confident . . . and unapologetic

Most of you are jumping into the world with confidence and have a high level of self-esteem. Gen Y’s as a whole are more than willing to express their own ideas, bring new thinking to issues or problems, and critique the way things have always been done if they think they have a better way. As one of you expresses it, “I’ve come to realize that the most significant characteristic of the Gen Y bird is that we are unapologetic. From how we look, to how spoiled we are, to what we want—even demand—of work, we do think we are special. And what ultimately makes us different is our willingness to talk about it, without much shame and with the expectation that somebody—our parents, our friends, our managers—will help us figure it all out.”¹

This sense of confidence is by no means a Western characteristic of your generation. Gen Y’s in India, for example, are waking up to the huge potential and opportunity they face. They tend to be extremely confident, to the point that retention has become a major issue. Wages in that country are currently rising at 16 percent per year, and turnover can exceed 40 percent.²

immediate

You are impatient and eager to live life now.

There are those who think that this is something you will “grow out of”—that when you get older you’ll be willing to defer gratification. Some people claim that your impatience is a holdover from a childhood in which many of you perhaps became accustomed to getting what you wanted when you wanted it—new toys or clothes.

I don’t agree. I think your sense of immediacy will be a hallmark of your generation until the end of your days. You will not grow out of it, nor is it caused by a pampered childhood. The events you witnessed when you were impressionable teens—the sudden, devastating, and unpredictable world events outlined in chapter 2—have left you with an undeniable impression that tomorrow just might be too long to wait: “[You] just kind of realize you’re at a great time in life and you should just enjoy it while you can, because you never know.”³

optimistic

Despite the terrorism and environmental disasters that occurred during your teen years—or perhaps even in part because of the contrast between those tragic events and the life you now lead—as a generation, you have an optimistic outlook. Some 84 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States report that their quality of life is good or excellent, and 93 percent are satisfied with their family lives. Three-fourths have high expectations for their lives five years out (compared with only 59 percent of those twenty-six and older); 45 percent expect the lives of their children to be better than their own.⁴

This sense of optimism will likely be reinforced by many of your experiences in the workplace. Whereas Gen X’ers ran up against a stagnant economy and a tight job market, Y’s are likely to find ever-growing demand for their skills. In some fields, this demand is already allowing you to approach work almost as paid “volunteers”—joining an organization not because it’s the only game in town but because you genuinely want to.

overwhelmed

Ironically, your immediacy and optimism have a dark lining. Your optimism creates high expectations: most of you envision your life as an adult as highly successful; many of you may have views that are unrealistic. Your “unlimited” choices can mean endless decisions. Many of you are feeling overwhelmed—really overwhelmed. In one survey, more than 60 percent of recent high school graduates said that they had experienced some of the symptoms doctors use to diagnose clinical depression (see “Are You Depressed?”).⁵

You are transitioning from a world in which you were on a pretty clear path; you knew what classes to take and what was required to succeed. But the challenges you now face are numerous and complex: you’re choosing a career, a city, a company, a role, colleagues, and, for some, a life partner. You’re determining how to trade off multiple priorities: money, passions, and aspirations. You’re planning how to get out of debt, buy a home, and maybe even plan for retirement in the face of a collapsing social welfare system. Given the number and complexity of new decisions you’re facing, it’s no surprise that some of you feel overwhelmed.

And then there’s the issue of our pace of life. The number of Americans who say that they “always feel rushed” more than doubled between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, with people from the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four feeling most anxious about the great many things that need to be done. For older Y’s in particular—those of you who have entered the workforce—it would not be surprising if you feel busier and more stressed than ever.

Overlying these situational factors is the reality that the onset of depressive disorders most commonly occurs in an individual’s mid-twenties. Although depression is sometimes linked to family history or genetic tendencies, depressive episodes also result from situational stress.

Alarmingly, in the same survey cited earlier, only 7 percent of the students experiencing depression had sought help. Individuals in their twenties rarely seek treatment for psychological disorders, because they lack insurance, time, money, or information about options for getting help. This inability to reach out often increases their sense of isolation.⁶

narcissistic? really?

Your generation does have detractors. It’s popular to point out that as children Y’s often received trophies for simple participation, and extensive praise for almost any idea. Detractors criticize you as products of a misguided movement in parenting and education that was designed to buffer you from the negative effects of competition and build your self-esteem—an approach, they argue, that has filled you with false self-confidence. Some people claim that self-esteem without achievement to back it up has produced an unmotivated and self-aggrandizing generation. A few have even latched on to the label narcissistic—focused only on yourselves and incapable of acknowledging or appreciating others’ points of view or circumstances. Ouch!

