the SUN series: Engaging Millennials into the Workforce

Thursday, 29 September 2011 23:33

the SUN series: Engaging Millennials into the Workforce

Written by Juma Wood

(This is the tenth article in the SUN series, a regular column in the business section of the Vancouver Sun, the cities largest daily newspaper. The introduction to this series is here.)

I heard the following conversation between two young colleagues on the elevator as I was coming up to write this article.

Person # 1: How are things?

Person # 2: It’s Wednesday. How are things in your department?

Person # 1: It is what it is.

It wasn’t very inspiring, to say the least. There was an air of tedium and detachment that should make any executive cringe. Any executive, that is, who recognizes the value in connecting to their young talent. millennials

Young employees aren’t motivated by the external incentives that drove previous generations. They are motivated by a call to adventure, where incentives are built into the purpose of their mission. Aligning personal and professional purpose for young employees is the primary challenge for today’s leaders.

I’m reminded of the difference between Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Where the elder Bilbo is the reluctant hero dragged from his comfortable life, the younger Frodo sets out willingly (albeit under strain and pending doom) to fulfill his destiny.

It’s clear from the exchange above that the younger generation is currently losing the battle for Middle-earth.

The inter-generational fault lines that affect the workplace are deeper and more complicated than many of the solutions to correct them.

Let me explain quickly what I mean by inter-generational fault lines.

There are three dominant generations active in the contemporary workplace, and broadly speaking each has a different approach to work: Baby Boomers live to work, while Gen X’ers work to live and Millennials see their work and life as undivided and so are drawn to a livelihood that aligns to what they see as their purpose in life.

Most office environments are disconnected from what motivates Millennials. Interactions tend to be stilted and cautious with people hiding behind a veneer of professionalism. This type of office culture is strongly Gen X influenced, strictly dividing personal from professional.

There’s a popular movement afoot to improve the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) quotient in many workplace environments. This is an important step to integrate Millenials into the workplace. EQ distinguishes four categories of emotional maturity: Self-awareness, Self-management, Social Awareness and Relationship Management. Each has a subset of emotional competencies that determine maturity in any of these areas.

Introduced properly, this trend can help capture and unleash the passion that Millennials have to offer. A skeptic might point out that the office is not an appropriate arena to express emotions, but such a skeptic, besides being decidedly not a Millennial, is emphasizing the Emotion and overlooking the Intelligence portion of EQ. mordor

Any decent psychologist will agree that emotions like fear, anger, joy and love hold important intelligence. Most work environments now are cold, calculating and cerebral, comfortable for Boomers who are emotionally repressed and Gen X’ers who are emotionally divided but for Millennials this is Mordor, the destitute land ruled by the evil lord Sauron.

If Millennials can’t be expressive they will become disengaged. The challenge for managers is to learn how to find appropriate outlets for this emotional intelligence to cultivate and grow. Be willing to ask personal questions and share from your own personal life. Give constructive feedback that is specifically relevant to an EQ competency you are trying to help your young staff develop. And most importantly find out how they see their work aligning to their sense of purpose in the world.

It won’t be easy for many Boomer’s and Gen X’ers. It will feel awkward and uncomfortable much like Bilbo felt when he was forced out into his unwelcome adventure. But stick with it. Middle-earth will be won by organizations that can harness the EQ dormant in their organizations and inspire a call to adventure in their young talent.

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6 comments

Comment Link Friday, 30 September 2011 22:44 posted by Bergen Vermette
saw this article linked on FB today that speaks to what you're saying.

Title: "Millennials Have (and Need) Big Problems to Solve"

In it, John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods, speaks about his experiences with an employee base that's almost 50% Millennials.

There's also a short video.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/40158
Comment Link Saturday, 01 October 2011 04:52 posted by Juma Wood
This is spot on Berg. And the bigger the problem the better, because left to their own devices this generation can also, in my experience, cause all sorts of headaches when they're needs aren't met. They can be quite needy, desperate to be important and do important things and have a sense of entitlement about their place in the world.

That said, they have the energy of youth, and that energy, unlike previous generations, wants to shower out onto the whole world. Lead them, for they want to be led, set them loose, because they don't want to be micromanaged and give them challenges, because they know in their bones the issues are big and are theirs to solve.
Comment Link Saturday, 01 October 2011 19:12 posted by Lindsay
Great article Juma,

I love how clearly you present the emotional differences between the generations. While I'm sure there's many shades of grey, this highlights why it's really important to understand and integrate the emotional atmosphere of a generation. Especially the younger ones entering the work place, or entering any aspect of life for that matter. Whatever generation we belong to, and whatever ever aspects of life we're embarking on, understanding this concept is key.

