Not Everyone Gets A Trophy

How to Manage the Millennials

Bruce Tulgan

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119190776
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Adapt your management methods to harness Millennial potential

Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage the Millennials provides employers with a workable game plan for turning Millennials into the stellar workforce they have the potential to be. The culmination of over two decades of research, this book provides employers with a practical framework for engaging, developing, and retaining the new generation of employees. This new revised and updated edition expands the discussion to include the new 'second-wave' Millennials, those Tulgan refers to as 'Generation Z, ' and explores the ways in which these methods and tactics are becoming increasingly critical in the face of the profoundly changing global workforce.

Baby Boomers are aging out and the newest generation is flowing in. Savvy employers are proactively harnessing the talent and potential these younger workers bring to the table. This book shows how to become a savvy employer and...

• Understand the generational shift occurring in the workplace
• Recruit, motivate, engage, and retain the newest new young workforce
• Discover best practices through proven strategies, case studies, and step-by-step instructions
• Explore new research on the second-wave Millennials ('Generation Z') as well as continuing research on the first-wave Millennials ('Generation Y')
• Teach Millennials how to manage themselves, help their managers manage them, and how to become new leaders themselves

It's not your imagination—Millennial workers are different, but that difference is shaped by the same forces that make potentially exceptional workers. Employers who can engage Millennials' passion and loyalty have great things ahead. Not Everyone Gets a Trophy is your handbook for building the next great workforce.

CHAPTER ONE
MEET THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION
The Most High-Maintenance Workforce in the History of the World . . . and Likely to Be the Most High Performing

They keep telling me, “Here’s what you get in five years, ten years, twenty years. . .” But they expect me to come back to work tomorrow. What do I get tomorrow?

—Millennial

Not long ago, the president of a health care consulting firm told me he had just interviewed a twenty-five-year-old man for a job in his firm. The young candidate came to the interview armed with a number of ordinary questions about job duties, salary, and benefits. When these questions were answered, he made a request: “You should know that surfing is really important to me and there might be days when the surf’s really up. Would you mind if I came in a little later on those days?”

•••

At a major food conglomerate, summer interns are usually given an assignment, such as a big data-entry project, that they can complete during the course of their summer employment. An executive there shared with me the story of one of his latest interns: “On the first day, she announced she had invented a new cereal. She had a box, complete with artwork and a bag of her cereal inside, that she called her ‘prototype.’ Clearly she had gone to great lengths, including the recipe and nutritional information and preparing a slide show. She wanted to know when she would be able to pitch her idea to senior executives. ‘The sooner the better,’ she said.”

•••

An experienced nurse-manager in a busy hospital told me she stopped a new young nurse from administering the wrong medicine by intravenous drip to a patient. The manager pulled the young nurse aside and explained emphatically how serious a mistake she almost made. “I explained that this is how patients die unnecessarily. I told her, ‘You need to check the wrist bracelet, then the patient’s chart, then the charge list, then the IV bag. Then you need to check them all again.’” Before she was finished, the young nurse interrupted her. “Actually, you are doing this conversation wrong,” she told her boss. “You are supposed to give me some positive feedback before you criticize my work.” What did the manager respond? “Okay. Nice shoes. Now, about that IV bag. . .”

•••

A group of executives in the U.S. Peace Corps reported that program administrators receive e-mails on a regular basis from parents making suggestions and requests about the living accommodations and work conditions of their children stationed on missions around the world. One of the Peace Corps executives told me, “I just got an e-mail from a parent saying the meals being provided don’t meet his kid’s dietary needs. Could we get this young man on a nondairy diet?” The funny thing is that generals in the U.S. Army have told me similar stories about the parents of soldiers.

•••

Another experienced manager, this one in a retail organization, told me an even more striking story. This manager was trying to correct a young associate who had just spoken rudely to a customer. The young man turned to his boss and said, “You know what? I’m thinking about buying this place. And the way you are going, you are going to be the first one out of here!”

•••

Managing people has never been easy. Stuck between employer and employees, managers are tasked with the tough job of negotiating their often competing needs and expectations. But as these stories illustrate, being a manager is even more difficult when a new generation enters the workforce and brings with it new attitudes and behaviors. Every day, leaders and managers in organizations of all shapes and sizes in just about every industry all over the Western world tell me stories about working with the new generation of young employees—the so-called Millennial Generation—that suggest this might be the most difficult generation to manage yet.

