Gen X vs. Gen Y - Hype

In an earlier post, I raised issues with Gen X and Gen Y stereotyping and taking the hype beyond what the data really says. I was happy today to see that the Society for Human Development has put out a publication on Generational Differences that goes even further than my warning. The publication, which is based on a seven year study by the Center for Creative Leadership, lays out the following on Gen Y:

• Employees of different generations actually actually want a lot of the same things from their work.
• Global demographics, education levels, living costs, economic issues, and labor market conditions may have the strongest influence on the way different generations view work.
• Other findings.. regardless of age,
  
• Resistance to change is more about what you stand to lose or gain.
• Loyalty to the employer is more about your place in the company hierarchy than your age.
• most employees seem to what security and a balance work and personal lives.

My hat is off to Jennifer Deal who is the study's lead author!

Is your work meaningful?

The need or drive to seek pleasure (Freud)

and the relentless pursuit of power (Adler)

were really just attempts to cover up,

but not necessarily fill, a

“void of meaning”

that existed in the lives of these individuals.

-Alex Pattakos on Viktor Frankl’s principle on the “search for meaning”

1992 Olympics - Derek Redmond

In the spirit of thanksgiving here in the USA.. I want to give thanks for all that touch my life with love and leadership. I thought it would be nice today to share a video that reminds us all of how even when things are not so good.. we can reach forward and do great things... In one of the the greatest of Olympic moments, Derrick Redmond demonstrates what it means to be a champion!

BIG QUESTION: Top Reasons People Consider Leaving Their Jobs?

If it is not succession planning.. it is retention that seems to be getting the most attention among HR and T&D experts these days. Leaders know that a huge workforce is retiring and that there will not be as many workers to replace them. Human capital may be more valuable than oil in 15 years....

A colleague of mine and I are working on some research related to retention. We know from previous research that most of us have thought about leaving our current job at least once or twice. Of course, we often do not act on these thoughts, but the thoughts themselves tell us something about retention.

You can help out a great deal by either responding to this blog with a comment, or sending me a private e-mail. Please feel free to respond to the blog in an anonymous post. It should not take you long to answer just one question.

The last time something happened that made you think your current job is not the one you want to be in... what was it that made you think about leaving that job?


Please share this post with as many people as you can.. I would love to get as many people as possible to respond.. If I get a good response, I hope to post a summary of the best of the posts and the most dominate themes..

CISCO Star Trek Show

I believe that we will see many new things in social networking in the next few years. Much of what we are doing now is the tip of the iceberg... Here is just one example of what I mean by tip of the iceberg. Innovation usually takes 20 years to mature and become viable, so take a look at the following CISCO presentation and then think of what this means:

CISCO's Chambers demonstrates the art of Telepresense

Imagine.. 20 years from know this may be the most common way of communicating. What is the implication of being able to project your telepresense to millions of homes or businesses or call someone halfway around the world for a nice evening chat. I am sure you can think of lots of ways this could be used. Will we end up with American Idol on Steroids? Will this technology enable leaders to network greater than ever before and communicate to their followers in more frequent and richer ways. Imagine what this one piece of technology might mean to the darkest side of humanity.. could it allow the leaders of countries like Israel and Palatine to work together for peace knowing that they can interact daily without security concerns. So here is the question for you.. If you were a leader today and hand this technology, what is the one way you would seek to use it for the highest return on your time in the telepresence chamber? Here is mine:

I would use it to enhance what are boring teleconferences we have. This technology would add richness to the conversations and also encourage everyone to be mentally present. Now it is your turn:

Gotta run.. I am scheduled for a holodeck session in 5.

Emotional Attachement = Customer Engagement

Hot off the presses.. Human Sigma is HOT.. A must read for anyone who is interested in customer or employee engagement. John Fleming lays out for us all a great model for evaluating our efforts at customer satisfaction that is logical and research based. I love it and plan to use it to complement my already robust customer service programs. The model lays out four levels of Emotional Attachment.. the kind of attachment that has been proven to positively impact the financial statement. The model looks at these four dimensions:

• Confidence: What are you doing to create customer trust in your services? Would your customers say you always deliver on your spoken and unspoken promises?
  
