Interesting article from Neil Howe. I got 9 out of 11 right on the quiz and I haven’t had a puppy in 30 years. His description of Gen X as young workers fits me to the tee. When I went into the workforce I just wanted to get the job done with no nonsense. Then I wanted to go home and play basketball or go out drinking with my friends. I required no feedback. I knew if I was doing a good job. I was self motivated. I didn’t need mission statements and rah rah HR bullshit. I still don’t.
There are quite a few Millenial workers in my office. They are all motivated and intelligent, but they do need a lot of mentoring, guidance, and hands on managing. These puppies will ultimately succeed or fail in leading this country through this Fourth Turning. Mentor them well Xers and Boomers.
Managing Millennials… or Breaking in Puppies?
OK, prepare for a totally derivative post. To understand it, you need to go to mentalfloss.com and take this quiz.
It all revolves around the following question: Do you know the difference between managing Millennials and raising puppies? Are you sure? Most of the people I know who have taken this test get at least a couple of the questions wrong.
I had to laugh when I took the quiz myself. When I talk to audiences about Millennials in the workplace–these are often audiences full of Xers and Boomers–I admit to them straight up: This is a high-maintenance generation. They like to think of themselves as VIPs, no question. They demand lots of structure, feedback, moral support, mentoring, and some sort of deep connection with the organization they work for. You need to offer all of the above if you want the best of them to stick around.
It’s work–a great deal more work than the “low-swet” Xers who came along before them. In many ways I really miss young Xers. Their day-one attitude toward their employers was simple: You don’t ask much of us and we won’t ask much of you: Let’s just all get what needs to get done quickly and efficiently, so we can all go home. I don’t think young Xers were ever puppies. They seemed pretty “broken in” before they ever showed up at their first career job.
Yet here’s what’s really interesting: The puppiness we see in these first-wave employed Millennials is going to become a lot more exaggerated by the time we meet the Xers’ own late-wave Millennial children when they show up en masse in the workplace starting around five years from now. Why? Because these Xers are raising their own kids with behavioral handbooks that actually do resemble puppy-care guides. Many Xer parents look at Cesar Milan’s “Dog Whisperers” for tips on how to be the alpha-dog in their family. I first started writing about the new behavioralism in Xer parenting on this site a couple of years ago. Here is an excerpt from that post:
…A lot of Boomers really wanted to change society with the way they raised their kids. And in trying to do that, they believed all that mattered was the intensity and quality of their relationship with their child and the correctness of the values they taught them.
With Xer guides, everything has changed. Xer guides are much more prescriptive, full of do’s and don’t’s, and much less attitudinal. Many of the Boomer guides looked a bit like the Whole Earth Catalogue: It showed how raising children was part of a whole world view. To Xers, hey, child rearing is just like any other technique or business–there must be a good way and a bad way to get the job done. I want to do it the good way.
Xer guides are much more scientific in the sense that the authors need to show that there’s empirical evidence favoring one way over another. Skeptical Xers don’t take advice on pure faith. Amazingly, Boomer guides rarely talked about evidence: We just “knew” e.g. that Lamaze just *must* be a vastly superior way to give birth. Just look at those Hopi designs on the book cover! (btw, I’m a big supporter of Lamaze; I just acknowledge that it was never sold to us as an evidence-based practice.)
As I’ve mentioned, Xer guides are putting a lot more stress on behavioral techniques. Dog whispering is, admittedly, an extreme example. But apt. As in so many other things, Gen-Xers know how to take their own ego out of the equation, which is what behavioral parenting requires. The whole behavioral point of view is very Xer in that it looks at the human condition as a matter of external conditioning and adaptation–a useful antidote to the endless Boomer fixation on interior motives and values.
Here is a story I hear all the time from Boomer and Silent Generation grandparents who have Xer children. When the Xers drop off their grandkids with their grandparents–en route, perhaps, to a rare vacation alone–they typically include a list of “do’s and dont’s” and a strict schedule regarding their kids. The grandparents express surprise, “A list? Why do we need a list? After all, we raised you.” To which the Xers rejoin, “Yeah, mom/dad, that’s why we’re including the list.”