Managers tell me:

• “They walk in the door on day one with very high expectations.”
• “They don’t want to pay their dues and climb the ladder.”
• “They walk in the door with seventeen things they want to change about the company.”
• “They only want to do the best tasks.”
• “If you don’t supervise them closely, they go off in their own direction.”
• “It’s very hard to give them negative feedback without crushing their morale.”
• “They walk in thinking they know more than they know.”
• “They think everybody is going to get a trophy in the real world, just like they did growing up.”

It seems to me that the vast majority of leaders and managers think Millennials have an attitude problem. But isn’t this always the case when a new generation joins the workforce? Doesn’t every new generation of young workers irritate the older, more experienced ones?

At the early career stage of life, young people are just learning to break away from the care of others (parents, teachers, institutions) and taking steps toward self-sufficiency and responsibility. Some do it more slowly than others. As they move into the adult world with the energy and enthusiasm—and lack of experience—that is natural at that stage, they are bound to clash with more mature generations.

And yet as much as human experience—such as the rite of passage into the workforce—stays the same over time, the world doesn’t. One epoch may be defined by an ice age, another by global warming. What makes each generation different are these accidents of history that shape the larger world in which human beings move through their developmental life stages. So while every generation rocks the boat when they join the adult world, they also bring with them defining characteristics that alter the rules of the game for everyone going forward.

Millennials’ “attitude” probably is not likely to go away as they mature; their high-maintenance reputation is all too real. Still, the whole picture is more complicated. Yes, Millennials will be more difficult to recruit, retain, motivate, and manage than any other new generation to enter the workforce. But this will also be the most high-performing workforce in history for those who know how to manage them properly.

Meet the Millennial Generation

I began conducting in-depth interviews with young people in the workplace back in 1993, when I was myself a young person in the workplace. For decades now, we’ve been tracking the ever-emerging ever-“newer” new young workforce. By the late 1990s, we started tracking the first wave of the great Millennial cohort, what we refer to as “Generation Y” (born 1978 to 1989), and by the early 2000s, we began tracking the second-wave Millennials, whom we call “Generation Z” (born 1990 to 2000), when they first entered the workforce as teenagers in part-time jobs. Since then, we’ve kept our finger on the pulse of the new young workforce, maintaining a comprehensive picture of where they are coming from and where they are going in the changing workplace.

First, to understand the historical context, let me take a few steps back and glance at the accidents of history that defined the generations leading up to the Millennials.

The generation born before the Baby Boom, what I call the Schwarzkopf generation, grew up mostly in the 1930s and 1940s. Their young adulthood was defined by a period of confidence and stability following the upheaval of depression and war. The Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were defined by two distinct eras: the first was characterized mostly by the stability of the 1950s and early 1960s, while the second coincided with the major social changes of the 1960s. Generation X came onto the scene in the 1970s, when adults were steeped in the self-absorption of the “me decade.” By the time they came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, globalization and technology were making the world highly interconnected, rapidly changing, fiercely competitive, and information driven. Their first days at work were also the first days of downsizing—and the last days of job security. While the older workers were hanging on to their desks groaning, “Hold on! It’s a workplace revolution! Please, don’t downsize me,” Gen Xers, in the vanguard of the free-agent mind-set and self-directed career path, shrugged: “Downsize me. Whatever.”

Now there is the Millennial Generation. Although demographers often differ on the exact parameters of each generation, there is a general consensus that Generation X ends with the birth year 1977. Most agree that those born between 1978 and 2000 belong in the Millennial Generation. But the Millennials (like the Boomers) came in two waves: Generation Y (those born between 1978 and 1989) and Generation Z (those born between 1990 and 2000). Gen Yers are today’s thirty-somethings, no longer the youngest people in the workplace, while Gen Zers are the newest new young workforce, those who are filling up the rising global youth tide in today’s workforce.

Here’s the short story with the Millennial Generation: If you liked Generation Y, you are going to love Generation Z. If Generation Y was like Generation X on fast-forward with self-esteem on steroids, Generation Z is more like the children of the 1930s. That is, if the children of the 1930s were permanently attached to hand-held super-computers and reared on “helicopter parenting” on steroids. Overall, the Millennials embody a continuation of the larger historical forces driving the transformation in the workplace and the workforce in recent decades.

Globalization and technology have been shaping change since the dawn of time. But during the life span of the Millennials, globalization and technology have undergone a qualitative change. After all, there is only one globe, and it is now totally interconnected. Millennials 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 t...