e-Tips

A while ago I was thinking about stories to tell at a conference where our panel was discussing the issues and solutions at the intersection of generations and gender. Most of the attendees were women partners in law firms or female senior in-house counsel. My perspective is not as a player in the midst of management and internal politics of the issues, but as a problem-solver seeing the bigger issues.

A Wall Street Journal article on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs reinventing philanthropists that I blogged about got me thinking in broader terms about Gen X and Gen Y philanthropy and how their approaches translate to the workplace. For some time I have been following the philanthropic and legacy efforts of Generations X and Y and how they differ from Traditionalists and Boomer generations in general. Also I’ve been advising on conflicting approaches within families that financial advisors and planners often need to address with their clients.  There are lessons from this different perspective for corporate and professional services managers working with the younger generations.

 

(See this e-Tip on video here) – or read on.

Employers and managers are looking for the secret sauce that will turn young recruits into the more traditional, driven professionals they could count on to work hard, aspire to significant responsibility, act like owners and stick around for at least 3 to 5 years, at which point they will have justified the organization’s investment in them.

“The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, her opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, suggests that our connectedness to and by electronic gadgets have changed “not only what we do, but who we are.” I had the privilege of meeting and hearing Turkle speak at the Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, SC in December 2011 on this and related subjects. She claims that people are alone together. “We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one.”

“Mobile, flexible, agile, engaged” are not only descriptors of our elite athletes and our smartphones, but also the workplace cultures most desired by the most sought after talent. We’re going to see more frequent leadership changes at various levels, role shifts and non-traditional reporting relationships brought on by external forces and internal impatience.

What does this mean for future leaders their training and how teams will operate?

Social Media – it’s much more than Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Foursquare, Pinterest, Tumblr, blogs, podcasts – it seems new platforms are created every hour wherever sharing is happening. Not only is the accelerating use of these outlets affecting our behavior and use of time, but also social media are influencing behavior of the different generations – and vice versa.

Lloyd’s ranked talent and skills shortages the #2 risk facing businesses as of 2011, up from #22 in 2009 according to a Human Resource Executive magazine editorial. This was a finding of a study of 500 C-suite and board level executives, which also found that “talent and skill shortages” was one of only two risks that “respondents felt insufficiently prepared for.”

Though aspersions are most often cast at the youngest generations – Gen Y/Millennials now and Gen Xers before them – entitlement attitudes are found in all generations. Whitney Johnson, a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors, wrote on a Harvard Business Review blog “Entitlement is pervasive in American culture.”