If each county was a basebal league , and each department functioned as a team, who would the department heads be: the team manager, the coach, the umpire, or the biggest fan?
And if each department were a team, would you want Nolan Ryan hanging around giving advice, even to the outfielders?
For a while now, managers have had it somewhat easy, according to human resources and workforce experts who have studied how organizations can get the best results from their employees. The Generation X-ers (now 30-somethings) entering the workforce between 1985 through 2000 generally required relatively little management: hand employees a task, leave them alone to go do it, then compliment them on a job well done. Allow them to go home early and everyone was satisfied.
But with Generation X moving up in the workforce and new players coming in, managers may find themselves wondering what hat they should be wearing. The newest recruits – the 20-somethings who make up Generation Y – need a boss, to be sure, but they also seem to need their own set of cheerleaders and fans.
“Boomers who are now managers have to be trained that management means a lot of things,” said John Payne, a field representative and marketing specialist for the Texas Association of Counties. “Managing means mentoring. It means coaching. It means cajoling. And it also means being the boss when you have to be the boss. You have to be Dad, Mom, Brother and Sister in a management way. You wear a lot of hats.”
Experts on the multigenerational workforce all seem to agree that Generation Y requires a different type of management style than its predecessor, Generation X: more praise, more communication, more apparent trust in an employee’s abilities. The difference is slight, but visible: instead of teaching, Generation Y requires coaching. They want managers who are inspirational leaders and motivators, who yell from the sidelines and push for improvement, all in the spirit of saying ‘good job.’
And, they expect the coach to have proven himself, not just once, but daily.
“You have to lead by example,” Payne said. “Your employees have to see that it is important to you, and that you can take a mad taxpayer and have them chew you out, and then help them, and that they can have home runs in customer service. They all have to see it, and then they will all buy into it.”
Most workforce experts also agree that Generation Y employees are most satisfied when they are learning new job skills and have visible advancement opportunities.
Many private sector companies – Microsoft, Boeing, Hewlett- Packard, Intel, Southwest Airlines, State Farm Insurance – have taken those insights and created mentorship programs aimed to help Generation Y recruitment and retention.
Some of those mentorship programs have gained press for their successes, but others fail and even push away the talent they were created to keep and mold.
“I hear from some people that say, ‘We do have a formal mentoring program,’ but when I hear from the young people (working for that company), they say, ‘I don’t really like it because I don’t want a mentor, or I feel like I’m bothering them,’” said Pat Schnee, the lead trainer for the University of Texas Professional Development Center. “People literally, from all over the world, are confused about what to do.”
One problem may be that managers and employees all say ‘mentor,’ but each group is picturing different functions and roles, and neither group can let its own ideas go.
Many Boomers have specific, personal ideas of what and who a mentor should be, based on people who helped shaped their own careers.
“I had a very experienced manager who was an excellent teacher. I was in sales and I followed his sales techniques, and they worked. He taught relationship-selling, and taught me that the product will sell itself; what you establish is trust with your customer,” Payne said. “It was a very unofficial mentorship, but I see now that that was a very important part of my training as a marketing person. I probably wouldn’t have succeeded without it.”
But organizations and managers have to be careful about pressing their own ideas, aspirations and selves onto Generation Y. Young people say they want mentors in the workplace, but Schnee said she believes they ultimately are talking about two different types of programs: one for initiation, and then one for short-term tutoring and skill building. That’s not exactly the same concept as what baby boomers have in mind when they talk about a guiding light who infuses wisdom and knowledge upon the favorite young gun.
“(Generation Y) wants, immediately, a mentor who is a friend, somebody that can help navigate them through the workplace culture,” Schnee said. “My generation wanted someone that would help them grow, someone they would look up to.”
Not that the guiding light concept is the wrong way to go. Ultimately, all three ideas have their benefits, and the best way to judge which is most appropriate for one county or another is to ask. Young people, after all, generally won’t shy away from the microphone.
“The first step is to get people thinking about mentoring within your organization. Bring in your new talent and talk to them, ask them what they would want or need in a mentor. Let them be a part of the decision-making on how to set up the program,” Schnee said.
One word, many ideas
There are four main concepts of mentorship being discussed among Generation Y experts:
• The Friend. Mentors who help a person understand the structure of an organization and how it all fits together. Colleagues who know the workplace culture and who can give advice on what to do when dealing with Person A and Boss B or on the best person to share Idea A with. Someone to make a person feel immediately at home in the work place, whose role eventually vanishes.
