By Sarah Newton

I do think when it comes to managing Gen Y we are missing a trick.

We talk a lot about how Generation Y are good at asking for what they want and fantastic and speaking up, putting their work-life balance at the centre of what they do, all of which I think are great attributes.  However we don’t take enough advantage I think of their fairness attitude. Most employers find them very difficult to manage, purely due to their inability to get Gen Y to sometimes share another point of view, which I think is a youth thing rather than a Gen Y thing.

But I think the key could lie in something I learnt in police training. When doing my sergeant’s exam we had to do some hideous practical exams, where we had to deal with six role play situations, one after the other, while been assessed. I did so much training for these exams and passed really well, but the best piece of advice I got was, think in threes. That was when we were trying to get our point across to a PC, we were disciplined to think how it reflected on them, us and the organization as a whole.

This stuck with me and in my earlier worked with families in conflict, I would always ask people to think of what they wanted, what the other person wanted and then what the family wanted. It was always so successful at getting people to realize the complex relationships involved.

Recently, I have begun to use this in my work with young employees.  Since most of my experience lies in the catering industry, that is where I started. For example, time off in the catering industry is a real challenge due to the antisocial hours you have to work. The old pattern was, ask for time off, get refused and get mad. We simply changed this to having every conversation include another person and that third part was “the business”. So when an employee asked for time off the manager would say, “I would love to give you the time off, let’s look at what the business needs that day”. They would then sit down and just go through the business needs for that day, balancing that with what they both needed as individuals and come to a conclusion which, more often than not, was not favourable for the employee. What we found though was that suddenly, employees started to find their own solutions to ensure the business needs got meet, they stopped blaming the managers and feeling liked they were been picked on. By clearly stating the facts and appealing to Gen Y’s need for things to be fair, we solved a very contentious issue.

I continue to use this technique in other situations, but my sense is that it will work just as well, begging the question of whether Gen Y really are difficult or are we just not dealing with them in the best possible way?

By Sarah Newton

As England comes home defeated from the World Cup, it becomes so obvious that there is lack of good talent coming up through the ranks of sport in the UK and it seems that this skill shortage is hitting hard.

My eyes were recently drawn to an article in Construction Manager (my hubby is in the field) entitled, “Industry is storing up trouble over skills shortage, reveals CIOB survey.” http://www.ciob.org.uk/resources/research

This survey reveals that the industry is laying the groundwork for an on-going skills crisis. A third of respondents  said that the recession had resulted in reduction in graduates at their firms, while 20.3% said it had stopped altogether, with 32.9% saying that apprenticeships were down and 17.5% stating that they had stopped apprenticeships altogether.
Lyne Crowe, regional manager of the recruitment consultant Hays Constructions, says that the industry sees graduates and recruitment as a major cost, rather than a long term investment.

While I know nothing about the construction industry, my guess is that this trend is far-reaching and worldwide.

To me, cutting down on employing fresh talent seems totally counter intuitive. Not only do we create future problems for ourselves in terms of skills, but we also cut out the new creativity, energy and enthusiasm that young fresh meat can bring.

As a company, when the going gets tough do you cut your most valuable resource, the young fresh talent? What can you do to make sure this doesn’t happen?

This is a post that I have wanted to write for so long and no, I haven’t been procrastinating, I just needed to get an inside ticket, so to speak.

In the UK there are a few amazing companies that have been started by Gen X ( of Gen Jones for those of you who are into generations in a big way) that are walking and living examples of how to run companies that Generation Y want to work for. However, there is no company that has done it better then the guys at Innocent Drinks. I have already talked about this company before. They are living, breathing examples of building a business based on real values through and through and Gen Y fall over themselves to get a slice of the Innocent pie. Richard Reed, Adam Balloon, Jon Wright, now 36, started their business in 1998 with a clear goal to get fresh healthy drinks out to the public, and they did it in a very quirky way.

I have always had a sneaky suspicion that these wonderful, rebellious, middle class Gen Xs, determined to do everything a different way, had built a company that not only appealed to but valued Generation Y’s qualities and that they had managed to build something quite unique, a company that values above all else its young employees. However, this was all just hearsay; I needed to see for myself, so after a few years of trying I finally managed to get a ticket to their AGM (a grown up meeting) where I, along with loads of other people, spent the day with the crew at Innocent.

Among what I can tell you is that this company has got it when it comes to Gen Y, but what is the IT? Well simply, a culture that allows their Gen Y employees to thrive. Their employees are passionate, committed, loyal and very efficient, going totally against the grain of how we think of Gen Y employees. So what have they done?

Well, walk into Fruit Towers and you know this place is different, from being greeted by a town crier to seeing the astro turf vans to the bean bags that adorned the floor and the bunting all around the office. This is a Gen Y’s dream and mine too!