• Integrity: Do you treat your customers fairly? When something goes wrong, do you apologize for the problem? How fair are you in resolving the problem?
  
• Pride: Do your customers have a positive sense of association and identification with you? Are they proud to be your customer? Does their association with you mean something to them personally? Does it define their own self-concept of who they are?
• Passion: Would your customers consider life not worth living without you? Ok.. that is a bit much, but the concept is the same... Are you indispensable? Would they drive across town for you? How much passion do they have for you?

I will use a easy example to bring these home.. Think of the last time you flew somewhere on an airplane, where things didn't quite go as well as you hoped.. close your eyes and imagine yourself waiting to get on the flight...

Confidence: How sure were you that the flight would leave on time? Were you confident that you would get where you were going on-time and with your baggage?

Integrity: Now whatever went wrong has happened.. they have been delayed, or your bags are gone.. etc..Do you think they treated you fairly? Did they demonstrate respect for you?

Pride: After the flight.. did you go around bragging on how you traveled.. I mean, did you become a poster child for the airline?

Passion: Now suppose you are going to fly again next week.. how important is it for you to fly on this same airline.. if they can only offer you bad connections or cost more, would you still fly on them?

Most likely, you answered no to all of these questions. It is sad, but I think the deck is stacked against airlines. They don't help themselves much, but they have little chance of overcoming the confidence dimension. Some have risen above.. take Southwest.. you could argue that they do most of these well. I have run into a few Southwest Air Passion Freaks in my days.. Better examples might be Apple or Nordstroms.

There is another piece of this pie as well.. It also links up to employee engagement:
Confidence is about knowing what to expect.. Integrity is about respect and recognition, Pride is about belonging and inclusion (FIRO), and Passion is about connecting to some future goal.. The result is employee engagement.. which equals retention. Incidentally, these concepts also overlap with concepts in Lencioni's new book on misery! :)

Collaboration Conundrums

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article by Lynda Gratton and Tamara Erickson. It points out some of the paradoxes of teams.

• We know that diversity is a strength once a team is well formed. Diversity brings forth creativity and insight that comes from multiple perspectives held by those from different backgrounds and viewpoints. The paradox.. research shows that the higher the proportion of people who do not know anyone else on the team and the greater the diversity, the less likely the team members share knowledge.
  

• Knowledge is good. Right? We want our teams to have specialize knowledge. We want the experts, but research shows that the greater the proportion of highly educated specialists on a team, the more likely the team is to disintegrate into unproductive fights. Kinda sounds like a faculty meeting...

• Virtual teams.. it is the great solution for all of us who travel too much. Wikipedia.. Facebook.. etc.. the Net is allowing us to work together in new ways at a distance. It all makes sense, but research shows that as teams become more virtual... collaboration declines.

So what is the message for leadership. There are great examples where the above paradoxes were overcome. The question is are these examples, these successes we see the norm or are they exceptions to the rule. Think of the last time you were on a team that was diverse, has self-proclaimed experts, or were meeting at a distance. These teams have much to offer, but we have to accept that this is a huge challenge. The first step is to pick up the latest version of Harvard Business Review and read it. The second step is to ponder the following questions:

How do we build trust with individuals who are different from us?

How do we build trust with individuals who perceive they know more than us?

How do we build trust with individuals who are at a distance from us?

TRUST.. sort of becoming a theme for this blogger lately...

Ron Brown on the Future

Listening to a talk by Ron Brown on the future of Extension.. the art of disseminating knowledge that is created in Land Grant University Labs. I will try and capture his major points here today (excuse the typos.. doing this on the fly).

We have to unlearn and relearn in-order to change for the future. Changes that may influence us:

• Demographically we are changing - we are getting grayer, older, browner, and more diverse
• There will be twice as many old people in the near future
• Families: Few Children, 75% will be nontraditional families
• Declining rural and urban communities (Increasing problems/declining opportunities)
• Changing workforce (Gen X vs Retiring Older workers)
  
• Increase in the demand for training
• Natural Resources: Value shifts.. care for animals, need for open space
• Social Issues - Obesity, housing, globalization, terror, safe food, disasters
• Technology, web 2.0, anywhere-anytime-anydevice
• Funding pressures and accountability
  

"We have to eager to learn and enjoy change."