• The Tutor. Mentors who are well-developed in a specific skill that may or may not fall into a young employee’s career path but who can still allow someone else the opportunity to learn or explore something knew. These mentors are also short-term; the relationship is present only on an as-needed basis.
• The Super Star. Mentors who have all the perceived skills and experience a young person wants to eventually gain, who spend years shedding light and knowledge upon a young person with the intention of promoting him or her up the ladder.
• The Therapist. Mentors who may not have any experience in a person’s field at all, but who are good at advising and discussing strategies and solutions. Much like a high school career counselor, they don’t pass down knowledge, but try to help their mentees find their own enlightenment.
Each program could fail if it’s not designed carefully, especially if mentors aren’t trained or if young employees aren’t given the option of opting out.
If creating an initiation-type mentorship program, it’s most likely necessary to ask long-time valued employees to volunteer and be trained as mentors. While young workers do expect managers to have the same skill sets and attributes as a mentor – someone who cares about their professional development and future, someone who knows more than they do, someone who can listen and offer advice – their manager can’t properly fill the role as the person they discuss workplace problems with, especially since the most common problems are boss-related.
That means creating a selection process for employees who want to be mentors, which can be difficult both politically and logistically. It’s important to find people who will be earnest about taking an interest in someone else’s professional development while not ostracizing employees who choose not to participate or who are not chosen to participate.
Choosing which driving factor the mentor-mentee relationships should be based on is also important. Some organizations go by personal traits and have employees take personality assessments; others go by expected career path; some choose mentors from different departments; others allow the mentee to decide. It’s also possible to pair teams together based on interests and personality during the initiation period, then after months or years introduce the employee to a second mentorship program based on career path and job skills. Judy Feld, a professional coaching expert who trains private sector companies on how to create mentorship programs, said she advises organizations to ask employees who would like to participate in a mentorship program and how, rather than select certain employees and then ask if they will participate.
“I think it’s a privilege to be a mentor,” Feld said. “To be fair, everybody on the organization’s side ought to have an opportunity to tell the decision-maker that they want to be a mentor. I might send out a company-wide memo that says, ‘I’d like to know why you’d like to be a mentor and what it is about your personality or path or experience that shows this would be a good fit for you, and what kind of person would you like to mentor?’ And then it’s not like, okay, you’ve been selected, but you’re out. You can just say, for the first round, we’ve selected this list of people, but there will be another round. That way, you’re immediately filtering out a lot of people who didn’t reply” and don’t want to make the commitment.
Either way, mentors should have specific goals in mind: either helping a new employee become comfortable with their new position and colleagues and excited about a long-term future with the county, or passing on specific and general knowledge about an institution or position in order to prepare for promotion or retirement. Working toward those specific goals does take some training.
Mentors have to understand the ins and outs of a department or organization, know the various roles people play, be willing to listen, and have good communications skills that cater to various personality types and employee preferences. Mentors will most likely need a set of ground rules or activities to get started: a forum for meeting, topics to discuss, frequently asked questions to address, field trips.
“If you just say, ‘Person A, mentor Person B,’ they are liable to talk about the football game,” Feld said. “Even if the mentors in an organization are volunteers, they still have to treat it as a commitment. You don’t want the mentors to let down the mentees.”
Generation Why A theory for why today’s 20-somethings are different than yesterday’s 20-somethings By Maria Sprow
I’m siting in a seminar during the Texas Association of Counties’ 2008 County Management Institute, asking myself where I belong. Pat Schnee, the lead trainer and curriculum coordinator for the University of Texas Professional Development Center, is giving a presentation on the multigenerational workforce and saying some not-so-appealing generalizations about “Generation Y,” basically those now in their 20s.
The “new workforce,” she explains to the crowd, thinks of work as a means to an end. We prioritize our social lives above our work lives. We require constant management, in that we need positive reinforcement on a daily basis. We admire ourselves and want to give our opinions on just about everything, because we think we are right. Our parents raised us to believe that we were special, and if they’ve never been right about anything else, they were right about that. From the sounds of all that, Generation Y is so focused on their (do you like how I change to “their” instead of “our” so all of a sudden I’m not talking about myself?) own needs and satisfaction that it could be nicknamed “Generation I”.
I want to disagree out of principle and decide maybe I’m a member of Generation X (generally those now in their 30s and early 40s). My parents are both Boomers (in their 60s), not “Zoomers” (40s and early 50s) or Generation Xers, so in my mind that puts me in some sort of generational cusp. Generation X, Schnee said, balanced their work life with their home life by getting the job done and going home. They drove flexibility into the workplace. They were self-sufficient, task-oriented, and didn’t waste any time.
