The M-Factor

How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace

Lynne C. Lancaster, David Stillman

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061987892
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Karriere

From Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman, the nationally recognized generational experts and authors of When Generations Collide, comes the definitive guide to "Millennials" (those born between 1982 and 2000) in the workplace—what they want, how they think, and how to unlock their talents to your organization's advantage. If you enjoyed the insights in It's Okay to Be the Boss, you need to read The M-Factor, destined to become "the" business book on this Millennial generation in the workplace.

part one

here come the millennials

one

MILLENNIAL NATION

“I have a wireless router in my trunk. Why don’t I go get it?” the fresh-faced intern asked helpfully.

David yanked his head out from under the desk. He had been fiddling with his Internet connection for forty-five minutes while the new summer intern watched politely. Never mind that David had a crick in his neck, a pain in his knee, and had knocked his head on the keyboard tray. Now he didn’t even know how to respond.

“Would that help us?” he asked plaintively, blinking dust out of his eyes.

The intern pondered her answer. She did not want to offend her new boss, a Gen Xer who obviously took pride in his technical know-how. On the other hand, if she let him continue grappling lamely with all those wires this could take forever, and she really wanted to make progress on her first day.

She spoke loudly and slowly as if English was David’s second language: “Well, if I go get it we don’t have to waste time trying to hard-wire everything and both computers can just log onto the network through my router.”

David stared at her feeling English was his second language. He brushed himself off and there was an uncomfortable silence.

She jumped in supportively: “Don’t worry; I don’t need it back right now. I have, you know, another one at home.”

She gave David an encouraging nod and bounded out of his office. As soon as the intern had disappeared, Baby Boomer Lynne poked her head into David’s office grinning happily. After years of feeling like a dinosaur while David tormented her with the latest and greatest technologies, it was finally Lynne’s turn to watch David squirm. Her enjoyment was all too brief; the intern was back in a flash. Before either boss could say a word, she dove under the desk, reconfigured the system, leaped back up, and was eagerly awaiting her next assignment. It was 8:45 a.m.

Her name was Debra. And while interns were not exactly new to BridgeWorks, this one seemed alien. What was different? She was a Millennial—our first one.

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How a Whole New Generation Is Colliding, Clashing, and Clicking with Traditionalists, Boomers, and Generation Xers

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It was a landmark day at BridgeWorks as we welcomed a new generation to the team. We could only speculate if a company specializing in generational differences could be caught off guard by a single Millennial, what was happening in the rest of the business world?

We see them on the street, in the malls, in school, in our living rooms, and at times in our faces. We watch as they text message, surf the Internet, microwave a snack, listen to iTunes, and download a favorite TV show all at the same time. We wonder if the Millennials can truly do it all and if they’ll actually do it a little better than we did. Amidst our musing, it seldom occurs to us that the same people who glared at us across the dinner table will soon be staring at us across the conference table.

The leading edge of the Millennial generation, born between 1982 and 2000, began showing up in part-time jobs in the late nineties, and not only has it made its presence known, this generation will continue being a force to reckon with over the next decade and beyond. As Millennials join Generation Xers (born 1965–81), Baby Boomers (born 1946–64), and Traditionalists (born prior to 1946), the question becomes, will corporate America make the same mistake it made when Generation X showed up on the job?

In the late 1980s and early nineties, when Gen X entered the workforce, companies were blindsided. Employers never expected Xers to behave differently from Baby Boomers or that they would have their own unique expectations about the workplace. From dress codes to rewards programs, Xers railed against doing things the way they had always been done, and companies struggled to adapt. Years later many companies are still trying to figure out Generation X.

Flash forward and it’s déjà vu all over again as the Millennials make their debut. A whole new generation has arrived in the workplace and surprise, surprise—“the way it’s always been done” is getting ready for more renovation.

The Millennials—sometimes called Generation Y, GenNext, the Google Generation, the Echo Boom, or even the Tech Generation—are 76 million strong and compose the fastest-growing segment of workers today. (In fact, this generation is still increasing due to immigration and will likely surpass the 80-million-member Baby Boom generation in size in the 2010 census.) Millennials had barely kicked off their careers when employers started scratching their heads and asking, “Who are these people?” Suddenly they seemed to be shaking up everything from how the Internet gets used at work to whether or not Mom and Dad are invited to orientation.

