It was my very first job and I was definitely trying to make an impression, but I guess the impression I made wasn't too great. I was taking the wrong things for granted and I guess I seemed clueless about how much I needed to learn just to be able to really understand a lot of what was being said in meetings. It took me a while to learn the players and their roles and a lot of the unspoken rules of being part of this team.
—Twentysomething
The following story was told to me by a senior executive in a large automobile parts supply company: “We were downsizing the organization, but we were trying to do it through controlled attrition. We were offering buyouts for senior people in certain categories who were willing and able to leave the company inside of twelve months. When some of the younger people got wind of this, we were inundated with requests from them. They wanted to know why they were not being offered the buyout. [Because] I fielded some of these requests myself, I had a chance to say, ‘But you are ineligible.’ They would say, ‘Why?’ I'd say, ‘You've been here less than a year.’ And they would say, ‘That's not fair.’ They honestly didn't get why they were in a different position from the employees who had been here for twenty or thirty years.”
We see this sort of thing in our research all the time. Managers often tell us that their new young team members seem to suffer from a fundamental lack of context. This is partly a life stage issue: younger people have less life experience than older people and thus fewer points of reference to compare circumstances, people, and relationships. Context is all about these points of reference. Lack of context kind of goes with the territory for young employees.
Still, there is something about today's young people and their lack of context that seems to stem from more than just youth and inexperience. “When I was young and inexperienced,” said a fifty-something sales manager in a pharmaceutical company, “I may have been cocky, but I knew age and experience mattered and I knew I didn't have either. Recently I set this new guy up with some paperwork. When I came back a few hours later to check on him, he was gone. I looked across the hallway and realized he had set himself up in a different cube than the one I put him in. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me that he liked the other cube better. Of course, you like that one better. The other one is bigger, has a window, and a bigger desk. That's why it goes to someone who's been here more than six hours. It's like they don't even realize that some of us have been working here since they were in diapers. They don't see it, or they just don't see why it matters.”
In fact, our research shows that today's young people do usually appreciate and respect age and experience. After all, they have enjoyed the most nurturing relationships with adults perhaps of any generation in recorded history. But their appreciation and respect don't translate into deference or acquiescence. Young people nowadays have grown up in a child-centric era in which their feelings, words, and actions have usually been accorded a huge amount of respect by the adults in their lives. Their relationships with adults have rarely been defined in terms of authority and have instead often been inflected by familiarity. Their preferences have been given much weight, and their opinions and words have been given much airtime in discussions. Misbehavior has been more and more likely to be diagnosed instead of punished. And their accomplishments have been highlighted with a lot of emphasis.
As the sales manager for the pharmaceutical company put it, “Nobody has ever said to them, ‘Because I said so!’ It's like they exist in a vacuum. Nobody has ever pulled them aside and said to them, ‘Look, we've been at this for a long time. This is how we do things around here. You've just arrived. This is where you fit into our picture.’”
I believe he is on to something.
Giving the gift of context means explaining that no matter who an individual—any individual—may be, what they want to achieve, or how they want to behave, their role in any situation is determined in large part by factors that have nothing to do with them. There are preexisting, independent factors that would be present even if they were not present, and those factors determine the context of any situation.
Context is easier to understand when we consider extreme examples of it: jail, war, famine, earthquakes. In any of these contexts, the possibilities are limited, and so is the scope of an individual's potential role. In these contexts, certain expectations, hopes, expressions, and actions are inappropriate. While it is relatively easy to be sensitive to extreme contexts, it is often difficult for people, younger employees in particular, to be sensitive to more subtle contexts, particularly when they walk into new situations. Every situation has a context that limits possibilities and limits the scope of an individual's potential role.
The big mistake leaders and managers often make is allowing young team members to remain in their vacuum. Telling new employees all about the company is not the same as giving them context. Telling them, “This is how it was for me when I was a new employee” is not giving them context. Understanding context is about understanding where one fits in the larger picture.
In our career seminars, we teach young workers to use a simple brainstorming tool in order to situate themselves in a new context, and you can use it to teach your young team members—and newer team members of any age. We tell them that before they can figure out where they fit in an organization, they need to get a handle on the other pieces of the puzzle. We ask them to think and respond to the following simple orienteering questions:
Conflicts, dislikes, and gripes between and among employees are very common and can be some of the most difficult issues for managers. We see this in our research all the time. Cliques and ringleaders are common problems—and sources of conflict—in the workplace. They always have been. Young people, brand new to a workplace, are often lured into cliques or distracting personal relationships by one social ringleader or another. As one Twentysomething put it: “My boss was sort of non-present most of the time at work. I got most of my cues from the other people I was working with. One of the ladies at work, I connected with her right away. She told me who was cool and who to stay away from. I would definitely say we became friends.” When this happens, the young team member's focus is drawn away from the work and onto personal and social machinations. How can managers deal with this problem?
