Chapter 8
Build a Relationship: First Them, Then You
Engaging the Self-Absorbed
When I was coming up through the ranks, I reached out to my boss. I didn't expect my boss to reach out to me.
—Engineering firm manager
If I wanted to be a camp counselor, I would have gone to work for the Y.
—Syndicated news program manager
If they took the time to get to know us, I think they would like us.
—A Millennial
You have heard the story about two people having a conversation at a cocktail party … Mike asks Jim how he's been lately. Jim goes on and on about his new promotion, his golf game, his kids' recent achievements, and his health. Finally, Jim says, “We have been talking about me all night. Let's talk about you. So Mike, what do you think about me?” There are a lot of managers out there that feel like Mike.
The Millennial Intrinsic Value: Attention
Similar to the Baby Boomers, the Millennials' sheer numbers demand an audience. Millennials are used to getting a lot of positive attention, and they like it. Not only do they like the attention, they expect it. When they enter work life, they anticipate the same consideration they have enjoyed at home, in school, and on the playing field. They want managers who will tend to their career development and act as an advocate for them. When faced with an adult who they perceive is not for them, they don't know what to do. That is why in many cases they turn to mom and dad for help with professors and managers. (See Table 8.1.)
Table 8.1 Engaging the Self-Absorbed
| Engaging (Build a Relationship) | Self-Absorbed |
| The ability to reach out and connect relationally. It requires taking an interest in the employee as a person and finding points of connection. | A primary concern for how one is treated rather than for how one treats others. Tasks are seen as a means to my ends. Millennials have a preoccupation with a need for trust, encouragement, and praise. |
One explanation for Millennial preoccupation with positive attention is the result of a subtle shift in parenting style. We believe there has been a swing from training to nurturing. That is not to say their parents (mostly Baby Boomers) did not emphasize training—they just placed a greater emphasis on nurturing. Many of the managers we interviewed told us that they perceived themselves to be more nurturing as parents than they remembered their parents being. It was not uncommon for a manager to share that he or she had never heard the words “I love you” from the lips of a parent. They knew they were loved; it just wasn't spoken. In keeping with age cohort theory, we looked for social markers that may have contributed to the shift in parenting styles. We encountered an unlikely source while touring the Museum at Bethel Woods in Bethel, New York. There it was, in a museum devoted to Woodstock and the 1960s, a section featuring Dr. Benjamin Spock. The tribute was in recognition of Dr. Spock having penned the parenting handbook for a new generation of parents:
Spock's ideas have become such a part and parcel of the parenting landscape that it's easy to forget how revolutionary they were. In post-war America, parents were in awe of doctors and other childcare professionals; Spock assured them that parents were the true experts on their own children. They had been told that picking up infants when they cried would only spoil them; Spock countered that cuddling babies and bestowing affection on children would only make them happier and more secure. Instead of adhering to strict, one-size-fits-all dictates on everything from discipline to toilet training, Spock urged parents to be flexible and see their children as individuals.
Perhaps most revolutionary of all, he suggested that parenting could be fun, that mothers and fathers could actually enjoy their children and steer a course in which their own needs and wishes also were met. All this and much more, including a wealth of helpful medical advice, was delivered in a friendly, reassuring, and common-sense manner completely at odds with the cold authoritarianism favored by most other parenting books of the time.1
It is quite remarkable how Dr. Spock's emphasis on being friends with your children, being flexible in your parenting style, having fun with your kids, and bestowing affection on them aligns with many Millennial intrinsic values.
The increased positive attention from parents is a good thing. However, managers need to be aware of how Millennials have experienced the primary authority figures in their lives. If you wish to engage them, it will be through a relationship that provides positive attention and affirmation.
The Bias of Experience
“Nobody asked me what I wanted out of the job when I was first entering the workforce. They just told me what was expected of me, and if I couldn't do it, they would get someone who could,” one manager boasted. A reorienting of focus is occurring in real time for today's managers, from attention to what the organization expects of the employee to what the employee expects of the organization and the manager. Although it adds a layer of complexity to management's job, the real frustration is the preoccupation that Millennials have with their own experience without an appreciation for management's objectives.