I just can’t relate, but maybe if I try…
Then Schnee starts talking about Generation Y again, about how brilliant, optimistic, innovative, technology-savvy and necessary those coming out of college are. We’re goal-oriented. We have brilliant ideas. We can multi-task. We’re efficient and tenacious and resilient. Yes, yes, yes. Maybe I’m in Generation Y after all.
Then comes the clincher that seals the deal: We’re impossible to fully motivate if we don’t know why something is being done. Why is this committee needed? Why do all these papers have to be filed? Why does that person do this job?
Apparently, the constant “why’s” make other generations – our managers – think we’re a little slow, special but in a different sense of the word. We’re being difficult, challenging authority, or just lazy. It’s frustrating and a waste of time to field so many questions. I had no idea.
Then Schnee, who identifies herself as a Boomer, once again defends Generation Y (Gen-Why?): When we ask why, she explains, it’s because we’re constantly looking at how to make things better and more efficient. We want to understand the whole picture, and how every piece fits in the machine. Maybe we want to work less, but we also want to do more.
This may mean managers and organizations have some adjustments to make if they want to recruit and retain those coming out of high school and college. For the past 10 years, managers have been able to sit back and not have to do much people management. “The Gen Xers are the ones that are my children’s age, and we parented them very differently from how our parents parented us. We left them alone. All we thought of was work and materialism,” said Schnee. “So as a result … they (Gen X) wanted flexibility. But they didn’t want all the mentoring. They didn’t want all the feedback. They just wanted to know what you wanted from them, and then for you to leave them alone.
“We liked Gen X because we didn’t have to manage that much. We just said, ‘That’s pretty cool, I know that all I have to do is give them a task and they are going to do it,” she added. “With this new group, we’re going to have to totally change our management styles. … We are not going to be able to give them feedback in the same way, because their parents have told them they are special. They expect to get positive feedback. … They are going to be in the manager’s office all the time.”
Trying to Explain the Why’s of Generation Y
Most generational experts point to shared experiences and parenting styles as the main causes for why those in similar age groups seem to have shared characteristics.
Schnee points to one additional scapegoat: the way different generations received information while growing up: via radio (the mostly retired Vets); television (Boomers and Zoomers); computers (Gen X); or the Internet (Gen Y). How different generations received information directly correlates to certain behaviors and expectations: how immediately they expect to receive information, how much feedback they give, how many questions they have, how they verify it, how they send information to others.
“Technology and the way we received our information was prob-ably one of the biggest factors that told people how to behave,” Schnee said. “Think about what you learned immediately as a young child, how you learned to communicate… all that carries over into the workforce.”
Radios are one-way communications devices that gave the average person no opportunity to ask questions directly to those giving the information to them. Information was broadcasted at a particular time, according to someone else’s decision, and people formed routines around watching the evening news or reading the morning paper. Those seeking out information really had to search – via the public library, or through word-ofmouth. But mostly people just listened, then did what they heard needed to be done. They fought in World War II, sacrificed for their country, then made babies. Television was still mostly one-way communication, with information controlled by the Powers That Be and broadcast at a certain time, but it evolved so that people were allowed to see themselves. Boomers who protested Vietnam could see the change being made by political movements. Even if they didn’t have a direct line to the White House via which they personally could question or add to the information they received, they at least had an unofficial spokesperson doing it for them, shown right there on the TV. People back then had to visually work together to accomplish things: big rallies, big protests. They had to communicate face-to-face, not computerto- computer or via conference call. Schnee breaks down the Boomers into two groups: those born from 1946 to 1954 – “we were idealists, we were the ones going after all the issues” – and the more materialist Zoomers, born 1955 to 1964 (for further explanation of Zoomers, think Steve Jobs, born Feb. 24, 1955, and Bill Gates, born Oct. 28, 1955). Boomers and Zoomers gave birth to Gen X beginning in 1965.
Somewhere around the time Generation X was going through school or entering the workforce, computers changed the speed with which information could be given, found, saved and re-accessed. Generation X could tape television broadcasts and watch them later, making information more convenient and accessible. Digital encyclopedias of pre-determined information became widely available learning tools. The way people interacted with information became less controlled and more private, hidden in tiny little folders that didn’t take up any space. Some time around either 1977 or 1981, Zoomers and Gen X began giving birth to Generation Y. The Internet was born or discovered in 1991, when Generation Y was going through school or still unborn (the Y generation extends all the way to those born in 1998).
