Generation Gap: Managing Gen X

Join Jed and Bob as they discuss how this generation has been shaped, the expectations of Gen X at work, and most importantly, how to effectively lead this group.

Watch the ‘Generation Gap: Managing Gen X’ Video (14 mins 41 sec):

Download the  ”Generation X in the Workplace” Cheat Sheet, Video, Audio, and Slides

 

Generation X in the Workplace

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Given how small Generation X is compared to the Boomers or the Millennials, there is much written about Generation X in the Workplace.  Below we discuss:

  • Why managers should care about Generation X in the Workplace.
  • What has shaped Generation X in the Workplace
  • The expectations of Generation X in the Workplace
  • How to lead and motivate Generation X in the Workplace

First, we should define Generation X in the Workplace

Traditionalists:             1925 – 1945

Baby Boomers:           1946 – 1965

Generation X:              1966 – 1980

Millennials:                  1980 – 1999

Why Managers Should Care About Generation X in the Workplace

  • Clashes between generations can directly affect turnover, and unwanted turnover is expensive and time consuming.
  • If team members do not feel like they “fit in” or that their values are not reflected in the workplace, they are more at risk of leaving.
  • Generation X in the Workplace has been influenced by different life events and thus has different perspectives that can impact motivation and performance.  For Example, Generation X in the Workplace:
    • Has unique ways of viewing quality.
    • Has distinct and preferred ways of managing and being managed.
    • Has different priorities that effect how and when they show up for work.

The Shaping of Generation X in the Workplace

  • This generation watched their parents get downsized out of their jobs after a lifetime of loyalty.
  • They graduated from high school and university into a poor job market.
  • They were the most educated generation in history at the time.
  • Gen X came from families that had triple the divorce rates than that of the previous generation.
  • They came of age during the end of the Cold War
  • They saw the beginning of the digital revolution
  • They were the first generation to wonder if they’d be able to do as well as their parents.

Expectations of Generation X in the Workplace

  • They are skeptical of everyone and everything.
  • After watching their parents struggle with large organizations, they expect to be screwed.
  • They are as loyal to their organizations, as they expect their organization will be to them (not very loyal!)
  • They expect to be independent and to do it on their own.
  • Rather than challenge authority they tend to ignore it.
  • Job security is about mobility, not stability.  They believe job security comes from proactively jumping from job to job.
  • They are entrepreneurial.
  • They approach work as a process of acquiring skills or resume building.

How to Lead and Motivate Generation X in the Workplace

  • Let them take risks.  Allow them to take some chances.
  • Respect their time.  Time off or away is often a motivator for this group
  • Be Creative with Time Worked: Sabbaticals, compressed work-weeks, telecommuting, are all very popular amongst this group.
  • Reward them with training or other experience building offers. Gen X values the opportunity to build their resumes.
  • Let them do it their way.  Take advantage of their entrepreneurial spirit.   Give them a challenge and let them figure it out.

3 Things that frustrate Generation X in the Workplace about the other generations:

  1. Boomers are self-absorbed workaholics, who took all the good jobs, and now won’t give them up.
  2. Traditionalists reject change, and are too rigid.
  3. Generation Y expects everything to be handed to them.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Generation X in the Workplace (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Managing Generation X

Is it possible to have a whole generation with such a collective inferiority complex that they can all be tagged as slackers with a bad attitude?  Join the Wily Manager guys this week as they discuss Gen X, and how you can better lead them in the workplace.

Monday’s Tip: Build their skills and experience. Gen Xers want to continually build their resumes and expand their life experience.  If you can facilitate this, they will be appreciative.

Tuesday’s Tip: Be creative with work times. Flex time, telecommuting, and/or sabbaticals all work to appease Gen X.  Try to incorporate such  tactics into your workplace.

Wednesday’s Tip: Let them do things their own way. Gen X has an entrepreneurial spirit.  If you can find a way to harness that energy, you may get great things back.

Thursday’s Tip: Offer time off as a reward. Some people prefer money or status, but many Gen Xers will respond very well to time off as recognition.