A few Gen X managers in one of our focus groups remembered wanting things to be different but having to adjust her own expectations, “If you think about it, we have a lot of similar values, but we [Gen X] were willing to change, and what frustrates us is that they don't think they have to.”
When you boil it down, Millennials expect special attention because they believe they are special. Their parents have told them, their schools have told them, television has told them. Now it's management's turn.
Best Practices
You have probably already recognized that many of the competencies work in tandem. The engaging competency is somewhat of a baseline because it must be done well before one can master some of the other competencies. Fortunately, it is one of the easier competencies to master.
One begins by shifting the focus from her or his own experience to that of the other person. As usually is the case with any kind of skill, those who do it well seem to do it effortlessly. The managers in our study who were best at engaging told us:
Sometimes you have to get to know each one of them. They're all different. And to me, I like to try to relate to each one of them, and I try to remember what it was like when I was that age and how I thought.
They have a lot of stuff going on. I don't mind them confiding in me. I feel good if I can help them out in any way. I'll just talk to them and ask them what is going on and usually they will talk to me about what they're interested in.
I just try to relate to them because I have been there before.
The following chapter sections give our distillation of the thoughts, feelings, and practices that these naturals relayed to us. What our natural engagers told us, in essence, was be empathic (“Got Empathy?”), “Get Closer, Be Curious,” and “Grow Them.” In addition: “Try to Like Them, Not Be Like Them,” rethink some of the rules you were taught (“Rethink What You Have Been Taught”), and watch out for “Peer Pressure” and “The Fine Line.”
Got Empathy?
The managers quoted above genuinely cared for their employees and how they were experiencing both work and personal life. Empathy is sensing another person's feelings and perspectives and taking an active interest in the others' concerns. It is what enables managers to have relational awareness. Would you rather work for someone who cares about you or someone who doesn't?
Get Closer
Relax, we mean in proximity. One manager told us that he felt that he had lost touch with the younger generation in his office so he re-engaged his employees by doing their job with them. Periodically, he would join his employees and work alongside them. The manager and his team would set small goals for the morning, and he would buy pizza for lunch if they hit their target. Although his idea is not new, it makes sense. Relationships that develop at work often emerge simply due to proximity. One way to engage your Millennials is to work next to them.
Be Curious
It is no secret that Millennials are used to attention. They are not shy when it comes to talking about themselves, their ideas, or their interests. One of the best pieces of advice we heard was from a manager who told us: “I try to stay curious about them.” The manager told of having read the book Turning to One Another by Margret Wheatley. The intent of Wheatley's book is to encourage people to have conversations that are important to them and the people they care about. Wheatley says:
Stay curious about each other. When we begin a conversation with this humility, it helps us to be interested in who's there. Curiosity is a great help to good conversation. It's easier for us to tell our story, to share our dreams and fears, when we feel others are genuinely curious about us. Curiosity helps us discard our mask and let down our guard. It creates a spaciousness that is rare in other interactions. It takes time to create this space, but as we feel it growing, we speak more truthfully, and the conversation moves into what is real.2
Effective managers make it a point to have conversations with their employees. They stressed the importance of routinely making time to socialize with employees at work. They were also prepared for occasions on which employees came to them with problems—work-related or not. The key is to recognize that much more than casual conversation is going on. Trust is being built.
Grow Them
Those who are successful at engaging their Millennial subordinates experienced a deep sense of personal fulfillment when their employees became successful in their own activities. We encountered this many times over the course of our research. A health club manager in her early fifties, who seemed to have a knack for leading Millennials, describes what she most enjoyed about working with Millennial employees:
It is energizing to see them grow, to see their excitement about improving and their movement from the baseline.