Employees of Innocent do not sit in departments, they are all mixed around and there are no offices with shut doors. Most meetings take place in the very large communal area that resembles more of a 5th year common room, while looking at a screen adorned with grass and daisies. Their board of directors are actually called the “bored” by the staff and they meet in the “bored room”, which has “blah” written all over the walls. They give employees grants to do things that they really want to do, which they all vote on, the most recent being a remake of Thriller aptly called Chiller. You just get the impression that this is a great place to work.

They don’t stick Gen Y in a box with a list of tasks, they instil in them vision and then expect the results. They care about their staff, having pictures of them all as babies on the wall. They have sports clubs for the staff, a gym masseur, breakfast for everyone, Fridays evenings out, all giving a valuable message to their employees that they care about them as people. They appeal to Gen Y’s need for balance and they haven’t missed out the families too, giving employees an extra 5 days off if they get married and extra tax free money towards childcare. It is a Gen Y dream.

However, ask them how they created this culture and they will clearly state that it is all down to their amazing staff, even turning down TV opportunities to talk about the Innocent culture because it is not their job to tell others what to do . To them, it’s all about the people and they choose their people based on whether they fit with the values of the company and have the capacity to do well before they even look at their experience.

While I was there, someone asked if the innocent culture could be adapted to another business, which was a great question. I began to wonder if it could and came up with the conclusion that it would take a grounded, egoless, innovative person who did not feel it was their job to control how and what others did. To portray a culture that Gen Y love and admire, I even heard one employee say that they would have gone back to New Zealand ages ago, but just couldn’t leave Innocent. You have to be a very special person who cares as much about making relationships as you do about making a successful business and above all, thinks work is fun. I don’t know about you, but most people just are not brave enough.

By Sarah Newton

There has been little talk up to now about Gen Z, but I can see a few things coming up through the ranks. A recent post has claimed that they are more like Gen Y than Gen Y. Saying that, they are more connected and more comfortable with technology – well of course it is all they have ever known! At 9 years old, my daughter has her own web show, her own Skype and plays computer games while talking for hours to her pal over the Internet.

However, to me this is a little on the surface for Gen Z. Because they have mainly Gen X as parents, they have something that Gen Y did not have and that is realism.

While the Baby Boomers molly coddled their little Gen Y, Gen Z will have none of that!

Their Gen X parents have taught them to stand up for themselves rather than fit in. They have taught them to toughen up, as life is not fair (a favourite saying of Gen X). They have taught them to be individualistic and rebel, so while they may appear similar to Gen Y, they are entirely different.

They are more cynical; you only have to read my daughter’s account of a cleaning product (http://genyguide.com/the-world-from-the-eyes-of-generation-z/) to understand that. They demand structure and will no longer just get excited by an idea; the Coca Cola Happiness video taught me that. http://genyguide.com/gen-y-gen-z-viral-video/

And if we look at Howe and Strauss, (and while I love this I appreciate that others don’t) we find that they are the next artist generation.

Artists are subtle, indecisive, emotional and compromising, often having to deal with feelings of repression and inner conflict. They grow up as the over-protected children of a Crisis, come of age as the sensitive young adults of a high, rebel as indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, and become the empathic elders of an Unravelling. The Silent Generation is an example of an Artist generation. The ingeneration (the term coined by Larry Rosen in his book Rewired: Understanding the ingeneration and the Way They Learn) is expected to emerge as the next generation of this example.

So they are not the Heroes Generation as Generation Y is. Their passing may bring little of note, but you can guarantee they will bring structure and a sense of stagnation, which may be a good thing. One thing is for sure, this generation will be the most family-connected generation ever and in my opinion are much more likely to make a loyal and committed workforce.

As you may or may not know, as I write this the UK is going through a political stalemate, with no stable government and all the parties trying to decide if and how they will form a government. The UK look on in disbelief, not quite knowing what to do. (We now know they have formed a coalition government)

This election was unprecedented in most of our lifetimes and has ended with a hung parliament, meaning that no party has an overall majority to run a stable government.

For the first time in UK politics we had televised debates, which did really shake up politics and really woke the youth up when it came to political reform.

However what happened on Election Day was a real blow for Generation Y and may have been the first time they felt massively let down. After seeing the impact of the youth on the Obama election, they must have felt they had a chance to change things. And as they all rallied around the party that normally came third, they were devastated when an exit poll revealed that this party would lose seats and the party they despised the most would get the most seats. Furthermore, when the exit poll became true, twitter came alive with their displeasure.

Firstly, the fiasco of polling stations having to be shut with queues of people outside and some places running out of ballot papers put them up in arms. Was this really democracy? The challenge for them was that since most of them had gone to vote late, this mainly affected them.

