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I am a Practitioner of 'The 7e Way of Leaders' where a Leader will Envision, Enable (ASK for TOP D), Empower, Execute, Energize, and Evolve grounded on ETHICS!

Friday, April 9, 2010

Daily Lessons from Life 08 April 2010 - Gen Y hardest to work with

"Gen Y hardest to work with - Thu, Apr 08, 2010 my paper

EMPLOYEES here aged 30 and above, particularly older ones, have the most difficulty working with colleagues belonging to Generation Y - those aged 29 and below - a study has found.

But the converse is not always true for Gen Y. While seven in 10 Gen Y workers have problems working with baby boomers - those aged 46 to 64 - only 6 per cent have difficulties with those aged 65 and above.

3500 employees where polled from Oct'09 to Jan'10 in this research."

Intergenerational issues between Gen Y, Gen X, etc. A worthy research area for HR practitioners and business people for sure. It would be great to know what intergenerational issues were researched on. The brief description in the news article pointed out the 'areas for improvement' by Gen Y are: impatient, arrogant, and abrupt.

Lessons for me are:

1. in any generation, there will be generational gaps as long as we work with colleagues of different age group. In some fast turning profession or vocation, you probably will meet mostly those of your generation. e.g. auditing, consulting, armed forces, etc that promote and encourage rapid turnover of young blood. So, this research is not unique;

2. what may be of significant differences are how Gen Y (and in fact some are already talking about Gen Z (or the Internet generation)) learn and play. Less personal? More 'strange' tastes? etc. The key will be still back to basic: what do we need to achieve at work? If the methods and approaches of the Gen Y or Gen Z can produce the results agreed upon with the 'right' soft people considerations in tact e.g. high morale, happy co-workers, etc; I have no problem at all with turning the tasks over to them;

3. focusing on the differences hence, in my opinions are good and meaningful only if we move on to looking at what are the common goals we need to achieve together. Also, what the people side of the consideration we want to have with the achievement of the common or aligned goals we mutually agreed upon. Once, that is settle, any generations of workers can work relatively well.

Finally, let's think about it for a moment, were we not given a strange look by our senior when we began our first job? Did they not considered us to be arrogant, impatient, and sometimes, abrupt? How did we sail through it to be where we are? Same challenges though different generation! ;-)

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