We tend to relate to and understand others (or groups) who are emotionally similar to ourselves (consciously or not), but are unfortunately dismissive (consciously or not), of those who aren't. If someone doesn't 'feel' or experience emotionally the way we do, we often think that their experience has less value, or is not valid at all, because we didn't experience it ourselves. Taking the time to genuinely learn and understand how others (individuals, cultures and whole generations) operate emotionally will definitely open things up.

On a personal note, this was really interesting for me to read and consider how I operate in the work place. I was raised by blue collar Baby Boomers. My father is definitely emotionally repressed at work (and at everything else), which showed up as constant anger at home and eventually some heart problems. But, an insanely hard worker. I'm right at the end of Gen X, and I definitely work to live and have some emotional divide between work and life. But, I'm also right at the beginning of Gen Y (born 1977), and I would so love to have a livelihood that aligns with my purpose/passions in life. So I HATE that I work to live, but I've felt most of my life that there's no other options, and suffer daily because of it.

But this has given me much to think about, so thank you for writing it.
Comment Link Saturday, 01 October 2011 23:23 posted by Kitty Wilson-Pote
Juma, this is so bang-on! At 66, I feel very fortunate to have been part of the Between Generation -- neither really postwar nor boomer -- and to have entered my teaching career in the heyday of new hopes filling the new Ontario Community College system. The faculty in my school were encouraged to be as vibrant and vital a part of curricula and of our work community as possible, to grow as individuals as well as educators and to "Keep It Real" in the human sense. After about a decade, though, the emphasis shifted to a Boomer philosophy, probably necessarily. After two decades, our college was referring to students as "clients" and after three decades -- well, I'd definitely become exhausted by the efficiency model that sucked most of the dynamism and real learning, real EQ development out of the work there.

Here's to a renewal, in fact a whole new shaping of the energy that inspired me in my workplace 40 years ago -- it was a power for good that transcended the relative innocence of those idealistic times.
Comment Link Monday, 03 October 2011 23:56 posted by Juma
@Lindsay I think your insight re. how we relate to those who share our emotional dispositions is a fine one. There is often a tacit and dubious agreement that certain topics/dispositions are out of bounds and certain are within the boundary of professionalism. This is how culture shapes and bullies people. Some of the great work and literature that is at the progressive edge of creative work environments (Theory U, Flow, etc..) require an important mixture of transparency and maturity. Millennials are often transparent without the maturity (much of it owing to age, much of it owing to this idea of bringing your whole being into the room being a new one in general) while Gen X & Boomers have a certain maturity (often owing to age and experience) but are painfully opaque. The act of resolving tensions, peering into the future, acting on intuition, these require a trust that is not born simply from sharing the same repressed philosophy on professionalism, but rather a trust that emerges from transparency and the capacity (maturity) to hold and process tensions, perspectives, multiple information streams. Genuine inquiry and thus collective intelligence is born from such things.

As to your thoughts on purpose, this is thorny. I think a variety of circumstances, fear and conditioning hold us to certain stations in life. I don't quite have the brazenness of many Millennials to 'follow my bliss' as it were, but then this pursuit is often fraught with narcissism. My current stance is that as best as possible to being doing or moving towards work in the venn overlap between what I'm passionate about and what the world needs. And to have the humility to know where I might fit in that rather large picture.

@Kitty, thanks for sharing your experience. Renewal is such an important word in this context. Millennials are often called Echo Boomers because they capture the idealism and enthusiasm of many of the progressive and post-war early Boomers, who were very much about renewal. Without renewal, i believe most environments are destined to contract to subsistence levels. Renewal can look like a lot of things: staff turnover, new leadership, innovative management practices, compelling vision, all of the above.

I like to think that the fact that Millennials have been wired to think globally since birth (where this was mostly a born concept of the Boomers) gives a certain legitimacy that their idealism has more staying power. Truth is all environments oscillate between healthy and unhealthy cultural practices and grow stale over time. This is especially and unfortunately true of union environments but certainly not limited to them. I believe sustained renewal will come with a combination of developmental competencies (EQ high among them), global necessity and innovative practices around management and governance.

I also believe that the infectious enthusiasm of Millennials may well be inexhaustable and wired into their generation, and therefore finding ways to set it free (or removing the barriers to its repression) is an important leadership responsibility.
Comment Link Sunday, 20 November 2011 19:05 posted by Bergen Vermette
Came across this interesting article today by a millennial.

He raises some interesting and sober points about the realities of being a young person in the workforce.

He also disagrees with the idea that there are major generational differences among the boomers/x'ers/millennials. On this point I think he's right - but only to a degree. From what he's written he largely reduces generational experiences to material, technocratic events (right hand quadrants, in integral speak).

This misses, in my opinion, the influence of the zeitgeist of the times (as has been spoken about in the comments above), mood, significant events, changes in cultural expectations, etc. These factors shouldn't be overemphasized either - nor should millennials feel particularly special that they "live in a different time" - but they're important factors to keep in the picture.

http://technoccult.net/archives/2009/02/18/generational-differences/