The Care and Feeding of Your Young Employee

The Care and Feeding of Your Young Employee – by Jamie Belinne

I have been a professional trainer and public speaker for more than 25 years. I love to use illustrations in my speeches and trainings.  I’ve used one for several years, using the movie “Titanic” as one such illustration. It was only a couple of months ago when it dawned on me – I really shouldn’t use this example anymore. “Titanic” is now older than 20 years, and many younger people in my audience have never seen it, nor even heard of it. I find myself having to make adjustments such as this on a fairly consistent basis. What’s “new” and “exciting” today seems to quickly turn into Yesterday’s news. 

These types of problems are tenfold when we talk about getting along and working well with others in the workplace. When we take the time to look around in our work environment, careful observation shows us that there are a wide variety of ages in most cases. In this book, author Jamie Belinne does a great job discussing the different generations, the different idiosyncrasies of each, and more importantly – how a manager must successfully juggle such a challenge. Her focus is on the older managers and the younger employees (note the title), but I almost wonder if the title of this book is a bit narrow. It seems to me that a younger manager who manages older employees can learn a lot from this book as well.

The nomenclature that people use for these different age groups varies. In her book, she focuses on how older managers (She calls them “Boomers” and “Generation X”) can successfully manage the younger crowd (“Generation Y” and “Generation Z”).  To hopefully clarify – Generation Y is also known as “Millennials” and Generation Z are the youngest of the young in the professional workplace – born around the turn of the century.  It’s interesting that Belinne notes that there has been a lot of emphasis on Generation Y being the “kids”, yet they really aren’t kids anymore.  So even if you think you may have a handle on what is important to Generation Y, you now need to get ready to create a brand-new slate since the younger crowd (Gen Z) will be crowding the employment train quickly in the foreseeable future – with different needs and expectations.

So the author describes many strategies, using actual case studies, on how people are different, and why people are different based on their respective age groups.  She does accurately point out that you can never pinpoint a person’s habits and personalities simply based on their age, but it’s fairly common that there are definitely trends within each of these groups. 

She also keeps her focus on the fact that companies and bosses can never prevent change, and the biggest change that companies always face is “generation gaps”. Rather than fight this change, a good company (and its managers) will embrace this change and come up with alternative strategies that work for different people. The author reminds us of just how important this is – if you can’t accommodate your younger workers’ different behaviors, they’ll simply pack up and go somewhere else. Never a good thing when trying to retain top talent.

I would almost recommend that companies use this book as a workbook. There are so many good ‘tips’ here, that it can be easy to forget many of the helpful suggestions that the author gives once you are done reading. I’m not a fan of companies making their employees (or managers) “read books” to aid them in doing their job, but I think it would be very beneficial for leaders at a company to spend maybe a week on each chapter and formulate questions, scenarios, and tips as to how to work well within the different age groups. I would also suggest that the examples and illustrations that the author gives are not unique to the workplace. Personalities within families and friends can rapidly deteriorate as well when one refuses to acknowledge key age differences among the people involved.

To be successful in today’s work environment, it’s crucial that you accept people as who they are (within limitations of course) and not try to “mold” or “assimilate” people into only one way of doing things. The author does an excellent job reminding us of this with many real-life examples.  The world of work is tough enough with competition, regulations, and negative Yelp reviews.  Why not make things slightly easier and figure out how to work well within the walls of our company?   

Yes, it can be hard and challenging, but it’s crucial that everyone adapts to this way of thinking if we want our company to survive and prosper in today’s workplace.