The most negative conclusions are based on an analysis of thirty years’ worth of data from a standardized narcissistic personality inventory, in which respondents score themselves against statements such as, “I think I am a special person.” Based on this approach, the average college student’s score on the inventory was 30 percent higher in 2006 than in 1982.⁷ However, I find it a bit melodramatic to jump from this analysis to the conclusion that you are narcissistic. Nor does it track with my actual experience of interacting with you.

Although there is a real difference between clinical narcissism and healthy self-esteem, the semantics with which we describe the difference are fairly slight and have almost certainly been influenced by the changing cultural context. Even the dictionary defines narcissism—OK, granted, the fourth definition—as “the attribute of the human psyche characterized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.”⁸ And some of the descriptors include people who love themselves; are optimistic, achievers, self-promoting, self-assured, success driven, and ambitious; think they can charm anyone, think they are better-looking than most people (something that may or may not be true), believe that they are special, are more a leader than a follower, and so on. Sound familiar to anyone? I suspect many of you have been encouraged from your earliest years to feel that most of these characteristics, at least to some degree, are highly desirable.

Think of the U.S. Supreme Court’s struggle to define obscenity —and the clear recognition that our shared definition is changing over time. What clearly would have been obscene in the 1950s would scarcely raise an eyebrow today. The same is likely true of the language used in the assessment of narcissism. Our cultural norms have shifted. The parenting messages you received throughout your adolescence would have influenced the way your generation answered the standardized inventory, altering the implications of the various descriptors.

For example, in 1982, saying that you were a “special person” would have been uncommon behavior. However, today, after a lifetime of eating off those darn red “You Are Special Today” plates, you would probably be a bit odd—or at least a slow learner—if you hadn’t been conditioned to believe that the correct answer to the question of whether or not you are a special person is an unqualified yes. For you, given current ways we use this sort of language, this answer doesn’t pack the same negative clinical punch that it did a quarter of a century ago.

The critics are also concerned that the culture of praise you experienced as a child will reach deeply into the work world, suggesting that Y’s feel insecure if they’re not complimented regularly. Bosses are being made to feel the need to lavish praise on young adults with the threat that they will wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.

I’ll let one of your own rebut this last point. “Young workers today aren’t all spoiled attaboy-addicts,” says Ryan Paugh, twentythree-year-old cofounder of EmployeeEvolution.com. Although he agrees that twentysomethings today may be hungrier for feedback than previous generations were, he adds, “People think of praise in the coddling sense. But what we want is guidance and mentoring—and praise when [my emphasis] we’re on track.”⁹

proud of your diverse tastes and styles

Ironically, one of your most shared characteristics is your diversity of taste and individual preferences.

Yours is a world of proliferation—of brands, media, product types, and channels. Gone are the days when Boomers counted down the top ten hits; you compose iPod playlists chosen from millions of available tunes. Amazon.com gives you the choice of hundreds of thousands of books, both in and out of print. One search on the Internet will turn up hundreds of options for almost any electronic gadget you are looking to buy. Boomers may roll their eyes at the number of variations on coffee offered by Starbucks, but most of you like it that way.

You love exercising the freedom that comes with this range of options. Only 13 percent of you strongly agree with the statement, “There is so much to choose from that when I buy something, I tend to wonder if I have made the right decision.” Most of you feel well informed and confident in your purchase decisions; 83 percent say you usually know what you want before you go out to buy a product. More than half (53 percent) of you want the products you buy to help you express your individuality.¹⁰

Your preference for choice extends to the work world. Almost half of you (48 percent) say that you won’t work for an organization that doesn’t offer many different career paths.¹¹

what you don’t want: to be part of the traditional workforce

My coauthors and I dedicated our book Workforce Crisis to our teenage children. When it was published, my daughter, then sixteen, shared what she thought was a great joke: “You guys,” she said conspiratorially, “have just dedicated a book on the workforce—to people who never plan to be in one!” Now, despite what it sounds like, I’m (pretty) confident she is not planning a life of leisure. She’s an energetic and ambitious young woman, but clearly whatever the word workforce triggers in her mind, it does not describe a club she wants to join.

What’s going on?

