I'm still reacting to reports on the so-called Millennials and their difficulties adjusting to workplace conventions.
There always will be some tension between conformity and the gradual change of standards (after all, our "conservative" workplace would not be recognizable to someone from the 30s, for example. Do you think that it's bad that a man can unbutton his jacket now?). What appeals to this generation is what really appeals to all young generations: the explicit invoking of strategy. Believe me, females and males equally like thinking of themselves as some sort of warriors, even if they never have seen physical combat (and the video game/movie industry has encouraged this mythology). So a company can make great headway by putting everything in terms of strategy (which is what you tend to do), rather than "values," which any younger generation is ready to reject, no matter how worthy those values seem to the oldsters.
I guess that you can tell that, when I was a college teacher, I tired of all the other teachers who moaned about their slacker students. Instead, I finally told them, they should teach students proper strategy from the beginning. The teachers needed to model excellence.
If one change is in the making, maybe it is a good one: perhaps companies should train their supervisors so that the new employees see excellence in action immediately. It's hard to believe that one should work hard when a company is filled with mid-level mediocre managers. If today's new employees more readily detect this mediocrity, then we can hardly fault them for being analytical and perceptive. But young whiners--I have no time for them.
2 comments:
I have found a certain number of the "millennials" in the classroom to have the self-centered, "you are wrong and I am not" attitude, but I would still argue that a majority of the students, at least at Florida State University where I teach, still have the basic common values of respect and professionalism. However, perhaps the FSU scene only allows me to see the best of the best.
Perhaps part of the problem is the herd-mentality that sometimes takes over in these "Millennials." Often, within the context of "this herd" is where I see a lot of the examples of negative behavior.
I just wanted to add (to my above response) that I think the content here on the site is very strong, and I like how you are approaching this debate from a new angle. Keep up the great content!
--Michael Dalton Trammell
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