Friday’s Tip: Do not expect loyalty. This generation was jaded from the outset.  They do not give, nor do they expect to receive loyalty.  Bearing this in mind will help you better understand their motivation.

 

Your Mentor and Captain Marvel

What the hell is a mentor anyway?  I hear the word, and I always think of Captain Marvel’s alter ego, Billy Batson, and his nameless Mentor.  As best I can tell, Mentor’s job was to drive a Winnebago around the United States with no particular destination in mind, and to give clichéd advice to Billy, all while giving any casual observers the creepy feeling they might be witnesses some form of pedophilia in progress.

The Management Gurus will tell you that when mentoring works well, it is a relationship of high trust, where the Mentor knows and understands the technical, political and social ramifications of a particular organization, but does not have organizational power or control over a person.  Some organizations even assign two people to each other for a mentor-mentee arrangement.

I don’t think this type of relationship is really possible in most organizations, and here’s why:

  • We fired most of the middle-managers that could have served in such a role several years ago.  Now, outside of the occasional peer, there is no one to act in this capacity.
  • Mentoring relationships take time – years in some cases.  Most people don’t stay in one job, or at one location that long anymore.
  • Workplaces are generally lower trust environments than they were a decade or two ago.  Employees don’t trust the employer to act in their individual best interests, and employers see their people as disloyal.

Many organizations start these well-intentioned, but misguided attempts at mentorship programs.  Mentoring relationships, by definition, must occur organically, so drawing up a schedule to pair one person with another is a waste of paper.  Not to mention the awkward situation this puts the participants in:

“I’d like to introduce you to your new mentor!  Now run along and share your deepest fears and aspirations with this person.”

So here’s my alternative:  a personal Board of Directors.  Don’t be put-off by how badly publically traded companies have bastardized this good idea.  It is their implementation that is suspect, not the idea.  There are a variety of aspects of your professional life (and maybe your personal life, too) that could benefit from the external feedback of a Board of Directors.

If you’ve found a great mentor, then that person, may provide adequate direction for all axes of your professional life.  If you don’t have a mentoring relationship in place, you may want to consider a different person for each of the following areas:

  • Technical – how can you better execute the core skills of your job?
  • Political – how do you negotiate the politics?
  • Organizational/Social  — who are the true leaders of the organization, and who defers to whom?
  • Networking – Who do you need to know?  Who knows them?
  • Community involvement — What causes or initiatives should you be involved in.
  • Self-promotion – How do you raise your profile, without coming across as a bootlicker?

There are undoubtedly other categories unique to your situation too.  Perhaps you have people who can serve in more than one role, or maybe you have someone for each different aspect.

Just make sure you use their real name, and don’t address them as “Political Director”, otherwise you may leave people with that creepy impression like Billy Batson and Mentor did.

 

How to Mentor Someone

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Many leaders get the call, and then have to figure out how to mentor someone.  Below we discuss:

  • Why you would want to learn how to mentor someone.
  • How mentoring someone is different than simply managing someone
  • The role of the mentor
  • The expectations of the mentee
  • The mentoring agreement

Why Learn How to Mentor Someone?

  • By learning how to mentor someone, you will improve employee retention within your department or organization.  An Interim Services study revealed that 35% of employees who did not have a mentor planned to look for a new employer within the next year, while only 16% of those with good mentors indicated the same intention.
  • Learning how to mentor someone will capture employee discretionary effort.  A 2002 University of Georgia study proved that mentored employees perform better, advance more rapidly, and report greater job and career satisfaction.
  • Learning how to mentor someone can better position you as an employer of choice.  A MMHA Managers’ Mentor study discovered that 60% of college and grad students said that the availability of a mentoring program weighed heavily in their decisions regarding selection of an employer.

Mentors and Managers

Many leaders don’t bother to learn how to mentor someone, because they believe it is the same as managing people.  It is not.  Immediate managers provide direction, resources, encouragement, consequences and measures progress.  Mentors, on the other hand, provide high-level guidance and help track progress.

A manager and an employee have a reporting relationship; a mentor/mentee relationship normally does not have a reporting relationship.  Finally, a mentee is under no obligation to accept the feedback or advice offered by a mentor, whereas the feedback and advice offered by a direct supervisor is often not optional.