Reactions to the language of work give us some interesting clues about your preferences. Semantics—our interpretation of the meaning of a word—are an important indicator of how values are changing. There seems to be something about words like workforce that convey a sense of rigidity and power-based hierarchy that is not appealing to the majority of the Gen Y working-age population.

A key theme of my conversations with Gen Y’s is a core frustration with many of the traditional operating policies in large corporations. As highlighted in table 3-1, many of your preferred ways of getting things done are very different from the operating style you find in many large organizations.

You are accustomed to operating in a much more horizontal and networked world than the hierarchical pyramid that is still at the heart of most corporations. You learn, collaborate, and reciprocate within your network, tapping information broadly and offering opinions to anyone you feel will benefit from your insight.

You are used to much more open access to information than you will find inside most corporations. This preference is likely to conflict with the formal policies of the corporation regarding access to information—many designed around corporate concerns for security or privacy—as well as the sense of what older colleagues would consider “proper” business protocol, particularly in formal, hierarchical organizations.

Your views of time and pace differ from the practices you are likely to find. Many of you are amazed by corporations’ obsession with time—both the absolute amount spent on work and the emphasis on specific times: you prefer to work on your own time and at your own pace—flexibly and fast. You are very willing to invest the time required to get the job done, but many of you chafe at the idea of putting in “face time” for the sake of being present or adhering to a fixed, seemingly arbitrary, schedule.

Let’s cut to the chase: in many dimensions, most corporations are not compatible with the way you’ve become accustomed to operating at school and in your interactions with your friends. Most corporate policies were designed by your grandparents’ generation. Boomers, by and large, acquiesced to the rules, and, although there have been some important changes over the past decades (for example, the development of horizontal process thinking), many of the fundamental assumptions about how organizations should operate are still based on rules from the mid-1900s: hierarchical structures, rigid, individualoriented job designs, unilateral employment relationships, and cascading decision making.

The good news for corporations is that many of you seem willing to work within the system to help create change. Worldwide, two-thirds of Y’s say they would rather work for one or two companies than for a variety of companies. This is a sharp contrast with X’ers, the quintessential “free-agent nation,” whose work philosophy has been characterized by individuality and entrepreneurship. Gen X’ers have proven to be notorious job-hoppers, seeking to round out their own individual experiences. With your generation, chances are good that employers who are willing to meet you halfway will have the opportunity to build a relationship with you.

Despite your preferences, you are not afraid, in general, to move on from a job if it offers no immediate prospect of growth or learning. Our research has found that more than 30 percent of Y’s are looking for a new job with a new company at any given time. On average, you predict you will stay in your current job for 4.6 years.¹²

what you want: challenge without traditional responsibility—or your boss’s job

You do want significant challenge and meaningful work. Most of you are happy to handle big jobs and tackle them with confidence. Without a doubt, the most engaged Y’s in our research were those who felt that they’d been given very challenging assignments. In contrast, in one survey, 75 percent of you said you were unhappy at work; of those, 61 percent said you were bored.¹³

Most of you feel ready to tackle more-complex assignments than you are initially given. Participants in our research were not at all deterred by what older workers might perceive as their lack of experience or even limited qualifications for the task at hand. You think companies underestimate your abilities to scramble to find the necessary guidance for a new task. Most Y’s feel sure that they can tap in to appropriate sources to learn how to do what needs to be done. A common complaint from managers is that newly recruited Y’s are unwilling to “put in the time” required to learn the ropes. With some tongue in cheek, I advise corporations that the favorite job of any Y is one that is critically important but that he or she has no idea how to do.

At the same time, there’s an intriguing trend under way. More people are declining the opportunity to take on more responsibility —to move up the corporate ladder. Over a ten-year period, from 1992 to 2002, the desire fell sharply among both men and women of all ages in the workforce for jobs involving greater responsibility. In 2002, only a little more than half of all men and a little more than one-third of all women answered the question, “Would you like a job with more responsibility?” affirmatively.¹⁴

Broken out by age cohort, only 60 percent of Generation Y said yes in 2002, down from 80 percent of individuals at a similar age ten years earlier. Granted, the oldest among you were only twenty-two at the time and perhaps answering in the context of school. Nonetheless, the attraction of your generation to responsibility seems at first surprisingly low, given your desire for challenging work.

The explanation, I think, comes from your differentiation between “challenge” and “responsibility.” As with the word workforce , the word responsibility connotes a way of working—perhaps conjuring images of bureaucracy, constraints, and answering to other people’s rules—that is not appealing to Gen Y.

