Chris Nicoli, A partner in Teltek responds on LinkedIn after reading a column found on Linked In by Fortune called “Young bosses, older orkers: Bridging the generation gap.”
In this article a young 27 year old (Nobody’s Baby) is asked to take over a company when his boss suddenly and without warning leaves the firm. He is delighted to have the opportunity, but feels challenged because of the parent friction due to gap in the generations of workers. The new boss is the youngest person in the company and also has the shortest tenure with the firm. The article is written in the form of a cry to “Dear Annie” for help followed by a response by Fortune’s Annie.
Chris’ Response:
This is a great topic. We have 12 people in our company and I am the 2nd youngest person here (first 6 years I was the youngest). If anyone else is in the same situation and struggling to get your employees/ direct reports to follow your leadership I can offer two suggestions.
1) Make sure you have either done their job or spend time working alongside of them to understand concerns and challenges from their perspective; you might be surprised at what you find and the respect that you gain. Like any management – people respect leaders that work among their staff – don’t ask your people to do something unless you would/have done it alongside of them.
2) Older generations are typically frustrated by Gen Y’ers “attitudes”. I have found that this comes from the differences in the way generations have learned to communicate with their peers. We (Gen X and Y’ers) are use to shorter and more direct forms of communication like texting, emailing, voicemail and social media; older generations are not. Take some time to empathize with older generations and remember none of them grew up with cell phones; a lot of them grew up sharing one phone line for the whole block they lived on! Slow down, take the time to listen to them (hear what they are saying), and respond – even if it is more than 140 characters long.
Finally, like my father always says “I can’t wait to see you when you are 64!” Look around – 2 year olds are watching Netflix on their parents iPads in restaurants, 7 year olds have their own cell phones and many kids are multi-lingual by the time they get out of grade school. It won’t be long before we are the “old people” and feel inadequate!
The Fortune article can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/7mmqo4n
—