Refers to Scott Moore of Yahoo.. Moore showed that 60% of the audience that is watching 60 minutes on Yahoo is under the age 44.. 70% of the TV audience is over 60.

In 1993 according to Pew, 60% watched network news.. today on 28% watch network news.

Two Change Ideas

• Bigger and more consistent is Better (Mergers, Leadership wants consistency, but we are not all alike, we are all unique) Consolidation can cause us to be more alike.. may weaken our ability to be unique and successful
  
• New and exciting: Something new and different, even when it is not much gets way more attention. Older programs that are effective don't get the headlines.. Maybe we should rename our stuff that is working.. put a nice new look on it.

Skills needed to deal with Change:

• Vision - From all levels, inspiring, pointing to the future
• Good to Great: Listen to your customers - Continue to find your hedgehog
• Tells the story of the managers of Walgreen who had to accept location change so that Walgreen could put their buildings on the corner. Being Good keeps you from accepting change.. can not be satisfied with Good
• Must move to be more cooperative.. team approach regardless of the external culture of competition.
• We have to look for new ways of doing things.

Wikipedia vs primary sources

Seth has a very good piece on this blog this week about Wikipedia. I agree with much of what he says with regard to students spending time on writing vs spending time finding articles. Where I differ is I disagree with his suggestion that students do not need to learn to find "primary" sources. This is a continuous debate, one that is old.. began back before the net... Seth even discusses an example where he slipped by in his younger days. And while I am a big believer and users of wikipedia.. students need more skills than looking things up in an encyclopedia.. we needed them back in the 1900s.. and we need them today.

One of the most important issues in today is to ensure that you have valid and accurate information. Wikipedia replaced encyclopedias..and does a better job in MHO, but it is still a secondary source. It was true before and it is still true that our students should be learning how to validate and read primary source materials while synthesizing their own original thoughts. They can use wikipedia for their daily needs, but they also need this added skill. What example can I use to make this point.. Wikipedia comes to mind! We don't want our students to be just users of wikipedia.. we want them to be contributors.. contributors know how to find information and pull it together in a valid and reliable way. So I slightly differ with you Seth.. I want my son learning how to find information.. I want him to be writing wikipedia articles.. so he is going to be reading journals and such.. In fact.. now that I think about it.. there will be lots of people who can write.. it will be the ones who find the knowledge that have the edge...

Trust, Web 2.0 and Influence, Social Networks Part II

I continue to think that trust development is critical question to maximizing Web 2.0 technologies. Check out James Randerson's article in the Guardian Unlimited. Back in September of this year, he reported on research by Will Reader at Sheffield Hallam University. If Reader is correct, and there needs to be much more research performed on how can we build trust through online networking sites. If we can not develop solutions to the trust issue, sites like Facebook and twitter may be end up be much less significant in influencing behavior among network members. Exploring how trust can be built among these social networks may prove to be the six million dollar question.

Along the same vain, I am increasing interested in the complexity of social networking from the view of anthropology. Especially from the view of Dr. Karen Stephenson who has defined seven separate knowledge networks that flow through an organization. I have take the liberty of renaming some of her titles, but her list is a pretty good definition of the people networks we should be aware of in any change management effort:

• The Work Network
• The Innovation Network
• Expert Knowledge Network
• The Change Agent Network
• Social Network
• Career Coach Network
• Decision Maker Network

Dr. Stephenson's work is interesting from the standpoint that she has identified the host of knowledge sharing networks that can be found within any given organization. By exploring the complexity of these networks and the interrelationships between members of this networks, leaders have the potential of a new age change model. More on that later.. One final point, Dr. Stephenson's work defines high trust networks which are maintained the old fashion way... It would be interesting to discover if the net lends itself to enabling one these networks in a more effective way than others.. think innovation...