The Gen Y revolution that may never come

FT.com

November 25, 2013 3:36 pm


By Andrew Hill
The reaction of bosses when faced with youthful challenge is, for the most part, to dig in


It is always irritating to be stereotyped, but it must be particularly galling for cash-strapped, educated members of “Generation Y” to be told by demographers, marketers and futurologists that they have to get out and shake up management and the world of work.

Globally, under-30s may be “irreverent, change-seeking, challenging, better informed, mobile, and connected”, as Moisés Naím describes them in his new book,The End of Power. But the FT’s “Class of the Crunch” series has underlined that, in Britain at least, recent graduates are paying more for education and housing and earning less than their predecessors. Changing the world of work is the last thing on most of their minds: they have to get into it first.

Once there, new recruits find the reality of long hours at lean organisations that make few concessions to inexperience a shock, after years of cosseting by their baby boomer parents. London Business School’s Lynda Gratton details the challenges ahead in her book The Shift. She reprimanded an audience of older executives at the recent FT Innovate conference for giving young employees such “crap-awful work”.

There is certainly a gulf between what under-30s want and what they get. Studies by Ashridge Business School have found graduates sought responsibility, craved respect, and yearned for support from their managers, who in turn hoped to control their young recruits in the old-fashioned way.

But the clash between bright young newcomers’ impatient ambition and reality is not new. Tales of new staff ground down by corporate tedium remind me of Charles Dickens’ young Nicholas Nickleby, “depressed and degraded” after his first day as an assistant teacher at Dotheboys Hall, under the cruel head Wackford Squeers. I wonder how different this young generation will be from its predecessors – and therefore how far it will actually succeed in disrupting the managerial status quo.

As Gary Hamel has written, the online experience of the digital natives in “Generation Facebook” will “profoundly shape” their workplace expectations. Ian Cheshire, chief executive of Kingfisher, owner of home improvement brands such as B&Q and Castorama, says soundings of the group’s top 300 managers revealed a noticeable difference between executives aged over 35 or 40, many of whom were protective of their knowledge, and younger managers, who were happier to share it – a symptom of a group increasingly used to connecting and collaborating online.

But such insights, like all generational research, need to be tested over time. As long as companies retain some hierarchy – and most will continue to do so, despite the wishful thinking of radical management thinkers – insiders promoted to coveted roles will be tempted to hoard information and power. Even if the younger generation retains its collaborative outlook, Mr Cheshire points out it could take 20 years to feed through.

At the same time, Gen Y is not immune to the tendency to become more conservative as they grow older and raise families. This cohort already looks quite cautious. European graduates prefer the security of large employers – established companies such as Google and Volkswagen or public sector agencies such as the UN. In the UK, despite predictions that young people aspire to become entrepreneurs, the over-50s have contributed most to the increase in self-employment since the financial crisis, not the under-30s.

In 1997, Arie de Geus pointed out that three generations usually coexist in big companies – a group of recruits, a layer of potential leaders in their late 30s and 40s, and a group of older senior managers. Mr De Geus wrote that to become a “living company” (the title of his book about corporate longevity) each generation of staff must ensure succeeding groups move up. The context, drawn from his experience at Royal Dutch Shell, is now different, but readiness to adapt to the generational shift remains an ideal. Unfortunately, it is an ideal many companies still find hard to live up to. With a few enlightened exceptions, senior managers’ natural reaction to youthful challenge is to dig in rather than open up.

In Nicholas Nickleby, the hero cracks, thrashes his evil boss Squeers, and escapes. But that is fiction. In real life, recruits are still more likely to have to adapt to their employers than the other way round.

andrew.hill@ft.com
Twitter: @andrewtghill