Open Letter to “Millennials” – Number 1
Last week a staffing company asked me to speak at their annual offsite retreat about generational issues in the workplace. My colleague Wendy Shannon and I have been co-presenting on the four generations in the workforce for about a year now and in that time have learned quite a bit to share with those interested in this topic. The majority of the audience were members of the “boomer generation (i.e., those born between 1946 and 1964) and they had lots of questions about the millennials – aka Gen Y- (i.e., those born from 1980 on). These two generations have their challenges when it comes to getting along with each other, so I thought I would post a series of open letters to members of both these generations to suggest possibilities for how to improve the working relationships between each one.
I’ve addressed the first letter to the millennials. So for all you twenty-somethings out there , this letter is for you.
First of all, challenges that people from different generations have in understanding each other are not new. When I was your age, my parents called it the “generation gap. They didn’t understand our music, our long hair, and the way we talked. Some of the boomers that you work for tell me that they don’t understand your music, your tattoos and body piercings, and the way you talk. I try to remind the boomers that our parents said almost the same thing. It’s really about self-expression.
Expressing one’s individuality is great. We just need to keep in mind how that self-expression may effect other people. I had an internship at a bank in Philadelphia during the summer before my senior year in college. Long hair was a no-no and a suit and tie was the required uniform of the day , this was long before “business casual hit the fashion radar screen. One day I showed up wearing a blue dress shirt thinking nothing of it. One of the senior vice-presidents noticed how I was dressed and informed me that only WHITE dress shirts were acceptable and was actually quite dismayed by the way I dressed. I hadn’t thought that I’d cause such a stir about such a thing as a blue dress shirt. Yet, I learned from the experience. As infrequently as I wear a necktie today , I found I think a lot better when I’m not being strangled , I also know that sometimes I need to adapt how I look to fit the circumstances.
In social psychology there is a long history of study on something called attribution theory that says that we tend to attribute certain beliefs, attitudes, and values to others based on how they look and sometimes speak. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that you get laser treatments to erase your body ink or that you remove the piercings that everyone can see. What I do encourage you to do is to just take the “other’s point of view and try to understand the impact of how you look, how you speak, and how you generally present yourself can have on how others see you.