March 30, 2017
Dear Millennial,
I apologize for ignoring tip No. 1 of Paul Agnone’s “Seven Tips to Engaging Millennials” in my opening line. I realize that I categorized you, but now that I have your attention I’ll follow tip No. 6 and “get to the point.” Point: I think you are getting a bum rap. Every generation was once impatient, entitled, and undisciplined. What holds you back is a need for wisdom and discipline, not your age. That being said, please allow this boomer to provide context. You want a seat at the table and a voice in the process. Perhaps your goals could be accelerated with some give and take.
Old people are in the habit of seeing the next generation as clueless miscreants. Someone said, “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” That was Socrates. People have had short attention spans for discipline and hard work for some time now.
We have been encouraged to believe that the different generations currently in the workforce are motivated differently. To some extent, I believe this is true. The social contexts you and I grew up in are vastly different. I am writing to you because I think it’s time to question the wisdom of explaining a group’s behavior exclusively by vintage.
In a widely shared YouTube interview, author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek summarized the difficulty with managing millennials as a combination of entitlement, impatience, and a lack of toughness. Now, I share this because I agree with him, and because I appreciate his point that your stereotypical self-image is fragile because your parents protected you from failure. However, the basis for the millennial self-concept is no shallower than that of the rest of us. We all fail, and most of us have learned lessons from failure that cannot be gained elsewhere. Your predecessors just had the luxury of failing earlier in life, when the consequences were less costly. By the way, when our generation was less experienced, our resiliency was no deeper than yours.
In many conversations with you much-maligned millennials, I have been encouraged by your dedication to finding balance between work and home life, and by your desire to make a difference. You also have a refreshing openness about what you don’t know, and a desire to learn. I have also noticed that the things you do that annoy me are not characteristic of your generation alone. Since World War II, generations have increased in the same characteristics that millennials wear like a badge. Entitlement increases while attention span decreases. I say that the major difference between my generation and yours is that we hide our selfishness, impatience, and lack of discipline. You see them as normal because we never told you to hide them.
We are all entitled and undisciplined until life knocks us down. Some stay down and call life unfair. Some just keep getting up, which produces character. When we practice this as a group, it becomes corporate character. There are people in every generation who refuse to settle for worthless easy answers. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said it well: “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
Our cultural attention span is shorter than it was, and our lack of consideration of the consequences frightens me. We seem to hate uncertainty more. We have become so impatient that we settle for other people’s answers that are easily accessed online. It has become more difficult to engage people in the hard work of reconciling difficult questions through sustained discussion.
While our natural-born self-interest is timeless, our impatience may be increasing as a consequence of the overwhelming amount of information we access. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has evidence that our self-imposed overstimulation is rewiring our brains, but there is good news. We can develop new habits that reject shallow and simple answers. We can learn to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty and find answers on the far side of complexity.
We are both motivated to grow as leaders and get stuff done, so how about an agreement? I’ll stop stereotyping your generation by your demographic; I’ll try to listen more closely. You’d like me to cut to the chase more quickly. I will be happy to do that if you will help me trust that you understand the context. I’ll share my experience with you, but please tell me that you know your need for experience. I really want you to succeed, because my future is in your hands. That’s the deal I propose. And now you know how to talk with a boomer—if you must.
Scott Ellis, Ed.D., is a partner in P-Squared (P 2). He can be reached at 425-985-8508 or scottellis@psquaredusa.com.