The Role of a Mentor

A key part of learning how to mentor someone is to understand the role of this important relationship.  As a mentor, you should act as a(n):

  • Sounding Board
  • Development Coach
  • Interpreter and Guide
  • Role Model

What the Mentee Expects:

The other critical component of understanding how to mentor someone is knowing what the other person is expecting of you:

  • Encourage learning, achievement, and trying new approaches.
  • Mentees value mentors who are good listeners.
  • The mentee expects the mentor to keep their confidences.
  • Mentors who provide specific and honest feedback regarding their performance.
  • Mentors who suggest strategies for specific work challenges.
  • Most of all, participants want mentors who care about them and want them to succeed.

The Mentoring Agreement

A very useful tool for learning how to mentor someone is the Mentoring Agreement.  There are a variety of different formats for Mentoring Agreements, but here are some standard category contents for a mentoring agreement:

  • Purpose
  • Responsibilities of the mentor and the mentee
  • Measures of Success of the mentoring relationship.
  • Barriers
  • Ground Rules
  • Meetings

Click here for a Mentoring Agreement Template (members only)

3 Things to Remember about how to mentor someone

1)    Don’t bother if you are not committed.  A mentoring relationship will take some time and energy.  If you are unwilling to make that investment, you should decide early on NOT to do so.

2)    It’s about accelerating development.  Mentoring relationships are intended to advance the career of the mentee, and skill building.  If you are uncomfortable in such a role, you should not volunteer.

3)    Use a mentoring agreement.  A bit of structure can advance the relationship significantly.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about How to Mentor Someone (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Now I’m a Mentor: Being Yoda

Join Jed & Bob as they discuss why you would want to be a mentor, and what the roles of mentor and mentee entail.  Also learn about the Mentoring Agreement.

Watch the ‘Now I’m a Mentor: Being Yoda’ Video (13 mins 26 sec):

Download the  ”How to Mentor Someone” Cheat Sheet, Video, Audio, and Slides

How to Be a Mentor

You’ve been asked to mentor someone.  First, you schedule a meeting.  Then what?  This week the Wily Manager guys talk about how to be a mentor to others.  If you’ve never had a mentor yourself, this will be required reading.

Monday’s Tip: Say no if you’re not committed. Being a Mentor will take time and energy.  If you are unsure if you can commit the effort, you should decline the invitation.

Tuesday’s Tip: Be a Role Model. Your actions will always speak louder than your words, and as a mentor, you will be watched closely.

Wednesday’s Tip: Be an astoundingly great listener. The ability to listen empathetically is a core requirement to be a mentor.  The better your listening skills, the more effective a mentor you will be.

Thursday’s Tip: Don’t pull punches – tell ‘em what they might not want to hear. It is difficult to tell people things they don’t want to hear, but is likely the most important function of being a mentor.

Friday’s Tip: Put some structure around the relationship – a mentorship agreement. A mentorship agreement will document roles and responsibilities of all parties.  This little bit of structure will make any mentoring relationship that much better.

Optimizing Your Business Process Can Be a Really Bad Idea

Before the industrial revolution, most of us were connected to the outputs of our labor.  We were either farmers or craftsmen in cottage industries where we worked on something for some period of time, and then either harvested, used, or sold the output of all our hard work.

In the 21st century the link between what we toil on daily, and the output of that toil is much more illusive – particularly so in information based jobs and industries.  We behave like some really minor cog, in some great big organizational wheel always feeling at least slightly nervous that if we got hit by a truck, it might take some time before anyone noticed.

As a result, we become focused on a series of tasks, rather than how those tasks contribute to some greater goal.  Several years ago I did a job at a sawmill.  This was before the forest sector in North America got completely spanked, and prior to Americans and Canadians sparring each other, and failing to recognize the much greater threat was coming from outside NAFTA.

Turning a raw log into a two-by-four is a much more complicated process than you might think.  There are lots of moving parts and many people involved before you can go down to the Home Depot and buy some boards to build that eyesore treehouse for the kids in your backyard.  As a result, you’ve got several groups of people that optimize their little part of much larger process without ever putting their head up to see if what they’re doing makes any sense.