IDENTIFYING THE M-FACTOR

Since writing our first book, When Generations Collide (HarperCollins, 2002), we have been traveling the country, speaking and working with organizations on how best to bridge generation gaps. This exposure has allowed us to stay on top of the best and next practices in recruiting, retaining, managing, training, and engaging the generations, and also to spot costly new gaps on the horizon. If there is one large looming gap that we have watched organizations slowly recognize, it’s the arrival of the Millennial generation. While they haven’t been in the business world very long, they are already challenging the status quo. In fact, in our national survey, when Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, and Generation Xers were asked to name the toughest generation to work with, they all named the Millennials.

The more we explored who the Millennials are and what makes them tick, the more we became convinced that the best way to describe them is through seven key trends that shaped them and accompany them into the workplace. These seven trends make up what we call the “M-Factor.” Over time the M-Factor will alter the way all of us work, but in the process, it will create collisions and spawn divisions as the generations bump up against each other vying to find the best way of doing things. The outcome will be a negotiated settlement based on what works. That’s how change happens.

We have titled the seven trends that make up the M-Factor: Parenting, Entitlement, Meaning, Great Expectations, The Need for Speed, Social Networking, and Collaboration. While what constitutes these trends is described in detail in the ensuing chapters, each can be explained briefly as follows:

Parenting. Millennials are their parents’ greatest protégés and proudest creations. As Millennials enter college and then work, rather than cut the cord, Mom and Dad are buying an extension. From orientation to the first review, Millennials aren’t just keeping their folks in the loop; they’re taking them along for the ride. Stand back corporate America! When you hire a Millennial you get three for the price of one—here come Mom and Dad!

Entitlement. Raised during the self-esteem movement with plenty of praise, and emerging as teens thinking they can accomplish whatever they want to in life, Millennials see themselves as a desirable commodity often worthy of special treatment when they enter the job market. They have a lot to offer but they also expect a lot, from perks to promotions. How will we set realistic standards that motivate Millennials without undermining the other generations?

Meaning. The American Dream is shifting from “having a job” to having a job that means something. Millennials want to earn a good living while doing work that has value, whether this means contributing to a company, country, cause, or community. As the economy expands, the pressure is on for organizations to connect the dots for Millennials as to how their role fits with the larger mission and how they can find meaning in their work from day one.

Great Expectations. Millennials are showing up on the job with high expectations for fulfillment and success. Unfortunately, the job experience often isn’t what they hoped it would be and they change jobs looking for the right match. Traditionalists, Boomers, and Xers are caught off guard also when their expectations for Millennials go unmet. From how to dress for success to how to communicate in a meeting, employers are finding Millennials’ skills sometimes miss the mark. The expectation gap between Millennials and the other generations must be bridged if everyone is to succeed.

The Need for Speed. This is a generation that has scarcely known a world without a personal computer. Since early childhood, most have been able to access information, entertainment, or other people at the push of a button. How will the arrival of a new generation of multitaskers change the ways work gets done? When is faster not necessarily better? And how will the workplace handle the speed at which Millennials expect to learn, grow, interact, and advance?

Social Networking. Access to information at lightning speed has taught Millennials to communicate in new ways. They post, chat, link, and IM passionately about politics, religion, pop culture, and life with people they’ve never met face-to-face. Yet these people are part of the powerful networks through which Millennials operate their lives. Not only is this generation reinventing modes of communication, they are redefining the parameters of personal and consumer relationships. They will be a tremendous force for revamping the ways we gather information, disseminate it, and learn from it, but only if the other generations are assured this can be done in a responsible way.

Collaboration. In school and at home, Millennials have been given the floor to express their opinions. It shouldn’t surprise employers that Millennials are going to show up on the job and expect to have a voice. Giving orders is out; candid conversations and give-and-take negotiations are in. The trend goes further as Millennials are pushing for new forms of leadership and decision-making based on collaboration. They have highly developed skills for cooperation and they will bring these to the table, but how will the other generations react to this new way of relating?

As you can see from these brief descriptions, the trends at play as the Millennials enter the workforce are provocative and will challenge the ways many of us do things. While the workplace felt seismic shifts when Gen X came on the scene, we predict those won’t hold a candle to what Traditionalists, Boomers, and Xers will experience learning to work with the Millennial generation. At the same time, Millennials will be tested as they are faced with learning to adapt to and thrive in well-established work cultures. Our goal is to frame and explain these trends with the attitude that no one is right or wrong, they’re just different. And in these differences lie tremendous opportunities.

