Managing across the generational divide

It’s a whole new world out there for seasoned managers leading younger teams. The standard style and method of communications has radically changed in the last 20 years. Men and women entering the workforce out of high school or college face different challenges than their parents did, and their definition of success is quite different too. More experienced managers (and older workers generally) are not only called upon to absorb technology changes at an ever increasing rate, but also to collaborate with peers and subordinates who grew up in the internet age and expect their workplace to operate at hyper speed.

How smart is your phone? Do you text? Tweet? Are you available by email 24x7? You posted what on your Facebook page? Just keeping current is a challenge for everyone. Understanding how to maintain workplace productivity and reacting to the business risks posed by social networking and always-on communications are some of the biggest challenges for managers, but they are also great opportunities to share the wisdom born of experience. Here are some things managers can do to get the best out of a younger workforce.


Don’t assume your employees know more than they show you they know.

One trap that managers with more experience can fall into is assuming that everyone knows “the basics”. You only hire bright employees, but they can’t be expected to know things that you learned slowly over the years: how to communicate to executives; how to ask the right questions in ambiguous situations; how to negotiate with difficult people. Rather than judge your employees by what they don’t know, teach them well and then judge them by how they retain and use that knowledge.

Remember that being smart at one thing doesn’t make one smart at everything.

Illusionist Ricky Jay recently appeared on 60 Minutes. By producing a scholarly article he wrote in 2005, Jay quickly convinced Morley Safer that he had predicted the Bernie Madoff scandal. In reality, the article was faked with Photoshop, and while the journal that the article appeared in was real he had never written anything for them. Safer had earlier presented Jay as an expert on scams, and by showing false evidence (the same way the “expert” Madoff had), he showed how easy it was to fool Safer into believing him.

Ricky Jay went on to say that when he does his magic act, his very favorite audience is bankers, because bankers are smart at banking and often believe that makes them smart at other things as well. The easiest people to fool with an illusion, says Jay, are an audience of people who think they know more than he does. History is full of examples of brilliant people unable to transfer their skills to the art of living. Recall that the famous photographer Annie Liebovitz almost lost complete control of her artistic portfolio because of her inability to manage money.

This is a long way to say that just because your hotshot employee is a whiz at writing programs don’t assume she also knows how to write good documentation or manage a project schedule. These skills can be taught, but they don’t just appear.

Find out what’s really important to each employee

It is easy to assume that all of your employees want a raise. But if you ask the question right you may find that it’s not necessarily so. A question I always ask a new employee is “When you do good work how would you like to be recognized?”  Surprisingly few will say they would like to be recognized with money. Some tell me they would like to see good work reflected in their annual review score. One employee said that she would most like her manager to tell her thank you. When she next did something noteworthy I remembered her request and asked my boss’s boss to call her with congratulations on a job well done. She was so pleased by that call you would have thought she had won the lottery.

Whether it is on the topic of recognition, or career goals or personal development, find out what is really important to your employees and then manage to that. You will give them what they need and maybe save yourself some money in the process.

Get current, stay current

Even younger workers, even in high-tech companies, are having a harder and harder time keeping up with pace of change. Technology may be the change agent that first comes to mind, but don’t forget that your team also has to absorb changes in the organization and its processes and procedures as your company tries to quickly navigate choppy economic waters.

It’s up to you as a leader to be out in front of change. You must understand it well enough to explain it to others as well as to make decisions about which changes to adopt and which to set aside. Should your staff have smart phones? Should your organization use new accounting software? Is Six Sigma worth the effort? C# or Java?

This takes a lot of time and requires continual learning, but the alternative is to lose the respect of your team, your peers and your managers.

Assume you don’t know all the answers

When one of my employees comes to me with an issue, I always try to ask them what solution alternatives they have considered and which one they recommend. This simple exchange, if repeated until it becomes expected, will help your staff grow by making them think outside of their comfort zone. It will also offer a smorgasbord of creativity as everyone gets into the habit of articulating options for solving problems. It will also provide you, as a leader, with ideas that you never considered. The value of having a diverse staff is that everyone can draw from their own personal experience to serve the common goals of your organization. Don’t waste that experience because you think you know all the answers. Remember the old saw: If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

Focus on the basics (what your team needs to get done, and steps they can’t blow past) and reinforce tribal knowledge.

I recently had a disturbing experience with a process our team developed five years ago. The process is used only when our systems fail significantly enough that we need to notify upper management. A “major incident”. Happily, this process hasn’t been invoked in a couple of years. But over that time, our team’s management has turned over, our support team’s management has turned over, and we have gone through two reorganizations. It should not have been surprising that this well documented process, stored where it could be easily found if needed, was forgotten. The new management teams did not even know that it existed. That is, except for me, the only leader left from the “good old days” who remembered why we developed the process in the first place.

How did this happen? We as an organization, and I as a leader, did not periodically retrain staff on this basic process. In short, we didn’t practice fire drills. It may seem wasteful to keep rehashing the basics, but if you establish a solid training plan and stick to it, your team will know how to quickly put out the fire when it flares up.

Teach the organization’s culture

Every organization has a culture. If you have been around long enough you know how to navigate that culture. Share that with your peers and your employees. There is no better way to ensure that nobody shows up wearing sandals and socks on the day your biggest customer (or your largest donor, or your CEO) comes to visit.

Always, always, always focus on the future

The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Peter Drucker