Subscribe
In our last post we talked about what the organization can do for the new Gen Y hire, to help ensure a successful entry into the group. In this last of a series of four posts we will see what Gen Ys themselves should be doing to quickly become a valued contributor and team member? We suggest focusing on six key behavior clusters:
- Listen and learn. You almost never learn when you are talking. And in any new job you have a lot to learn. But most people don’t listen well – – – they merely pretend to listen while they compose a response to what they are hearing. To break this habit, take notes while others are speaking.
- Know how your boss likes to communicate. HBR still has available online the classic paper “Managing Oneself” by Peter F. Drucker. Every boss, employee and new-college-hire should read those 11 pages. New GenYs should ask how their bosses and peers want to communicate. Is your new boss a listener, talker or reader? This is crucial information.
- Join the team for the long haul. One mindset likely to frustrate you and your management is to overly focus on having a sudden intuitive brainstorm that changes the company or launches a new product and catapults you into the President’s office! Understand that the financial success of rappers and Hollywood stars and others who, with seemingly limited talent have secured nearly unlimited wealth is very, very rare. Seth Godin calls this phenomenon “The Purple Cow” and his book, same title, is a great read check it out at). Focus on helping others, learning all you can about your job and becoming a valued member of the team.
- Be tactful. *This is the exception to the previous advice to always “Say what you mean”. Words are powerful things especially when spoken to or about people. The key here is to separate a person’s behavior from the person. Only correct a person’s behavior, never labeling the person as problematic. Another rule that helps me is to never say something about another that I haven’t already said to them.
- Be open-minded. Look for things you can learn, not just from other Gen Ys but from Gen X, Boomers and Traditionalists. These other generations have seen and done things you won’t get to do for decades, if ever. Some jobs in an organization require experience and that takes time: you cannot assign three women to the job and grow a baby in three months instead of nine! Learn from the unique perspectives, experiences and stories of the other generations. Keep a journal of ideas, possible projects, ways to improve things, etc. and use it in your employee performance reviews with your boss.
- Be reliable. Do what you say you’ll do, every time. And if an unforeseen (and hopefully unforeseeable) problem looks like it will derail your plan, advise anyone who needs to know. Give them an early heads-up of the possible change in plans. Under promise and over-deliver. Control the expectations of others and then surprise them.
Now here is a last-ditch technique for any deeply entrenched Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and Traditionalists out there, stuck in their old ways of thinking and unable to accept Gen Ys into an organization. If nothing else works for you, not the sensitivity training, not the classes arranged by HR, the great videos by Jason Dorsey nor even your boss’s warning that you need to “get with it and learn to play nice with the new-hires”. Then try this: Train yourself to think of Gen Ys as belonging to a foreign culture. That’s right, think of them as being from another country entirely. You don’t expect foreign nationals to behave like you do. With their different cultures, values and standards for behavior, we expect them to behave differently. Do the same for Gen Ys.
We have seen this little mental trick prevent the eye-rolls and other knee-jerk reactions some older people have to some of the occasional stereotypical behaviors of Gen Ys (showing up late for work, telling established managers how to do their jobs, texting while you are conversing with them, jumping across multiple layers in a large organization, etc.). And if we can break the older person’s stimulus-response chain by adding an interim “thinking” step that says “hold on a minute, this Gen Y person’s brain is not wired exactly like mine”, we can perhaps help older workers accommodate the newcomers. We are going to need Gen Ys’ outlandish ideas and bold thinking to tackle challenges in the years to come because none of us is as smart as all of us.
Copyright: Solid Thinking Corporation
—