I’m shortly going to give my first couple of guest lectures
to the current EMMS (Executive Masters in Marketing and Sales) cohort. EMMS is a
post-graduate degree taught between the very pleasant campuses of the ESADE
Business School in Barcelona and the SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan.
Both are ranked global Top 20 business schools, I’m glad to report.
The `Executive` bit refers to the fact the students take the
course in modules whilst they are in full-time management positions. Bearing that in mind, my act will be entitled
`57 Years… 57 Lessons…` a theme designed
to send the graduating students on their way knowing what I’ve learned in entrepreneurial
business in 57 years on this Earth. This, I’m told, will contain valuable
lessons for their current and future personal and commercial lives once freed from
the part-time bonds of academe.
Recognise and act on
Generation X, Y, and Z behaviours
Slide 33 in the PowerPoint fest is entitled `You are
unlikely to be your audience` and warns `Generational change is profound. Learn
to understand, recognise and act on Generation X, Y, and Z behaviours. `
Generational change is indeed profound. It affects much more
than the common and usually grossly mistaken assumption in sales, marketing and
communications planning and execution that the audience for the product or
service thinks like the provider.
The problem, it appears, extends far beyond the relationship
between vendor and customer but is also rife within providing organisations. In particular, it is that there is currently mutual
incomprehension between what employers think
Gen Y staff want from their positions and what younger employers actually desire in their careers.
It’s something that in an era of ever more rapid change my
thrusting, international, Generation X-ish audience are going to have to deal
with increasingly. Whether they climb
the ranks of multi-national management or embark on the entrepreneurial journey
and start hiring.
Car crash of
confusion
This generational gap was highlighted recently in research
conducted by Penna, a company, unsurprisingly, that offers interim management,
coaching and HR services. A thousand senior managers and a thousand Gen Y
employees (aged between 18 and 34) were surveyed and the results show a car crash
of confusion getting off to an early start.
According to the results, employers believe leading a team
and experiencing lots of different jobs and sectors are the most important
motivators for Gen Y. Wrong! Gen Y employees actually rate achieving a
work-life balance and ‘being totally fulfilled and happy in my work’ as most
important - alongside earning good money, that is.
Interestingly, the report didn’t make the mistake of
assuming Gen Y is homogenous. For instance, it split Gen Y employees into two
groups - those aged 18-24 and those aged 25-34. That split reveals some rather
contrary results, showing the 18-24 year-old group perhaps being much closer to
Gen X values than their more laid-back older Gen Y siblings.
When it comes to leading a team , however, younger employees,
the research found, are more driven (21 per cent), compared to those aged 25-34
(17 per cent). The clearly-out-of-touch employers believe managing a
team is more important to older Gen Y staff (28 per cent).
Those aged 25-34 also rated the importance of work-life
balance much higher (44 per cent compared to 31 per cent in the younger group).
Employers underrated the significance of work-life balance for younger
employees - 18 per cent believed it was important to 18-24-year-olds versus 27
per cent for 25-34-year-olds.
Values and loyalty
The research also revealed managers are underestimating the
importance to employees of organisational values; 13 per cent of 18-24 year-olds said ‘values
that reflect my own’ was an important factor when choosing a company to work
for, but only seven per cent of managers believed this to be the case.
Loyalty also ranked highly with the employees, with 64 per
cent of 18-24 year-olds agreeing they believe ‘it is important to be loyal to
your employer’ compared to 56 per cent of 25-34 year-olds. However, when asked what age group they’d
most associate with loyalty to a company, only three per cent of employers said
18-24 year-olds compared to 26 per cent for those aged 25-34.
Problem or
opportunity?
Should these findings prove to be true over time we could be
having to handle a shortage in management in future, assuming that younger
generations in the workplace are not automatically going to want to sit behind
the desks of todays’ leaders and managers. I think you can count on that.
More likely, in my opinion, is that Gen Y’s new attitudes along
with new technology will drive further change in the nature of management and
the structure of companies. The
alternative will be a decline in engagement levels, productivity, and increased
staff attrition rates accompanied by the inevitable and perennial cries of
skills shortage.
But we should always be wary of lies, damned lies and
statistics. It’ll be most useful for those in charge of managing Gen Y to take
the time to sit down with them and find out what they want - or at least what
they think they want - and build that
into their management and business development strategy.
Get engaged
As slide 63 of the presentation warns, `You can’t create
something new without destroying something old. Learn to let go and move on
before someone does it for you! ` So, get engaged with Generation Y. They will be running things, so help them do
it well on their terms and from their perspective.
After all, the world of business didn’t fall apart when we dispensed
with the conventions of wearing ties, using fax machines or talking into wired devices
that just transmitted voice, did it? And
, yes, Gen Y, unbelievably, we late baby boomers once did that stuff.