Young people tell us every day in our research that relationships with coworkers are among the most important factors in their satisfaction with work. And the number-one factor cited by young people in our studies is having a good relationship with a supportive manager.
When individual young workers say that their own number one most important relationship at work is with their immediate manager, they have many fewer personal conflicts with other employees at work. We have also found that the busier team members are with their daily tasks and responsibilities at work, the more they tend to build their workplace relationships with colleagues around shared or dovetailing tasks and responsibilities (as opposed to personal matters). As a result, their workplace relationships tend to be more professional.
As a manager, the best thing you can do is help your team members anticipate relationship dynamics that are likely to cause conflict and help them avoid those situations and prepare for the ones they cannot avoid. Our research indicates four authority-related issues that tend to cause relationship conflicts for young team members:
In many organizations, employees answer to more than one boss. That means they have to balance competing demands for their time and energy. When you give a team member an assignment, it may not always be clear how many other assignments he is juggling at that point. Are you interfering with assignments from other bosses? Will another assignment come up from another boss and interfere with your assignment? The problem is that employees—especially those with less experience—are bound to feel as if they are stuck in the middle. Sometimes they try to please everybody and end up pleasing nobody. Other times they try to choose for themselves which assignment is a priority. Maybe they choose the assignment from the boss who seems most important to them. Or maybe they choose the assignment from the boss they like the best. Or maybe they try to make a business judgment about which assignment should take precedence. But this complicated situation often gets them into trouble with one or more of their bosses.
Step 1: When you give team members assignments, always ask for an inventory of all their other assignments at that moment. That way, if you or another manager becomes aware of a potential conflict, you can help them resolve it there and then.
Step 2: Explain the problem to team members in advance and give them standard operating procedures for dealing with it. When they receive assignments, teach them to first give the assigning manager an inventory of all their other assignments so that potential conflicts can be resolved in advance. When potential conflicts do arise, teach them not to try to resolve the conflicts. Rather, they should immediately contact each competing boss and ask for help resolving the conflict.
Sometimes new young team members may resist their immediate manager's authority or find their immediate manager to be unhelpful or unresponsive to their requests. Or sometimes they disagree with their immediate manager's decisions. In these cases, the young team member may try to go around their immediate manager and seek to deal directly with their manager's manager or their manager's manager. After all, the manager's manager's manager is more powerful, probably more experienced, has more access to resources, and may even be more responsive. Obviously, when an employee tries to “end run” their immediate manager, they are likely to encounter increased relationship stress with that manager as well as their coworkers.
Step 1: Teach them to deal with their immediate managers whenever possible. If they are unable to get what they need from their immediate manager, teach them to request a meeting with their immediate manager and their manager's manager together. This will raise the gravity of end-running the chain of command and lead them to do it only when it's really necessary.
Step 2: When team members end-run their immediate managers, whomever they try to deal with instead should immediately bring the team member's immediate manager into the loop and make the conversation a three-way conversation. The exception is a meeting requested in confidence, in which case someone from HR should be included.
Sometimes new young team members may rub older more experienced colleagues the wrong way because they seem so eager to take on responsibilities, prove themselves, and do things in newfangled ways. These more experienced colleagues can also become resentful when managers are perceived as acceding to the demands of young workers for rapid advancement or special accommodations and rewards. But the most common complaint we hear is that older, more experienced colleagues believe younger colleagues do not accord them an appropriate degree of respect and deference. Meanwhile, young team members sometimes feel they are treated with disrespect by their older, more experienced colleagues.
Step 1: Remind them that their older, more experienced colleagues are older and more experienced. Consider assigning each new young team member an older, more experienced person as a peer adviser. Although the peer advisers may have no official authority in the relationships, the peer adviser role creates one-on-one relationships of trust and confidence and mutual respect between young team members and their older colleagues. It is very important that these relationships not be pro forma, but rather that a concrete business purpose, such as training, be attached to the relationship.
Step 2: If you assign special responsibilities, award fast-track promotions, or make accommodations or rewards available to new young team members, then you should make a serious effort to make them equally available to older, more experienced workers too. Any special treatment should be available to older and younger workers alike and always in exchange for meeting clear, measurable performance expectations.
These interdependencies cause relationship conflicts when new young team members have a hard time getting what they need out of other employees and thus aren't able to complete their own tasks and responsibilities properly or in a timely fashion.
Step 1: Teach young team members to focus on tasks they can accomplish on their own while they are waiting for whatever it is they need from other employees.
Step 2: Teach them exactly how to work the system and how to interact more effectively with these people in order to get more of what they need faster from other people. Give them good standard operating procedures for spelling out their needs, asking for clear deliverables with specific timetables; and obtaining commitments and following up at regular intervals without seeming as if they are pestering.
Step 3: Teach them when and how to bring in you or another authority figure in order to apply extra pressure when necessary.