A generation used to having a say, encouraged to have a say and used to being heard were suddenly helpless. And as the dust settled and they looked at the figures, they began to shout very loudly for political reform. How could a party that 64% of the public voted against and had no representation in Scotland and only a bit in Wales be representative of the United Kingdom? How could a party that only had 8% more of the vote have 200 more seats and how could people voting for a party go up yet their seats go down? How could this be fair?

And they were right, it is not fair. They quickly got the figures together and sent them around Twitter and Facebook.

Party Votes per seat – Conservative 34,989. Labour 33,350. Liberal Democrat 119,788

Seeing how unfair this was, they demonstrated and pleaded with the leader of the party they had adopted to push for electoral reform.

Way this election has empowered the youth is so evident. It has empowered them around fairness and equal rights and they are not staying quiet.

So, the message to businesses and people dealing with Gen Y is this.

Ensure your dealings, policies and rules are fair. Ensure that they are not based on outdated tradition and ensure they give the youth as much of a say as anyone else.

By Sarah Newton

Generation Y employees are always being discussed and yet again, more research has the papers saying yes, they do have a sense of entitlement.

There is a post that says:

“Gen Y workers get a bad rap in the workplace, with many a geezer complaining that their work ethic is less developed than their sense of entitlement.” But is that really fair?

Yes, according to new research that has yielded actual data to back up that notion.

In a series of studies using surveys that measure psychological entitlement and narcissism, University of New Hampshire management professor Paul Harvey found that Gen Y respondents scored 25 percent higher than respondents ages 40 to 60 and a whopping 50 percent higher than those over 61.

In addition, Gen Y’s were twice as likely to rank in the top 20 percent in their level of entitlement – the “highly entitled range” – as someone between 40 and 60, and four times more likely than a golden-ager.

And if you think the Gen Yers in your workplace are oversensitive as well as entitled, Harvey’s findings back that up, too. Today’s 20-somethings have an “automatic, knee-jerk reaction to criticism,” he says, and tend to dismiss it. ”

I do think however that the entitled label can send a very negative vibe to potential employees. I like to think of them as expecting the best and wanting more, which I think is a good thing for business and organisations, who so often get away with treating graduates very badly. I was talking to my Dad the other day, who used to train graduates at a top US company and the stories of how they used to make their youth work all the hours that God sent were painful to the ears!

I don’t think Gen Y are entitled, I just think they care about their free time and value themselves, which cannot be a bad thing.

However I think that what can seem an entitled attitude can be a challenge for most employees.

So how do you handle it? Well first, as I have mentioned before, I think you need youth-friendly places but I also think handling this problem can be as simple as using their strengths, for example, their spirit of collaboration.

If you present something as a problem that you need to solve as a team and ask them the best way to meet the objective, you are more likely to get their buy-in. So a “Right, this project needs to be completed for tomorrow, so we are all in for an all-nighter!” would become, “Right, we have an extremely tight deadline on this one, tomorrow morning. How can we work together to sort this out?”

If we focus on what is bad about Gen Y, then that is what we will get, but if we focus on their strengths of collaboration, innovation and creativity, we may just get the very best out of them.

By Sarah Newton*

I recently saw this post and it really got me thinking about how we can manage Gen Y better by taking lessons from video games.

And while, in my experience, I am not sure that Gen Y in the UK keeps score (as stated in the article), so to speak, I do think that bosses can certainly learn how to manage youth by pulling information from the gaming world. As for understanding youth by understanding gaming, well certainly that would apply to boys in the UK but for girls you need to understand social gaming, which is so different.

For me, what they gain from gaming is not necessarily to keep score but to get a reward to keep going. In this modern day world it is a well known fact that young workers will not just go along for the ride as they use to, most want feedback and rewards to keep them going and they want to feel excited. As far as I can see, it goes far deeper than merely keeping score; it is about feeling the buzz of being alive.

So, if you manage lots of young employees, here is what I believe you can learn from their use of video games.

1. Instant feedback – a game gives instant feedback; you do something wrong, you die! You do something right, you move up a level, go further into the game, etc. Young employees want instant feedback, not a Sit down, how are you doing? once a month thing, but after the moment it happens. Ensure your on the ground managers know what to look for and how to correct and praise in an instant.

2. In a game the players know the objective, they know what they are supposed to achieve and when they reach that they get set another very clear task or goal. Make sure objectives you set youths are clear, concise, short-term, achievable goals and if you can link little perks to them, so much the better.

3. I know we all have this image that game play is very individual and people compete against each other or themselves, but that is simply not true anymore. Games are social and achieving something as a team or getting rewarded for helping another out are commonplace. How can you encourage collaboration rather than competition in your workplace and how can you reward helpful behavior?

