboration. Gen
Y likes working in teams
and learning from each
other.
00 Be flexible. If a gen Y
must have a day to telecommute, give it to him as long
as the work is produced on
time.
00 Set high expectations,
and the odds are strong that
a gen Y will reach them.
00 Address problems. If
something goes awry in a
gen Y’s performance, bring
it out into the open. Don’t
let it fester, Tulgan recommends.
Despite their enthusiasm,
one irony looms with gen
Y’s. They don’t necessarily
want their boss’ job, Sopp
says. “They watched their
parents burn out from working long hours. They don’t
want to call home at 6 p.m.
and say they’ll miss dinner,”
she said.
A balance between work
and life is a top priority.
Managers that understand
those values will get the
most out of their rapidly increasing gen Y staff, Sopp
says.