This isn’t about Millennials vs. Baby Boomers. It’s about youth vs. maturity.
I’m reading Millennials and Management by Lee Caraher after hearing her speak at BACN on Friday. The book analyzes various stereotypes about Millennials and assesses their basis in reality, as well as suggesting methods for developing successful intergenerational teams.
It’s a good book and I’m in violent agreement with most of what I’ve read so far, but one thing has been nagging at me as I read. Look at what’s implied in these two quotes, for instance.
This generation is confident. They are confident that they can contribute. They are confident in their ability to learn. They are confident that they can make a difference at work and in the world around them now. They are confident that they matter.
Caraher, Lee (2014–10–14). Millennials & Management: The Essential Guide to Making it Work at Work (p. 30). Bibliomotion, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Importantly, and sometimes frustratingly for their managers, Millennials want to contribute to the “real” work from day one, and do not relish the idea of working their way up the ladder, a process Boomers and Gen Xers considered the norm.
Caraher, Lee (2014–10–14). Millennials & Management: The Essential Guide to Making it Work at Work (p. 28). Bibliomotion, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
I believe those statements are true for Millennials. What amazes me is the implication that they were not true for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers when we were in our twenties.
Doesn’t anyone remember the musical Hair?
When the Baby Boomers were in their late teens and early twenties, they were protesting on campuses around the country, demanding an end to the draft and the Vietnam War. The war and the draft both came to an end.
Ira Magaziner ’69 helped create Brown University’s New Curriculum when he was still an undergraduate. Now known as the Open Curriculum, it’s no longer so new, but still considered somewhat radical because there are no distribution requirements.
The Baby Boomers certainly believed they could change the world while they were still young — and to some degree, they did.
I am an early Gen Xer: I was born in 1967, too young to go with my parents to see “Hair” but with a vague memory of watching the 1969 moon landing on television.
When I entered graduate school in the 1990s, all the students believed that the faculty members were making us suffer pointlessly — just because scholars in the past had suffered, driving themselves to exhaustion and eyestrain with the intensity of their studying. The hoops we had to jump through and the constant messages that we weren’t good enough caused one classmate to compare graduate school unfavorably to boot camp.
We overlooked something important. Our instructors weren’t making us suffer out of spite. They were trying to prepare us to face employment within the arbitrary and capricious university tenure system. They knew things were likely to get harder for us, not easier, after we finished our degrees, because we would be entering a workplace just as rigid, and a job market just as dire, as they had.
They were trying to make us fit to survive, but we didn’t see it that way — and no one bothered to explain.
Despite the hazing and my own very poor response to it, I survived my first year of graduate school and went on to achieve considerable success, at least within my narrow context. I landed a prestigious fellowship at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities that set me temporarily into a peer group of senior colleagues from many departments. I was doing something non-traditional and getting praise for it rather than pushback. My head was full of visions for the future.
“Every younger candidate I’ve ever talked with in the last five years thinks they are full of potential, and have so much to contribute right now. It’s not a question of whether or not they are right for the job, it’s a question of is the job right for them. This is so different from where the Gen Xers and Boomers were when they were at this age.”
Caraher, Lee (2014–10–14). Millennials & Management: The Essential Guide to Making it Work at Work (p. 27). Bibliomotion, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Maybe it’s different from where the speaker was when she first applied for jobs. But I was hugely ambitious at 27. I’d already co-founded an electronic journal — before the Web, even — and I wanted to start a center for ancient theater studies.
Expecting to just waltz in and take over wherever you go isn’t about whether you were born in 1948, 1968, or 1988. It’s a function of youth.
After a very painful mock interview conducted by my own department, one of the faculty said to me “No one wants to hear that you want to come to their department and start a center for ancient theater studies.”
From my perspective as an adult, that seems obvious. Of course prospective employers (and clients) want to know what you can bring to them. And the prospective employers with whom I did interview (not many) just wanted someone to teach Latin 101 — preferably someone who was not going to be distracted by projects there wasn’t any funding for anyway.
It never occurred to me that in advancing my ambitions, I might be creating resentment or stepping on people’s toes. I thought that my idea was so good it would sweep everyone else along as it had me. I tended to think that way about all my ideas. I had still not grasped a very basic fact (attributed to Zig Ziglar).
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
In my ignorance and self-absorption, I ran roughshod over friends, colleagues, and boundaries — in spite of the fact that I’d actually done things right once.
I’d been interested in the performance of ancient theater since my undergraduate years, but my actual experience was as an actor in school plays, not a director. So when I wanted to direct a play, I went over to the theater department and asked what I needed to do in order to be allowed to put on a play in one of the campus performance spaces.
I received extremely good advice: go to the Basement Theater club, introduce yourself, and volunteer to help out. The Basement Theater held 50 people including the cast and crew. I volunteered most often as house manager and sometimes helped with other things, like lighting. I did simple, non-intellectual jobs. I did them often enough that when I finally did direct a play in the Basement, my associates there asked whether I was managing the house that night.
Somehow I failed to generalize that experience. It would take a number of years and some fairly severe setbacks before I came to value all work and to see that the best way to start off in any new place is to find out how I can be of service.
Again and again, this formula has worked for me: find something I want to be part of. Show up. Listen. Get to know people. Help in any way I can. This is sometimes known as “paying your dues.” It’s an expression of a degree of emotional intelligence that I didn’t start to evolve until I was over thirty.
In a number of cases, I’ve found myself elected or nominated to be chairperson/president/organizer after a fairly short time — sometimes less than a year. It doesn’t take all that long to build social capital if you just show up regularly.
That doesn’t mean every idea you propose will be adopted — just that the members of the group will listen. It doesn’t mean that when your ideas are adopted, they will automatically be successful. Bright and capable isn’t the same thing as omniscient and omnipotent.
Anyone can use this method to get off to a good start in a new environment. I did it at 24, by following someone else’s directions. Internalizing it relied on two things I didn’t have when I was 24: perspective and patience.
From where I am now, squarely in middle age, a year is an incredibly short time to have to invest in something that can have a major personal or professional payoff. But when I was in college, a year was a long time to wait for anything.
There are unquestionably specific characteristics typical of Millennials, as there are for each generation, thanks to the context we grew up in. But wanting to jump right in and make a difference at work is not a uniquely Millennial characteristic.
Before you criticize a younger colleague for wanting to jump straight to C-level, remember what you were like when you were young. Then tell them the things no one bothered to tell you. It will make everyone’s life easier.