A training manager in a large insurance company shared this story with me: “My assistant helped me prepare for a presentation to a senior vice president who is an internal customer. She wanted to come into the meeting with me, which I said was fine. But throughout my presentation, she kept interrupting to explain, ‘I prepared the slide show,’ or ‘Let me explain this cost estimate I prepared,’ or ‘I think maybe you should let me answer this question.’” The training manager continued: “After the meeting, I was getting ready to tell her how inappropriate her conduct had been, but she beat me to the punch. She said, ‘Listen, if I'm going to do all the work for a presentation like that, I'd really prefer it if you just let me make the presentation alone. I'd really prefer if you weren't in the meeting. Next time, could I just go solo?’ I was speechless. I really didn't know what I was supposed to say.”
What was she supposed to say? Whenever your team members have to—or want to—attend meetings or give a presentation as part of their responsibilities at work, you need to prepare them rigorously in advance. The most important thing you can do for them is clarify whether a presentation or meeting is indeed a primary opportunity for them to shine or impress people or not.
Here are four best practices to teach team members in order to always be prepared for presentations and meetings:
Finally, sometimes meetings are often called for no good reason and are a waste of time but still cannot be avoided. In those meetings, teach your team members not to say a single word that will unnecessarily lengthen the meeting.
One Twentysomething says, “You want me to act all impressed? Be impressive. What can I say? If you are the big guy around here, then of course I'm going to set my sights on you. But you are still just another person. You know what they say: ‘Everybody poops.’ Don't get all high and mighty with me.”
A senior official in a U.S. government agency says: “They have no respect for authority.” He paused and then clarified: “Well, they do and they don't. If they think you can help their career, then they want to know you. In fact, they will beat down your door to get your attention. But I say they have no respect for authority because they are not intimidated by titles at all. I want to tell them that if this person is impressive enough that you are trying to get her attention, then she is impressive enough that you should be deferent toward her. I mean, you don't just go up to her and say, ‘Hey, how's it goin'?’”
So, what is going on here? Young people may not know exactly how to pay proper respect to those in positions of authority, but I promise you, they know well that powerful decision makers can help them. And they know that building relationships with powerful decision makers is a key to accelerating career success. If anything, young people are more attuned than those of other generations to the value of so-called networking because they have been accustomed since childhood to building close relationships with parents, teachers, and counselors in all dimensions of their lives.
This inclination is especially notable among the most ambitious young talent—those at the highest end of the achievement spectrum. Smart leaders and managers tap into young team member's desire for networking opportunities and use it for extra leverage by making exposure to senior leaders a reward for high performance. For all of the upsides of this approach, however, it often leads to unintended consequences.
Several executives in a major insurance company have told me different versions of this story. It seems that this company, like so many others, has a fast-track program for high-potential entry-level young talent. Although there are many different aspects to this fast-track program, one component is exposing the young employees to C-level executives. These fast-trackers spend time in small groups and in one-on-one meetings with the CEO of the company, the chief financial officer, the chief operating officer, as well as the executive vice presidents. These are meant to be interactive discussion sessions, sometimes over lunch or at cocktail parties. Typically, the senior executives participating in these sessions go out of their way to seem accessible: they try to engage with each young employee, use their names, answer questions, and ask them to share their impressions and opinions. Often the senior executives wrap up these encounters by saying something like, “I want you to stay in touch with me. I want to know how things are going for you. I want to know if you need something. Here is my e-mail address. Here is my assistant's direct line.”
Then, what's the problem? According to one of the leaders of this fast-track program, “The problem is that the fast-trackers take them up on it!” Young people who come out of the fast-track program “think nothing of calling the CEO or e-mailing him” to tell him “they don't like their work space, they are unhappy with an assignment, they don't like their boss” or “to get special approval for something their boss has told them they couldn't do.” But isn't that one of the intentions of the fast-track program: To give these high-potential young rising stars a feeling of access to and connection with senior executives? “Yes,” said one of these executives. “But they are so inappropriate about it. They aren't supposed to get the idea that they are best friends with the CEO. Sometimes you find them bragging to more experienced people, like, ‘I know the CEO,’ or even threatening their boss: ‘I'm going to tell the CEO about this.’ That is most definitely not our intention. It makes the program look bad. It's also embarrassing to the fast-tracker, even if he or she doesn't realize it.”
How do you give high-potential and high-performing young talent exposure to decision makers who can help them without exposing everybody involved to this type of embarrassing situation? You need to give them context: explain to them exactly who they should be reaching out to (and not), for what reasons, when, and how.
In our career seminars, we teach a number of basic techniques for building relationships with big-shot decision makers. Teach them to your young team members:
Young people often have particular difficulty tuning in to new contexts at work and realizing how context often restricts the range of their appropriate behavior. Whether you are helping them to reach out to higher-ups and decision makers, to conduct themselves properly in meetings, or to avoid the most common relationship conflicts, the key is to help them learn to ask themselves, “Where do I fit in this situation?”