basictraining
ally willing to sacrifice family considerations in favor of the
demands of bosses, clients, or their own perceptions of duty.
They understood organizational politics better than the preceding generation and tried to follow a progress/advance/win
career path. But many were caught off guard by late-career job
losses when they discovered corporate/employee loyalty was
sometimes a one-way street.
; Generation C: Gen Cers were born from the late 1920s
through the mid-1940s. Depression-era kids, their workplace
experience was straight out of “The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit” and “The Organization Man.” (In those days, men worked
and women—even those with jobs—were handmaidens.)
These, not the Boomers, were the three-martini-lunch types we
enviously watch on Mad Men.
They were generally loyal to employers, often feeling lucky to
have any job at all. They took comfort in—and counted on—the
stability of lifetime employment, in a single field if not at one
company. Orderly progression up the career ladder was virtually guaranteed to those who managed to refrain from taking off
all their clothes at the office Christmas party.
The Gen C crowd is tough. The babies of parents from the Jazz
Age, they aren’t all that far removed from the values of the frontier, the opening of the West, and the rise of great American cities.
They can relate to the Boomers. Not so much to Gen X, and
they experience involuntary spasms when encountering Gen
Yers and the behaviors that come with the new package. Think
texting in church and collecting friends, fans, followers, and
frauds on social networking sites. Boy, do the Codgers have a
lot to learn. They also have a lot to teach, if succeeding generations are willing to listen.
What next?
We talk about Gen X and Gen Y as if they are new phenomena.
Wake up! Gen X is aging. Gen Y has been in the workforce for,
what, 10 years now? Some are in their 30s, on the cusp of
supervisory and management roles if they haven’t assumed
them already.
So here’s where our next game-changing, game-winning
challenge lies. Once we figure out how to succeed, organizationally, in this parti-colored world of mixed generations,
we’ve got to get ahead of the wave.
We’ve got to watch little kids growing up and track them
through high school and university. We need to suss out how to
motivate, manage, and teach them before they enter the workplace, so we can avoid the confusion and conflict that have
delayed the full and effective integration of prior generations
into our social and economic engines.
Let’s stop “discovering” that change has taken place after the
fact. Instead, in this continuum of generational shifts, let’s try
informed and intelligent anticipation. Whatever the next—as
yet unnamed—generation acts and looks like, we must be
more ready for it than we were for its predecessors.
What’s at stake? How well—or not so well—we compete in the
brutal arenas of global supply chains, global economics, and global geopolitical contests. We had best be at our best in this game.
