Late night phone call from one Executive Director I'm coaching. At 28, she falls squarely into that 'Millennial' demographic and thus encounters frequent frustrations with her Board who are significantly older than her (I'd say the youngest Board member is in their early 50's).
I won't go into detail about the nature of her relationship with the Board, but it does read like some stereotypical Generation Gap. The Board, which actually showed itself willing to take a chance on a bright up-and-comer, has since fallen back into a "What's wrong with these kids?" attitude as the Director implemented needed changes to bring fresh air into a nonprofit that had become stale.
Since I was an advisor to the Board during their executive search, I'm familiar with both sides of this story. As they neared the end of the hiring process, I alerted the Board that the new ED would bring a large cultural shift to operations and that they'd probably see large turnover in staff in addition to a whole different presence in the community. This has come to pass.
To help prepare the Board for this cultural shift, I shared with them the following perspective of a young Polish writer about how the expectations of young people have been conditioned by their experiences of the Internet. They bring a vastly different set of skills as well as needs to the job. If you have young people on your staff and want them to excel, then read on.
NOTE: I've edited out the introduction so as to get directly to the meat of the piece.
Piotr Czerski - We, the Web Kids
1. We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this
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| Piotr Czerski |
is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online.
The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
As many know, I love to include thinking quizzes in my seminars/workshops. One format I often use is providing participants with a list of options on a particular subject (i.e.: Most Valuable Brand Names) and have participants try to pick the top three.
One frequently used is 'Personal Qualities Employers Want From Employees' which includes a selection such as 'Teachability', 'Curiosity', 'Dependability', etc. Also on this list of choices is 'Integrity', and here is where I'm seeing a large generational divide.
Most research puts Integrity as #1 or #2 among the personal qualities employers want from staff. When I play this game with Baby Boomers and Generation X, the vast majority put this quality in their top 3. However, among Millennials 'Integrity' hardly gets a second look. It happened again yesterday with a group of college students/recent grads. They split up into teams of 2 and amongst the eight pairings, only two even mentioned Integrity anywhere among their top three.
The explanations went something along this line: "Employers want to see results and don't particularly care how you get them". I don't know if this is true of employers or not, but note that this is the way the next generation views the world. Their deep cynicism about the workplace contains serious implications for the US economy in the coming decades.