She invested in relationships, but she was more than a buddy or friend. In our interviews with her, we discovered that she created an exciting work environment. More than that, she wrote personal accountability plans for her employees. She developed a baseline agreement with each employee so that each one could track his or her own success. As a result of the trust built with them, she informally mentored many of her employees by helping them deal with personal issues—and to achieve goals—both within and beyond the workplace. Many of her employees told us that she was the best boss for whom they had ever worked.
So What Are Some Barriers to Engaging?
In the next few paragraphs, you will discover a few misconceptions managers have about their efforts to relationally connect with Millennials.
Try to Like Them, Not Be Like Them
One mistake managers admitted to making while attempting to engage Millennial employees was by dressing similarly, talking like them, and listening to their music. News flash: that cool new spiderweb tattoo you have been thinking about getting on the back of your neck is not going to make you a better manager. (If you already have one, it is okay because that is really who you are, we hope.) Like everyone else, Millennials appreciate authenticity. But unlike you, they expect diversity almost to the point of taking it for granted. They do not expect everyone to be like them, and if you are a Boomer or Gen X(er), Millennials really do not expect you to dress as they do or listen to the same kind of music. What they want is for you to be who you are, and for you to like them.
Rethink What You Have Been Taught
Perhaps the greatest barrier to engaging is a result of traditional management training. Many of today's managers were taught by their managers not to build relationships with their employees. Engaging is the area in which we get the most pushback during our seminars and coaching sessions. Here are some of the arguments we hear from our clients and seminar participants:
- I was taught not to get close to them, because I may have to fire them someday.
- I don't think it is wise to fraternize and become drinking buddies with them.
- Familiarity breeds contempt, and sooner or later, they will use something against me.
- You have to keep clear lines between staff and management or else they will get confused.
- HR won't let me hang out with them; they say it is too risky.
We are not suggesting that you become BFFs (that is, best friends forever in younger-generation speak). The successful managers in our study made a connection with their Millennial employees simply by taking an interest in them. That does not mean you have to become drinking buddies with your employees, hang out with them after work, or attend their family reunions. Nor do you get to stop worrying about the difficulties inherent in firing an employee who is unable or unwilling to fulfill his or her job responsibilities. But discipline up to and including termination will come up far less frequently with employees who are appropriately engaged, and you will spend far less time working with human resources to work out employees who are not working out.
Peer Pressure
Even some of the effective managers were very careful in how they talked about relating to their employees. It was almost as if they thought they were doing something wrong. Listen to this manager:
I'm relational and nonrelational. I know for me it's important that I know my boss and feel like there's some connection there. And I feel like that's important for my employees. I meet individually with my team on a regular basis. I think it's important to know people that work for you, but we can't all sit around every day and talk about the night before. But I do think it's important to have some personal knowledge of your staff. I think that when there is a relationship, there is more of a sense of commitment and loyalty to you and to the organization. There is more motivation to get the job done. There is more of a feeling like you want to please somebody. So, for me, I feel like it's very important to build relationship with my team.
Later in the interview, we discovered that this manager was known to take her staff to movies in the afternoon and even entertain them in her home. She was highly relational. So why did she want to be perceived as nonrelational, too? First, because being nonrelational is equated with productivity in many work contexts.
The cultural environment in many organizations causes peer pressure among managers to work against constructive engagement. We found, for example, one company where a night manager who allowed the employees on her shift to make their own schedules was labeled a pushover. It is surprising to us that organizations are not leveraging the strengths of some talented managers to make the whole management team stronger. We asked an all-star at managing Millennials if all managers in her company used the same guidelines. Reluctantly she admitted, “Sometimes you can see managers do things that you know are going to result in a mess, but we kind of stay out of each other's way and use our own styles.” It is ironic that managers who engage their employees are sensitive to being perceived as too relational, while their counterparts show little concern over being perceived that they are not relational enough.