4. Most games have rewards for achievement so, for example, in the popular Farmville when you gain more points and move up a level more options are open to you, such as things you can buy and how big your farm can be. How can you emulate something like these levels, which open up more privileges?

5. Above all see how you can install some fun into the day. It doesn’t have to mean that the work environment or day has to be interrupted, but the best way to get the most out of young employees is to keep it light, fun and exciting. Innocent in the UK do a great job of this and are seen as an aspirational company to work for. Their canteen has astro turf and their employees are encouraged to blog and share funny pictures. While this might not be appropriate for your company, I am sure that there is some way you could put some youthful energy into your everyday that will make everyone feel happier.

Ines: What do you think the workplace will look like in 5 years? Many generational experts seem to think that we are moving away from traditional corporate structures and into a world of freelancers…Do you think this is the case?
Bruce: I’m not a futurist. I’d say that work is likely to be increasingly free of boundaries when it comes to where and when people work. I’d say work relationships are likely to become more and more short-term and transactional. I’d say that on-site, uninterrupted, long-term, exclusive employment relationships will be less and less common.

Ines: There’s a lot of talk about Gen Y having the highest self-esteem of any Generation so far. Have you encountered this in your research?
Bruce: Why are Gen Yers so confident and self-possessed, even in the face of all this uncertainty? One reason is surely that they grew up in the Decade of the Child. Gen Xers were the great unsupervised generation (we made the latchkey into a metaphor). But Generation Y was the great oversupervised generation. In the short time between the childhood of Generation X and that of Generation Y, making children feel great about themselves and building up their self-esteem became the dominant theme in parenting, teaching, and counseling. Throughout their childhood, Gen Yers were told over and over, “Whatever you think, say or do, that’s okay. Your feelings are true. Don’t worry about how the other kids play. That’s their style. You have your style.” This is what child psychologists called “positive tolerance,” and it was only one small step to the damaging cultural lies that somehow “we are all winners” and “everyone gets a trophy.”

Gen Yers have been respected, nurtured, scheduled, measured, discussed, diagnosed, medicated, programmed, and rewarded as long as they can remember. Their parents, determined to create a generation of super-children, perhaps accelerated their childhood. On one hand, kids grow up so fast today (I often say that twelve is the new nineteen); on the other, they seem to stay tightly moored to their parents throughout their twenties. Their early precociousness,in fact, turns into a long-lasting sophomorism. Many psychologists have observed that Gen Yers act like highly precocious late adolescents well into adulthood. (I often say that thirty is the new twenty.)

Ines: Your work reveals an interesting feature about Gen Y. On one hand, they’ve grown up with the hyper-connectivity and flexibility of the Internet and digital age, thriving on customization and diversity. Yet from your research they obviously need a great deal of structure in the workplace. What’s the key to reconciling these two Gen Y characteristics in the workplace?
Bruce: Gen Yers want freedom to maneuver at work. They want some latitude when it comes to their schedule, where they do their work, whom they work with, what they do, and how they do it. The problem is that every task, responsibility, and project has parameters that constrain every employee’s freedom.

But as much as they love freedom, Gen Yers also gravitate to structure and boundaries. For one thing, they don’t want to waste their time. Don’t forget, since they were kids, Gen Yers have been hyper-scheduled by overbearing adults. Whether they were being subjected to metal detectors, locker searches and lockdowns in school, or their own “individual learning plans”—and everything in between—Gen Yers are well accustomed to programs and procedures. One Gen Yer describes it this way: “The last thing I’m looking for is somebody telling me, ‘Yeah, do it how you think it should be done,’ but then it turns out she already knows exactly how she wants it done. I don’t want to beat my head against the wall trying to figure something out if you’ve already got it figured out. I definitely am interested in putting my personal stamp on things, but if that’s not going to happen, tell me up front.”

If you want to give Gen Yers more freedom at work, the biggest favor you can do for them is establish clear boundaries and give them a structure within which they can function with some autonomy. It is true that some jobs require employees to take risks and make mistakes. Even in those cases, it is the manager’s job to help Gen Yers avoid taking unnecessary risks and repeating mistakes that others have already made. Creativity and innovation do not require recklessness. You tell the advertising copywriter to “think outside the box,” but you must also help him avoid libel, slander, and obscenity. You need the nuclear scientist to be innovative, but you must help her avoid a nuclear explosion. It’s great if your food preparation workers are creative, but you don’t want them changing the recipes on regular menu items. As a leader, you have to create a structure and clear boundaries in order to create a space in which risk taking and mistakes are truly safe in the context of a job.