GETTING OUR ARMS AROUND THE MILLENNIALS

When the topic of generational differences comes up, it’s easy to refer to the gap between “Pet Rocks” and “Pop Rocks.” While popular cultural icons play into every generation’s identity, we don’t plan to chronicle the death of the rotary dial phone. But we do believe that each generation has been shaped by the events and conditions they experienced during their formative years. While some of these are personal, others are experienced broadly by an entire population, such as the Great Depression or the Vietnam War. To get to the heart of the Millennial generation, we needed to explore the forces that influenced them, identify how they see the world, and predict how this will affect their approach to work.

When we pitched a book on the Millennials back in 2005 we were told, “Nobody’s interested in them yet.” But we didn’t let it drop. We’ve been collecting data, opinions, case studies, and analyses on them ever since. While our research for this book is Millennial-centric it is by no means limited to only what Millennials think and do. With each push to learn something new about Millennials, we studied and surveyed how our findings reflected or conflicted with the attitudes of Traditionalists, Boomers, and Xers. At the same time, we also paid attention to how attitudes changed over the course of an economic downturn. Findings in our book represent viewpoints collected during boom times and also during the decline of 2008–09.

How did we do that? In three ways…

1. Case studies and stories. Because we give keynote presentations and workshops as well as consult and conduct trainer certification programs, we have the opportunity to interview 300 to 500 people from all the generations in various organizations each year. We ask them similar questions. Where do generational conflicts arise in your organization? How do you identify the issues and measure the costs? What kinds of solutions have you devised to bridge the gaps? Our clients range literally from MTV to the IRS and every type of business from Fortune 500 companies to startups, educational institutions, health care, and the public sector—so we get a broad perspective. Sometimes the responses are anecdotal, where we might be interviewing recruiters about how the generations differ in the ways they approach the hiring process. Other times they are quite strategic. We might put questions to a corporate HR executive who has measurement tools and numerical targets to help him or her identify what’s going on. Either way, we always learn something. Many of our clients generously agreed to allow us to include their examples in this book, but even when they aren’t mentioned by name their insights are reflected throughout.

2. Capturing the voice of the Millennials. When we started our business in 1997, leading edge Millennials were just starting to think about that first part-time job. As our business grew and we did more and more interviews, we began hearing about the Millennials, but we seldom heard from the Millennials. They may have moved up from mowing lawns, but they weren’t in positions of authority quite yet. The past few years we’ve been interviewing Millennials in earnest. When it came time to write this book we asked, how can we go deeper?

The magic for us as a Boomer and an Xer who have been friends and business partners for over a decade is that we feel comfortable butting heads about how we see the world. Since our job here was to better understand the Millennials, we thought, “What better way than to hire one?” We knew this had to be a magical relationship, so we tapped our former intern, Debra Fiterman—now an accomplished participant in the corporate world—to join us. She was charged with capturing the voice of her generation by spearheading a project we dubbed “Millennials on Record” (MOR). The idea was to tap a cross section of Millennials from around the country for in-depth, one-on-one interviews and take a deeper dive into how they see the world of work. Our MORs have provided input on everything from their search for meaning, to their career goals, to how they view the other generations.

Once we captured their voices, we could pull our whole team in to discuss, debate, and debunk ideas about the Millennials and all the generations with which they interact. When our CEO Allan Grosh (Traditionalist), program director Nancy Peterson (Cusper), associate Kel Gratke (Gen Xer), and sales representative and speaker Seth Mattison (Millennial) weighed in and added their perspectives, we knew we had found the right path. Our initial target for the MOR interviews was fifty Millennials, and we’ve since passed that goal. Not all of them were allowed by their companies to use their names, but their voices are heard in every chapter loud and clear.

3. Putting the numbers behind the ideas. The hardest part of writing about these issues is attempting to quantify generational attitudes. Is there a way to measure how perceptions differ between generations that can shed light on how we manage? We also needed to be careful to ask ourselves whether a particular finding is generational. Lots of factors shape who a person becomes, including gender, birth order, ethnicity, socioeconomic level, geographic location, and country of origin, not to mention in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• About the Authors
• Praise
• Other Books by Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher