Stand back all bosses! A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred: from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie. They are called, among other things, “millennials.” There are about 80 million of them, born between 1980 and 1995, and they’re rapidly taking over from the baby boomers who are now pushing 60.
They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it.
As correspondent Morley Safer reports, corporate America is so unnerved by all this that companies like Merrill Lynch, Ernst & Young, Disney and scores of others are hiring consultants to teach them how to deal with this generation that only takes “yes” for an answer.
Back in my day as a fresh faced 20-something new to the workforce, the ruling classes of the time deemed us Generation X. They called us slackers, said we’d amount to nothing. Blah blah blah. We seem to have done pretty well for ourselves as we navigated the first internet bubble and survived the burst. Us worthless GenX’ers also end up being the driving force behind the current web2.0 juggernaut. This hubbub about Millennials is no different.
What does all this mean for the managers of these fresh faced new employees? It’s easy, you need to manage them and shape their potential. You may need to find new ways to motivate them, but that shouldn’t be something new or shocking. Despite the VERY broad strokes that 60 Minutes uses to describe the Millennial generation, there is lots of potential to be tapped into.
UPDATE - The good folks over at 37Signals have something to say about Millennials as well.