Often a good way to allow Gen Yers to express creativity is to give them assignments that are truly matters of first impression. Maybe you, as the manager, don’t yet have a clear goal in mind; you don’t know exactly what you are looking for yet. This is a great opportunity to ask a young employee to “take a crack at it” and “do it however you think it should be done” and really mean what you say. It’s perfectly fine to use this Gen Yer to help you work out the early stages of your own creative process. But make sure you are clear from the start about the structure and boundaries. Explain that you are delegating only the initial stage of the creative process and you intend to take the project back.

In fact, whenever you have a new task, responsibility, or project for one of your very capable young employees, always start by spelling out expectations. Make absolutely sure that person understands exactly what he is expected to do and how he is expected to do it. That’s the only way to get employees to adopt your organization’s best practices and turn them into standard operating procedures.

Ines: Ines: And how should be the performance appraisal or the follow-up after gen Y´s tasks?
Bruce: As long as the assignment lasts, you should follow up regularly with one-on-one check-in conversations to review the employee’s progress. In those conversations, you should ask, “What have you already done? What steps did you follow? What step are you going to do next?” Listen carefully to their answers. Make it a habit to wrap up these conversations by deciding on a specific place and time for your next meeting to follow up.

Every assignment, no matter how much freedom and creativity is required, must have clear goals and specific deadlines with measurable benchmarks along the way. Boundaries and structure, however loose, are actually the keys to making freedom and creativity in the real world possible.

You might think a generation raised on mantras like “we’re all winners” and “everyone gets a trophy” wouldn’t be particularly competitive. But that is not the case. While the self-esteem movement was chipping away at Generation Y ers’ competitiveness, the testing movement was building it back up. Still, testing breeds a different kind of competitiveness: competition against standards and benchmarks, against averages and means, and against one’s own past performance.

Think about a video game that a Gen Yer might practice and practice, beating one high score after another, set by himself. He wins every time, and nobody has a reason to feel bad. That’s the kind of competition Gen Yers are looking for: they want to compete against themselves in a safe environment where they can try over and over again to improve on their own performance benchmarks. When it comes to competitiveness at work, this is what one Gen Yer had to say: “I’ll do whatever they want me to do. Just tell me someone is keeping track of all this stuff I’m doing. Tell me I’m getting credit for it, that I’ve been racking up points here like mad. Tell me someone is keeping score.”

When Gen Yers know you are keeping track of their day-to-day performance, their measuring instinct is sparked and their competitive spirit ignited.

If you can think of easy ways to convert the performance you need from your young employees into a point system, then maybe you should consider it. I promise you, a point system will get Gen Yers focused like a laser beam. If you want them to start showing up earlier for work, attach points for every minute they arrive early, and take away points for every minute they come in late. If you want Gen Yers to meet quality standards, give them checklists of every detail and specification, and give points for every detail and specification completed—and take away points for every one missed. If you want Gen Yers to speed up, set a realistic quota of tasks per hour and give points for every task done over the quota—and take away points for every task under the quota. And so on.

Another approach is to help Gen Yers keep track of their own work by using self-monitoring tools. Activity logs are diaries that Gen Yers can keep, noting contemporaneously exactly what they do all day. Each time he or she moves on to a new activity, the Gen Yer might note the time and the new activity. By using these tools, Gen Yers can document their own hard work every step of the way and build their own track record of success.

My advice to managers is to plug into Gen Yers’ transactional mind-set. Stop paying them and start buying their results, one by one. The more you trade results for rewards, the more reliable their performance will be. The smaller the increments you buy in, the more effective it will be.

The key to your success will be defining those measurable pieces of work and setting a price per piece.

Like was said in the post bellow, here goes the second part of the interview with Bruce Tulgan, the founder of Rainmaker Thinking Inc., best-selling author and the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Toastmaster’s International Golden Gavel, in an exclusive interview with Talking About Generations:

Ines: How do the aspects of privilege, culture, and social class fit into “Not everyone gets a trophy?” Is the idea of a generation getting trophies just for showing up, linked to a privileged American upbringing?
Bruce: The title is a reference to the fact that Generation Y is the generation of kids where every kid did get a trophy, just for participating. So many so-called ‘experts’ have jumped onto the bandwagon of this topic, but our research shows that most of these so-called ‘experts’ have got it all wrong. In many recent books and articles, many of these ‘experts’ argue that, since Gen Yers have always gotten a trophy just for showing up, maybe the best way to manage them is to give them lots of praise and, basically, give them a trophy just for showing up.

These ‘experts’ tell managers to create “thank-you” programs, “praise” programs, and “reward” programs. They recommend turning recruiting into one long sales pitch; transforming the workplace into a veritable playground; rearranging training so it revolves around interactive computer gaming; encouraging young workers to find a “best friend” at work; and teaching managers to soft-pedal their authority. In my view, this approach is out of touch with reality, especially in today’s environment.