The Fine Line
We are not suggesting that engaging Millennial employees comes without challenge and frustration. An attorney friend of ours named Ken has a client whose company has grown significantly over the past five years. The company is led by a CEO in his early thirties. Ken is intrigued by the fact that there is not a person over 35 years old in the organization and that the CEO pays for everybody's lunch every day. One day when Ken was in the office, he noticed a basket filled with Girl Scout cookies in the break room. The CEO had provided his daughter with prime product placement. The sign on the basket read, “Girl Scout Cookies $4, Thanks for your support!” Without hesitation, Ken reached into his pocket, pulled out a $5 bill, placed it in the envelope, and happily collected his Thin Mints. On a visit a week later, Ken noticed that the basket was still full of cookies. He thought about buying every box, but he started to think about how the CEO provided everybody's lunch, and this was the perfect opportunity for the employees to reciprocate the generosity of the CEO. It bothered Ken so much he asked the CEO if he noticed that no one was buying the cookies. The CEO did notice and replied, “I am not mad, I am hurt.”
Some managers felt that they had been taken advantage of because of their effort to connect relationally. They talked about the fine line between being liked and being respected, “Most of us want to be liked, but sometimes you can't be too buddy-buddy with them because you have to make sure that things stay on the respect level.”
A manager who had recently opened her own tavern, but had almost no management experience, talked about learning how to be tougher, “I do know that I care and that's what they like about me. But then again that is why they tend to take advantage of me. I wonder sometimes when they call in and say they can't come to work if they would do that with a boss that was more business-like and firm.”
If you are good at building rapport with your Millennial employees, do not let peer pressure or the fine line stop you from using what is a managerial strength for you. Play to your competencies. We really cannot emphasize that enough. Use the competencies where you are already strong to build up your strength in other areas. If you do feel run over or taken advantage of, some of the other competencies can help you. For instance, directing is about setting boundaries for behavior and broadening is about helping them understand how their behavior impacts the entire system, including you. Self-differentiating helps you to not take their behavior personally.
Something to Think About
Tom Rath, in his book Vital Friends, gives a startling statistic, “Employees who have a close friendship with their manager are more than 2.5 times as likely to be satisfied with their job.” In the same Gallup study, 8 million people responded to the statement, “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.” The people who agreed with the statement are more likely to stay with the organization, are more engaged with customers, and are more productive.3
A study by the Saratoga Institute found that the quality of relationship a worker has with her or his immediate supervisor accounts for 50 percent of job satisfaction.4 There are many challenges that managers do not have control over in the workplace. Perhaps you used to think that one of those challenges was relating to the emerging workforce. Take heart, it is within your control, and there is something you can do about it.
The Transfer of Tacit Knowledge Will Not Happen without Building a Relationship
Stop and think about it. Every organization on the face of the earth at one time or another is dependent on entry-level people learning from seasoned employees. Arguably, the greatest competitive advantage an organization has is not in the knowledge that resides in its company manuals, but the knowledge that is captured within the experience of people who have spent a career acquiring it.
When you consider the emergence of a knowledge economy, the inability to transfer information presents a serious threat. Knowledge is being drained out of organizations as result of retirement and voluntary turnover. The term brain drain was first coined by the Royal Society to describe the immigration of scientists and technologists to America from postwar Europe.5 The term has been broadened to define the loss of skilled people from one organization to another.
As Baby Boomers retire there is the looming reality of a Boomer brain drain. Companies will face it over the next few years with increasing intensity. One NASA spokesperson said, “If we want to go to the moon again, we'll be starting from scratch because all that knowledge has disappeared.”6
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average large company will lose 30 to 40 percent of its workforce over the next 5 to 10 years.7 The replacement for the Baby Boomer mass exodus is, and will continue to be, Millennial professionals.
If Baby Boomer and Gen X professionals do not attract and connect with Millennials, the loss could be devastating. Tacit knowledge can only be transferred through relationships. If there is a disconnect between the experienced and the young, odds are that tacit knowledge will not be retained in the organization.
In a Nutshell
The more often that Millennial employees perceived their managers to be interested in them and in their personal development, the harder they worked for their managers. First them, then you!