Yesterday, I wrote about the ways in which the corporate focus on "work/life balance" missed the mark. The point, I argued, isn't that the time spent at "work" and at "life" needed to fit into some pre-determined scheduling model, but that the goals of work and life needed to become more tightly integrated, so that workers, especially young workers, could feel that their efforts at work were in keeping with their broader life purposes.
To some, this means that today's younger worker is unrealistic, coddled, narcissistic.
Today, I caught up with yesterday's murketing's del.icio.us link feed, pointing to this piece, entitled, "The New Me Generation," in The Boston Globe. In it, people born after 1970 are broadly described as "narcissistic" due to their self-confidence, tenacity and unwillingness to subjugate themselves to authority.
I think it's dangerous to use a highly charged word like narcissism to characterize a large group of people. The term makes it tempting to believe that all these young people care about is themselves, that they are unlikely to be able to work effectively with others, that their selfishness will lead to a dog-eat-dog world.
If this is the case, how are we to explain the high degree of social and environmental consciousness among young people? Where does their tolerance for racial, religious and gender difference come from?
No, narcissism is a much less productive characteristic than what we see in many, many young people. Undoubtedly, we seem to have reared a generation that is much more self-confident, much less tolerant of abstract rules, much less willing to accept "wait your turn" as an explanation, than practically any previous generation. But these beliefs can co-exist with a broader connection with the world and fellow human beings.
When those connections do exist, we're talking about something that needs to be described as something other than narcissism.
I think the distinction is important because, no matter what you call this set of traits, corporate leaders are about to find that this group can be very, very difficult to manage in traditional ways. "Pathologizing" a generation by calling them narcissistic makes it too easy for leaders to approach their work as business-as-usual.
Now, no matter how you slice it, much of management for the past century and a half has come down to small groups of people telling large groups of people what to do, and, often, how to do it. The changes in the nature of work over the past half-century has led to enormous changes in that underlying mindset as everything from quality improvement to innovation programs to customer engagement have focused on a single point: managers need front line workers to participate more fully in the designer, delivery and modification of products, services and experiences.
As pervasive as these programs have become, however, many, many leaders and managers have held on to the traditional ways of leading work: "I'm the boss; do what I tell you to."
We now see that approach in crisis. As more and more young people come into the corporate workforce, bringing their attitudes and expectations with them, leaders must find new ways of engaging them with the purpose of the business. Yesterday, I pointed to Google as a prime example of a company that does this excellently. There are certainly more.
As these companies become more successful and as their workplace stories become less about cafeterias and foosball, and more about innovation, productivity and business results, leaders will have to confront an enormous challenge: change the way you manage your company or face a talent shortage of unprecedented magnitude.
With so many opportunities and such a strong vision of the kind of work-world in which they want to live, today's young people are likely to transform the corporation in ways no one would have predicted when we watched them scampering around on the soccer fields.
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