Here’s the short story with Generation Y. If you liked Generation X, you are going to love Generation Y. Generation Y is like Generation X on-fast-forward-with-self-esteem-on-steroids. Gen Yers’ childhood was defined mostly by the 1990s, and they are reaching their early stage of adulthood amid the profound changes of the 2000s—this era of uncertainty. One could say that the same major historical forces that shaped Generation X are also shaping Generation Y: Globalization and technology, institutions in a state of constant flux, the information tidal wave, and the growing immediacy of everything. But those forces have picked up so much velocity in just one generation that I would argue there is a profound difference in the life experience of Generation Y. After all, there is only one globe, and it is now totally interconnected. GenYers connect with their farthest-flung neighbors in real time regardless of geography through online communities of interest.

But as our world shrinks (or flattens), events great and small taking place on the other side of the world (or right next door) can affect our material well-being almost overnight. World institutions—nations, states, cities, neighborhoods, families, corporations, churches, charities, and schools—remain in a state of constant flux just to survive. Authority is questioned routinely. Research is quick and easy. Anyone can get published. We try to filter through the endless tidal wave of information coming at us from an infinite number of sources. A year is long term, and five years is just a hallucination. Short term is the key to relevance. In a world defined by constant change, instantaneous response is the only meaningful time frame.

Ines: But why is Gen Y so different from other generations?
Bruce: Gen Yers are comfortable in this highly interconnected rapidly changing web of variables. Uncertainty is their natural habitat. Globalization does not make Gen Yers feel small. Rather, it makes them feel worldly. Technological change does not make them feel as if they are racing to keep up. Rather, it makes them feel connected and powerful.

Institutions may be in a state of constant flux, but that’s no problem. Gen Yers are just passing through anyway, trying to squeeze out as much experience and as many resources as they can and so on.

The power of diversity has finally kicked over the melting pot. Generation Y is the most diverse generation in history in terms of ethnic heritage, geographical origins, ability/disability, age, language, lifestyle preference, sexual orientation, color, size, and every other way of categorizing people. But this doesn’t make Gen Yers feel alienated and threatened. Rather, they take the concept of diversity to a whole new level. Generation Y, difference is cool. Uniqueness is the centerpiece of identity.

How do Gen Yers continually shape and reshape their uniqueness? They want to customize anything and everything they possibly can. This goes beyond the services and products they buy. Gen Yers want to customize their very minds, bodies, and spirits, by customizing their information environment on the Internet. They voraciously pursue an ever-increasing array of mind food—images, sounds, experiences, texts—in an ever increasing range of media and formats, from an ever increasing number of sources, for an ever increasing number of purposes (education, skills training, self-help, health, entertainment, news, household matters, consumer interests, life planning, death planning, spirituality, and so on).

They customize their bodies by availing themselves of the wide range of natural and artificial tools and techniques, going way beyond tattoos and piercing and fashion statements. Their efforts range from food obsession to surgery; from Ritalin to naturalism; from yoga to steroids; implants, teeth whitening, tanning cream, and on and on. Beyond family, they customize their primary relationships across space and time in personalized networks. They even customize spiritual lives of their own devising. Gen Yers often put together bits and pieces of the teachings of one or more religious traditions, rejecting others, and ultimately settling on their own selection of values and beliefs and religious or spiritual practices.

From the first day, they arrive in the workplace, they are scrambling to keep their options open, leverage their uniqueness for all its potential value, and wrap a customized career around the customized life they are trying to build.

Ines: In your book, you argue that the idea that Gen Y needs work to be fun is a myth. I recently interviewed Don Tapscott the author of “Wikinomics.“ He writes, “They (Gen Y) think work—the work itself—should be fun and challenging.” He also states, “Training has to change, too. Some companies are using game-based training…” This seems to contrast with your view. What are your thoughts on this?
Bruce: One of the most important things I’ve learned in our research is that most GenYers don’t want to be humored at work. They want to be taken seriously. But they do want work to be engaging. They want to learn, to be challenged, and to understand the relationship between their work and the overall mission of the organization. They want to work with good people and have some flexibility in where, when, and how they work.

From computers, GenYers want to fill skill or knowledge gaps that get in their way. Their tools are usually menu driven information systems, wiki tools, and social networking sites. And it drives GenYers crazy when they have less sophisticated information management tools at work than they have at home. But that doesn’t mean they only want to learn from computers. They absolutely need the human element to do their best learning. GenYers love grown-ups and they love to learn from grown-ups whom they trust, and who are willing to share with them the lessons of their experience.

Gen Yers, especially the most capable and ambitious among them, push hard for more significant roles with increased responsibilities at much earlier stages in their careers than new young workers of generations past. It’s not just misplaced arrogance on their part, but rather a result of their natural adaptation to the information environment.

