8.
Managing the Creative
Process of Gen-Xers

Teach Xers to Micromanage Themselves

Xers have a strong need to experience a day-to-day sense of accomplishment—to confirm for themselves each day that they are achieving tangible results. This is how Xers prove themselves to themselves and affirm their ability to add value. The problem is that sometimes it is very difficult for new, less experienced employees to give themselves that daily sense of achievement. Maybe you’ve had one of those days where you run around from dawn to dusk and then, at the end of the day, find yourself asking, “What did I do today?” If you have ever had one of those days, you know how frustrating it can be. For Xers, it can be very demoralizing and have a notable effect on productivity.

Sometimes the discrete tasks in a job are so ad hoc, it is hard to appreciate them. In other cases, projects may be so big that achievement cycles are too long term for newer employees to see the smaller stages of accomplishment along the way. When it comes to very new employees, it may just be that they don’t understand the job well enough yet to see the smaller tangible results they are achieving each day.

Whatever the reason, you don’t want to fall into this trap: If Xers are not experiencing a daily sense of accomplishment, their morale will sink and their productivity will drop off. When that happens, they start to seem like “problem employees.” Often, managers will respond to this kind of slump by managing the “problem employee” more and more closely, constricting that employee’s freedom and responsibility, and checking up more and more frequently. When a manager starts doing this, he or she is going right down the path to micromanagement.

If you micromanage Xers, you will send them out the door as fast as they can find another job. The irony is that the best way to keep Xers focused and motivated is to teach them to micromanage themselves. Help Xers carve up their jobs into bitesized chunks—help them identify all the different categories in which their tasks and responsibilities fall. For example, if your employee is a salesperson, you might carve up the job into these categories: adding names to a prospect list, making cold calls, making second-round calls, sending follow-up materials, scheduling in-person meetings with hot leads, drafting proposed contracts, meeting in-person with hot leads, closing deals.

Once you help your Xer employees carve up their jobs into bite-sized chunks, encourage them to set daily goals for themselves in each category so they can monitor their success each day. You can encourage them to do this by reminding them now and then or by helping them create a daily action planning tool like this one:

Micromanage Yourself™ Daily Action Planner for a Salesperson