The Internet revolutionized speed and access, but it also for the first time provided the masses with multiple avenues through which to question information, as well as share information they had with other masses of people. While writing a letter to a person’s state Senator had always been feasible, it’s not for the lazy. The writing had to legible, money had to be spent on stamps, and someone had to have faith that it’d actually get read by someone of significance. Email and Internet forums allowed even the truly lazy to have their say to whoever wanted to listen whenever they wanted to listen. Information trended toward uncontrolled and public. Generation Y grew up with more information being instantly available in their bedrooms than at the library, and the anonymity and freedom of the digital world has left them expressing opinions about anything and everything. Getting to learn a new gaming system each Christmas made Generation Y adaptable and accepting of new technology and the ‘digital world,’ in which those without Facebook and MySpace do not exist. Phone calls evolved (deteriorated?) into text messaging (txt msg) and Generation Y finally learned shorthand. Phone cords evolved into cell phones and everyone became reachable anywhere, anytime. Generation Y is trained in multi-tasking, not focusing. Of course, parenting and shared experiences matter too —
But Nobody Asked Me “Why,” So Get to the Point
The idea that different generations of workers behave differently than other generations of workers, and that each generation tends to have shared work behaviors, motivations and satisfaction indicators, is not new. But many managers are just now adjusting from managing Generation X to coaching Generation Y.
Gen Y will be the “new workforce” for the next 10 years, so the transition has implications. Schnee has collected over 2,000 responses from employees and organizations regarding how genera-tional differences may impact the workplace. The surveys asked organizations and employers to describe a successful employee, and employees when they felt most successful and accomplished.
Managers responded that they want employees who “work hard,” care about how the company is doing, have passion and manage their time well: basically, a combination of the best Zoomer traits (work ethic) and the best Gen X traits (time management).
But Gen Y isn’t a blend. The employees answered that they feel successful and accomplished when they reach a goal, when they exceed their manager’s expectations, when they improve on a skill, or when they are helping others. So Gen Y is goal-oriented, but their focus is on the outcome, not the daily 8-5. The survey answers suggest that younger employees do care about the company and its mission statement, but not in the same way as their managers from the radio, television and computer generations, whose survey responses tended to be company-centric.
“The employees said, ‘when I receive praise, when I help others or the company, when I reach the goal.’ If it’s all about them, we can’t continue to coach them in the same way, because our coaching has been about tying things to the organization,” Schnee said.
Gen Y behaves as parts of a machine, not pieces of a puzzle. Interest in the company and mission statement focuses on understanding how each functions for the greater good, and on how other roles impact each other. Once Gen Y understands how something works and why it works that way, they’ll either try to make the machine work more effectively, or be much easier to motivate.
One key to tying the younger employee to the organization is to ask them for their input and involve them in decision-making processes, Schnee said. Doing so should help two-fold: it gives them an outlet for voicing new ideas and gives them first-hand knowledge regarding how and why something was done so they don’t become frustrated with unanswered questions.
Along with that, younger workers want to be challenged in areas that are unfamiliar to them. They don’t necessarily like organizational changes, but having grown up with rapidly progressing and evolving technology, they get bored easily and are culturally hardwired to want to keep up with the latest trends and newest toys. That translates over to wanting to expand their job skills.
“If you keep them learning, they will stay with you. The minute they stop, they will bail on you,” Schnee said. “If they find meaning in their work, and if they are constantly growing and learning new things, they will stay with you longer.”
Another insight that Schnee discovered through the surveys regards dissatisfaction. Managers felt dissatisfied when employees did not meet goals; employees felt dissatisfied when they made mistakes, didn’t understand a manager’s expectations, had ideas that were rejected or didn’t seem valued and when other employees seemed dissatisfied.
So that suggests that the Gen Y’s work ethic and satisfaction (whether they’ll stay) is influenced by workplace attitudes and environments, more so than Gen X, whose work ethic was influenced by wanting home-life balance. Salary and flexible scheduling are important, but in the end, Gen Y just wants to know it’s special. Or maybe it goes back to the communication technology thing again – the entire world is at their fingertips but they’re drowning in so much information that they just want to know they’re being heard.
Of course, Gen Y could all change its traits, and eventually transform into the Zoomer-Gen X blend of work ethic and time management department heads were hoping for. But don’t bank on it.
“You cannot change someone else’s behavior, it’s totally impossible. All we can do is change our own behavior,” Schnee said.