Managers tell me all the time, “In our line of work, it’s especially challenging to give inexperienced young people significant responsibilities. Perhaps a new young person could learn the knowledge and skill necessary to do one of these tasks and responsibilities, or two, or three, or four. But the role they want is too complex to hand over in its entirety to someone without several years of experience.” I promise you, I’ve been told that by leaders in supermarkets and nuclear weapons labs alike—and everybody in between. We call this the “meaningful roles problem.”

Ines: And what could be the solution for this managers and companies?
Bruce: The simple fact is that if it takes you months or years to get Gen Yers up to speed and into meaningful roles on your team, then you’ll have serious problems keeping high-potential Gen Yers engaged and growing. Don’t tell me you are struggling to manage and retain the best Gen Yers and then tell me it’s going to take months or years before they can do important work that allows their coworkers and bosses to take them seriously. How can you handle this conundrum? You may have to unbundle complex roles and then rebuild them one tiny piece at a time. You can give Gen Yers meaningful work at early stages in their tenure if you commit to teaching and transferring to them one small task or responsibility at a time.

So often I go into an organization that is trying to retool its training practices to suit what they think Gen Yers want and need.

Here’s the good news: you do not have to turn everything (or anything really) into a computer game to plug into Gen Yers’ learning needs. But you really should make the effort to get them the technology they are so comfortable and adept at using.

Yes, Gen Yers want the latest and greatest technology. But it’s not just a desire for the coolest toy. It’s like breathing. It’s their connection to the larger information environment. For Gen Yers, the information technology imperatives are simple: constant connectivity with whomever they want, immediate access to whatever information they want, total customization of their information environment, the ability to learn from and collaborate with experts in real time.

Wiki technology is the ultimate collaboration facilitator by enabling different individuals to contribute to a work product from remote locations on their own time.

Social networking allows anyone to build mutually rewarding relationships with people of similar interests—inside the company or outside—regardless of geography or other boundaries. Instant messaging means anyone can ask anyone they “know” anything at any time. Imagine a mind-set in which these tools—and the corresponding connectivity, immediacy, constant access, and total customization—are taken for granted. The only question is, What are you doing to facilitate Gen Yers’ use of these tools to increase their effectiveness at work?

Put the tools in their hands, and watch them fill one tiny information gap at a time in real time. This is the high-tech analogue to learning one task at a time. With access to the technology they know and love, Gen Yers will fine-tune and nuance their on-the-job learning in ways that might shock and delight you.

Especially when they are new on the job, Gen Yers are eager to identify problems that nobody else has identified and solve problems that nobody else has solved. They want to improve what’s already there, and they want to invent new things.

Most Gen Yers understand this on a gut level and won’t have it any other way. The real challenge is to keep them focused on all that work you hired them to do while simultaneously encouraging them to leverage knowledge and skill in that work. The more you encourage Gen Yers to think about their work—-whatever that work might be—the more engaged they will be. Help them channel their learning directly into their work instead of shooting down their ideas and dampening their enthusiasm. If you hire someone to unload boxes from a truck and that person wants to be an ideas guy, you need to get that individual to focus his thinking and learning on how to better unload boxes from the truck. If you hire someone to dig a ditch, get that individual to focus on how to dig that ditch better. And so on.

When they come in the door, Gen Yers want to hit the ground running. By training them one task a time, giving them the technology tools they need to be fast and efficient, and helping them focus their energy and ideas on the tasks at hand, you’ll be able to plug into their enthusiasm and keep their excitement going past their first day at the job.

Parents have never been so influential in their children’s decisions as they are today. Many parents actually accompany their children to job interviews. Some even make a point of dropping them off on the first day of work. Parents regularly complain about heir children’s grades and shamelessly ask bosses to lighten their child’s workload. Of course, this is old news. Everybody knows that generation Y grew up being overprotected and over parented. Parents are of course largely responsible for young people’s behavior in the workplace today.

Many experts have dedicated themselves to exploring this subject and discovering possible solutions. Bruce Tulgan is one of them. Tulgan argues, “Without strong management in the workplace, there is a void where their parents have always been.” Drawing from his experience as an inter-generational expert, Tulgan tells bosses to “Step into the void…[and] take over the tutoring aspects of the parental role in the workplace.”

Tulgan is the founder of Rainmaker Thinking Inc. and a best-selling author, his most recent book is “Not Everyone Gets a Trophy.” He is also the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Toastmaster’s International Golden Gavel. In an exclusive interview with http://www.talkingaboutgenerations.com, Tulgan shares his thoughts on managing the generation who got a trophy just for showing up.