Raw logs are scanned by laser on their way into the mill to optimize the use of fibre, and reduce the amount of waste (also known as chips).  The problem is as the timber got smaller and smaller over the course of many years, optimizing the amount of fibre meant that sawmills were producing a whole bunch of lumber with a dimension of 1” X 1” – about the size of a garden stake.

So you can imagine my surprise walking into the lumberyard of a sawmill, and learning that 80% of the space was taken up by garden stakes and bean poles.  Somewhere I had missed the bulletin about the fall of society, and our return to an agrarian economy.  Apparently, the larger lumber dimensions (like the wood you use to actually build things) were no longer required.

This is what happens when people optimize their little part of the business without any regard for the larger organizational goals.  This sawmill was indeed maximizing the amount of fibre recovered from each log – they just weren’t producing anything that anyone needed or wanted.

It would be easy to think this is an isolated case, but there are examples everywhere of people optimizing a piece of the business to the sub-optimization of the whole enterprise.  Ironically, this is often encouraged by well-meaning business improvement people, or high-paid consultants.

The bottom line is to draw a clear path between what each person does every day, and the higher-level goals of the organization.  If this path of vision is obstructed, you may end up with a yard full of garden stakes.

 

Strategy Mapping

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Strategy mapping is a simple tool that individual managers (as well as whole organizations) can use to connect individual effort to higher level corporate goals.  Below we discuss:

  • What strategy mapping is
  • Why individual managers should bother with strategy mapping
  • Examples of strategy mapping
  • Potential pitfalls of strategy mapping

What is Strategy Mapping?

  • A simple technique to connect people’s action to key business drivers.
  • Created by Kaplan & Norton of The Balanced Scorecard fame.
  • It’s the next logical extension of the Balanced Scorecard (click here for a Balanced Scorecard Toolkit)
  • Several books on strategy mapping have been published by Kaplan & Norton, including:
    • The Strategy Focused Organization (2000)
    • Strategy Maps (2003)

Why Use Strategy Mapping?

Strategy mapping is a tool that is elegant in its simplicity that can be used by organizations or individual manager.

  • Strategy mapping creates a clear line of sight between individual efforts and organizational objectives
  • Strategy mapping translates higher level business strategies to operational terms
  • Strategy mapping Aligns people and action
  • Strategy mapping helps put a value on things traditionally viewed as hard to measure

Strategy Mapping Example (Standard categories)

Strategy Mapping Example 1

Strategy Mapping (Example from an HR department)

Strategy Mapping Example 2

For each of the brainstormed categories above, metrics and operational goals would be established.

Potential Pitfalls for Strategy Mapping

Like any other tool, strategy mapping can be used well, or used poorly.  Some potential pitfalls to watch out for:

  • Being unclear on larger organizational goals will cause confusion when strategy mapping.  If it is not clear at the top of your strategy map, it will only get more unfocused as you progress downwards.
  • Not including your people in your strategy mapping exercise.  It is a waste of time to create a strategy map without the participation of the people doing the work.
  • Letting strategy mapping (or the balanced scorecard) take on a life of its own.  Tools need to be used wisely, and not become more important than the work they are supposed to facilitate or clarify.

3 Things to Remember About Strategy Mapping:

  1. Keep it simple.  Strategy mapping works because it is conceptually easy.  Do not make it more difficult than it needs to be.
  2. Put your strategy map front & center.  Once you have created your strategy map, put it where people can see it, and understand how their efforts impact the larger organizational goals.
  3. Adjust the categories to your needs.  Kaplan and Norton suggest four perspectives, and they are excellent starting points for the development of your strategy map.  Don’t feel bound by those categories, however.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Strategy Mapping (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

Looking for the Full-Length Podcast/Video? …

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Strategy Maps for the Individual Manager

Find out how how individual managers can build and use their own strategy maps, and how doing so can focus performance.

Watch the ‘Strategy Maps for the Individual Manager’ Video (15 mins):

Download the  ”Strategy Mapping” Cheat Sheet, Video, Audio, and Slides

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