Consistent with this, many of you are already clear that you don’t want your boss’s job. We were surprised in our research by the number of Gen Y’s who told us their boss’s job didn’t look “worth it.” The trade-off of time and stress versus whatever incremental money or prestige is promised by the next job on the corporate ladder doesn’t seem to be a smart deal to

Your challenge rests in finding ways to have the level of impact you desire, doing work that is interesting and meaningful without necessarily getting boxed in to traditional steps on the corporate career path that hold little appeal for you. Companies that want to keep you will have to, among other things, give you ample opportunities to learn and grow experientially through the work you do.

You expect even entry-level jobs to be personally rewarding. This is a particular challenge in industries that have traditionally run on a pyramidal apprentice system, such as law and consulting, in which junior recruits are expected to work long hours on the detailed but often boring background work required by senior partners. One Gen Y attorney notes, “Lots of [law] firms say, ‘Oh, we’re 150 years old, and we do things like they did 150 years ago. That’s not attractive to me. I want to do good work, not just slog through for years till I get my Persian rug and my 50-gallon fish tank.”¹⁶

and what about money ... and (sigh) debt?

Ah, money.

Attitudes toward money show perhaps the most divergent thinking among Y’s around the world. Your economic and cultural experiences—and therefore your expectations about the role money will play in your lives—are quite different.

In a survey of your generation across thirty-three countries, your top three priorities for your next job were interesting work (29 percent), meaningful work (18 percent), and work–life balance (also 18 percent). Financial reward scored fourth, at 14 percent.¹⁷ Worldwide, 56 percent of Y’s say that they would give higher priority in choosing work to the ability to pursue their passions, compared with 44 percent who would choose to make lots of money.¹⁸

But Y’s in many parts of the emerging world are eager to participate in the huge leap in consumer wealth that surrounds them. In India, for example, pay is among the most important features of a job. Money connotes value, confers prestige, and provides immediate benefits in the form of a higher standard of living. Indian employees often live with parents and even grandparents and provide as much as 70 percent of the family income. Gen Y’s in China also often contribute a significant portion of their family income. However, prestige and connections, reflecting China’s relationship-based business world, are considered slightly more important than pay when choosing a job.¹⁹

Gen Y’s growing up in most Western economies have experienced an unprecedented bull market and, for many families, a growing sense of economic prosperity. Coming of age during the most consistently expansive economy in the past thirty years, many of you tend to have a positive, optimistic outlook on life, work, and your economic future. In the United States, the 1990s were a decade of business growth and, at one end of the spectrum, increasing personal wealth, although admittedly a widening socioeconomic gap overall. Although the dot-com bust was also part of the experience of the 1990s, it generally had a more significant impact on X’ers than it did directly on most Y’s and their families.

In the United States, your views on money are one of the more hotly debated characteristics of your generation. Although some commentators conclude that money is extremely important to American Y’s, in most surveys money ranks lower than other priorities in choosing a career. Most of you say that finding “balance” in life is a higher priority than money alone. A whopping 78 percent of high school students say that “having close family relationships” ranks highest (higher than money and fame, among other things) in defining success.²⁰

However, even though many of you say you are not particularly motivated by making lots of money, money is nonetheless one of the big challenges you face. Almost one-third (30 percent) of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds say debt and finances are the most important problems they face; 73 percent say they have received financial assistance from their parents in the past year.²¹

The debt you carry as a generation is significant. The average debt students incur by the time they leave college (including student loans as well as credit card and other debt) is more than $19,000.²² Soaring college tuition has forced 65 percent of you to borrow money, compared with only 34 percent who did so thirty years ago when your parents’ generation graduated.²³ If you choose to spread your college loan repayments out over thirty years, as many do, you will be between fifty-two and fifty-five on average when you finish paying off your education.

And not too surprisingly, given your debt burden, you are not saving. Fewer than one-third of Y’s age eighteen to twenty-five who are eligible for a 401(k) or similar savings plan are actually participating in them; Y’s have saved an average of only $3,200 in their 401(k)s.²⁴

Have you recognized yourself in these descriptions? At a minimum, they reflect likely assumptions that your workplace colleagues may make about you, based on your generational background.

In part II, I turn to you as an individual and share ways to identify your passions as you search for the work that’s likely to be most rewarding to you.