Ines: You’ve spent years conducting in-depth research on the millennial generation, becoming a veritable expert on the subject. What specifically made you interested in studying this generation, since you’ve spent good part of your career practicing Law?
Bruce: I started out interviewing young people in the workplace back in 1993 when I was a 26 year old lawyer. The oldest of Generation Y at that point were only about 15. Since then, I’ve continued interviewing young people in the workplace. It’s just that I’ve gotten older and older and the young people have become the next generation. So now the oldest GenYers are 32. Just wait, soon they’ll be in their forties and the young people in the workplace will be Generation Z.

Ines: Can you talk a bit about what made you want to found “Rainmaker Thinking” and what you are trying to accomplish through the company?
Bruce: Back in 1993, I was an unhappy lawyer working at Two Wall Street in New York City. I became curious about what was then becoming obvious to me, the generation gap in the workplace at the time. That curiosity turned into a book, which was MANAGING GENERATION X. That book got a lot of attention.

Companies started inviting me to speak at their conferences, train their managers, observe their operations and conduct focus groups with their employees. Then I became more and more interested in the dynamics between managers and employees, more generally. I’d go into a company, interview their employees and managers, meet with the senior executives and share what I’d learned from the employees and managers. And we’d provide training for employees to help them work more effectively with their managers and with each other.

Since the mid-1990s, I’ve had a front-row seat from which to study workplace dynamics. I’ve spent most of my time training managers and employees at all levels and every industry. The more we learn, the more we turn that learning back into more training. It’s a dynamic process, learning from people in our focus groups and interviews and turning those lessons into training programs so we can proliferate the best practices.

Ines: In a praiseful Boston Globe review of your book “Not everyone gets a trophy,” the reviewer remarks, “Tulgan’s approach sometimes sounds more like parenting than managing.” In your opinion do managers have to take on a parenting role? And if so, how will Gen Y eventually learn to “parent” and “lead” themselves?
Bruce: I have a whole chapter in the book called, “Practice In Loco Parentis Management.” Of course, that is somewhat meant to be tongue in cheek, but there is a lot of real data underlying this. The details change, but the thrust of the story is always the same. There’s no doubt that parents are far more heavily involved in the lives and careers of their young adult children than those of previous generations.

College professors and administrators report that the parents of Gen Yers show up to new student orientations in record numbers (some studies indicate that more than 80 percent of new students are now accompanied by a parent for some part or all of orientation). Parents are often consulted several times a day by their college-attending children, using cell phone check-ins to get advice about course choices, classroom protocol, homework assignments, and exams. Professors routinely field parental complaints about student workload and grades.

This pattern of helicopter parenting carries over once Gen Yers get to the workplace. Managers tell me about parents accompanying their children to job interviews and even, once in a while, to the first day of work. Parents are consulted about career decisions and management practices. The big surprise comes when managers hear directly from parents, suggesting their children should be working fewer hours, getting different assignments, winning promotions, and receiving pay increases.

Yes, it is commonplace today for parents to insert themselves in support of their young (and not-so-young) adult children, even in the most adult spheres when such involvement would have been considered totally inappropriate in the past. But remember, this is nothing new for Gen Yers. Their parents have always been highly engaged with them. Every step of the way, they have been guided, directed, supported, coached, and protected. Unlike previous generations, they don’t express much desire to break free as they reach adulthood.

It’s become almost cliché to say that Generation Y is over-parented. But they are. And that is a fact with which managers today must grapple. I don’t think you should accept that. You hired the employee, not the parents. But you do have to deal with it. The irony is that if you hire a Gen Yer who is not close to his or her parents, you may be sorry. Among today’s young workers, those who are closest to their parents will probably turn out to be the most able, most achievement oriented, and the hardest working.

Ines: And what’s the way for employers to deal with this problem of over-parenting?

In my seminars, I tell to take a strong hand as a manager, not a weak one. Your Gen Y employees need to know that you know who they are and care about their success. You need to make it a priority to spend time with them. Guide them through this very difficult and scary world. Break things down like a teacher. Provide regular, gentle course corrections to keep them on track. Be honest with them so you can help them improve. Keep close track of their successes no matter how small. Reward the behavior you want and need to see, and even negotiate special rewards for above-and-beyond performance in very small increments along the way.

When I describe this approach at seminars, at least one manager will remark that this sounds a lot like parenting. Are you saying that we should manage these young upstarts as if we are their parents?”

I’m afraid the answer I’ve come to is yes, at least sort of. Do be careful, and don’t get carried away. The worst thing you can possibly do with Gen Yers is treat them like children, talk down to them, or make them feel disrespected. Gen Yers are used to being treated as valued members of the family, whose thoughts and feelings are important. Remember, Generation Y has gotten more respect from their parents and elders than any other generation in history.

I call this approach in loco parentis management.

Read on tuesday the second part of the interview with Bruce Tulgan