The other evening, “60 Minutes” aired a feature on “the Millennials,” a new generation of American workers born between 1980 and 1995. This burgeoning segment of the work force is marked by a number of interesting traits, not the least of which is the fact that it doesn’t give a fat rat how my generation does the business of doing business. In fact, were it to discover that I’ve been doing roughly the same job for two decades straight, it would deem me a dinosaur that needs to be put to pasture — or wherever it is dinosaurs were put, back in the day.
According to the report, the workplace has become a psychological battlefield and the Millennials have the upper hand, because they are tech savvy, with every gadget imaginable almost becoming an extension of their bodies. They multitask, talk, walk, listen and type, and text. And their priorities are simple: they come first. They don’t worry about careers. They switch places of employ routinely the moment a job becomes difficult or boring. They disdain the notion of “the journey;” it’s the destination that matters. And, get this: in order to get the most out of them at the office, you have to tell them they’re doing a good job — whether they are or not.
“You can't be harsh,” notes Marian Salzman, an ad agency executive at J. Walter Thompson, who has been managing and tracking Millennials since they entered the workforce. “You cannot tell them you’re disappointed in them. You can’t really ask them to live and breathe the company. Because they’'re living and breathing themselves, and that keeps them very busy.”
Salzman and other Millennial monitors say the attitude is the product of a generation of parents and other mentors who decided you didn’t play to win; you played to feel good about yourself. There was no best student; there was good in what every student did. There was no special reward for hard work; there was an equal reward for any kind of effort.
Obviously, there’s the potential to paint any generation with too broad a brush, but I’ve raised four children of my own — each born in the timeframe mentioned – and based on what I’ve seen of many of their classmates, I can’t argue with much of the report.
I can, however, share a fear my colleague Dave Kuack noted, after he saw the “60 Minutes” segment: “I would just love to have one of these Millennials as a doctor who does surgery on me. I wonder if Mom would be in the operating room telling her son or daughter that they are doing a really great job as I flat line.”
— Yale
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