4 Things About Gen Y

I came upon this article titled “4 Things You Might Not Know About Generation Y” and had to comment. I’ll post some excerpts and make my points as I go. From ere.net:

Sure, Gen Y is voting for Obama, but this doesn’t mean they are trailblazers. In fact, they are, for the most part, living out the values their parents gave to them. Not only that, but Generation Y is more comfortable being part of the crowd — identifying themselves by their group of friends, their teams at work, and the consumer brands they love most. Here are some traits of Gen Y that might make you think twice about the preconceived notions you have about those young upstarts in the workplace:

Gen Y is fundamentally conservative.

This is not a rebellious generation. This is a group that moves back home with their parents after college, something you could never think of doing if you were going to, say, spend a decade using drugs and hanging out at Woodstock. The helicopter parent phenomenon is also a sign of a generation that is not rebelling. They let their parents help choose their college and their clothes. And when it’s time to get a job, they let their parents help negotiate their salary.

This is under the assumption that the boomer parents that have the Gen Y kids are conservative. But parents have become far more permissive than ever before. Allowing kids to do things their own parent would never have done. Allowing cursing at a young age or engage in underage drinking. Yes, underage drinking has been curbed, but more and more parents are getting in trouble for hosting parties with underage drinkers. “If they’re going to go drink anyway, I’d rather it be in my home where I can keep an I on them,” is a common excuse. So are there less underage drinking? Or are less underage kids getting caught? It’s something to think about.

Also, I think the school systems allow for more diversity, teach tolerance of others, and are open to more liberal views. Except in places that don’t teach evolution. But I won’t get into that.

Gen Y is full of great team players.

This generation grew up on soccer teams, where everyone is a winner and no one is a star. School taught kids on the playground that you can’t say you can’t play, and kids translated this into a worldview where everyone plays together. They went to prom in teams and later they applied for jobs and quit their jobs in teams.

Today’s executive teams understand that work environments that use teams well outperform those that don’t; however, older generations are leaders and loners, not teammates. Gen Y is appalled by a lack of team structure at work, and often they feel like they are not accomplishing anything until they are working as part of a team. Gen Y is so team-oriented that the place they really need help is in learning how to be leaders — something that comes so naturally to Boomers that they never even expect to teach it in such a fundamental way as Gen Y needs.

This I agree with 100%. They’re great as a team, yet can’t do much without people to interact with. It’s like watching “House”. Whenever House doesn’t have his team to bounce ideas off of, he finds complete strangers to fill the void. Be it a janitor, the odd private investigator he hired this season or random people he bumps into. Alone, he seems useless. With his team to criticize, heckle and degrade, he’s a genius!

Gen Y women have more power than men.

For the first time in history, women in their twenties are out-earning men. This is true in every major city in the U.S., and the disparity persists until women have children, and then men earn more. Other generations might leap to cry sexism, but this generation understands that women have power to make their own decisions, and women are deciding on their own to downshift their career when they have kids, which means they are making an intentional reduction in earning power. Women in Gen Y feel empowered to get what they want in life, and they feel secure enough at the office to know that downshifting is fine.

I’m sure if you ask women in the workplace this they may disagree. Not being a woman, I can’t really answer this, but I will anyway. It does seem to me that they still have to work harder and better to be considered equal to their male counterparts. Maybe not as much as years past and hopefully less so in the immediate future, but from what anecdotal evidence I hear, they’re still getting the short end of the workplace stick.

Gen Y is more productive than everyone else.

While baby boomers are using their in-boxes as a to-do list, Gen Y is largely bought into the idea of an empty inbox. And while the idea of a constantly empty inbox might not seem defining to some, it is: For one thing, it means that Gen Y has more control over their priorities than everyone else because they are not choosing what to do by what is coming into their inbox, but rather, what their goals for the day are.

The other thing that an empty inbox signifies is Gen Y’s ability to slice and dice productivity software to get where they want to go. The key to an empty inbox is turning your email into a searchable database rather than a file system, which requires a good set of email tools. Gen Y chooses their own productivity tools, rather than waiting for the IT department to download them onto the company laptop. Gen Y’s productivity is so much higher than everyone else’s that you can assume that someone who is texting and watching a movie and listening to their iPod is still getting more done than you are.

Again, I agree. But with all the feedback, handholding on projects and constant praising along the way, the managers of the Gen Ys can’t be as directly productive since they are dividing their attention between work and their employees where in the past, you could delegate more with less involvement.

We need to learn to manage Generation Y. They have boundless potential. But let’s not put them on a pedestal yet. They already have huge egos and self-esteem. Let’s get them working on fixing this economy. Then we’ll tell them how wonderful they really are.

Tagged as: experience, feedback, Gen X, Gen Y, Generation X, Generation Y, humor, Humorist, making choices, motivation, motivational, negative, negative thinking, negative thoughts, Negativity, planning, problem solving, productivity