To find managing gen z a massive headache

[Managinggenzoclock]

I’m a millennial and I manage a team of people. Some of them are gen z. It may be individual personalities but these are the things winding me up.. please excuse this rant. Is it just me? I manage people from late teens to early 60s. The younger group are by far the hardest work.

• Very interested in career progression and pay (not a bad thing but see below)
• at the same time not being willing to ever (I’m not talking often) work more hours or support a colleague
• not willing to recognise that anyone knows more than them, even those with decades more experience
• resisting hierarchical management structures
• making lots of mistakes (including repeated over and over) but not have the humility of inexperience/ youth which would make this much less annoying
• trying to patronisingly ‘educate’ people on contentious issues in inappropriate ways.

I think maybe I’m being too nice.

Some of the underlying things - the arrogance of the young and inexperienced - has always happened. But what makes this different is that we have generations of people who cannot be questioned, corrected, advised because they cannot tolerate the feelings it stirs up in them. Some will build resilience over time, and benefit from it. As for the others - god help them and the people around them.

Well said @Wheresmywoolyjumpers. When I started work you did as you were told, no questions asked. Maybe not the best way, but once you had been in a job a while you could make suggestions - however we certainly never started a job with the belief that we were God's gift to the business and they were lucky to have us. People weren't generally very considerate of our feelings, but we dealt with it, and most of us didn't take it personally. We started at the bottom and learned what we needed to know if we wanted to go further.

No and Gen Z in my experience are the first generation who show a cultural trend against tolerance, heavily egged on by the authoritarians in the preceding generations.

Those awful boomers are the people who fought, campaigned, were sometimes imprisoned and argued and voted for racial equality, women's rights, gay rights (as it was called at the time0 on the statute books. Gen X, Millennials followed pretty much the same model with some cultural differences in style.

The notion that free speech must be shouted down and silenced, instead of an issue argued on its merits, is very much a regressive move in overall liberalisation of society. After three generations of progressively liberalising attitudes, speech and society the pendulum swings and we have a generation pushing back the other way, wanting to go back to an era where one group defines what is the one true way and impose it on everyone else.

As a trend, it is escalated by social media and our failure to educate children in critical thinking and critical analysis of content has made it worse. Its exploited ruthlessly by authoritarians in all generations. But to me its the pendulum swinging back to a more regressive set of attitudes.

But you make sweeping, dismissive statements about older generations? Did you really never learn anything from the generation above you? Its normally a two way thing, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time.

I also knew everything as a teen, but the idea that I learned nothing from the experience of the generations above would be absurd. Some of my brilliant ideas at 25 were pushed back on by dinosaurs - except those dinosaurs had experiences which gave them insight I lacked. Most ideas have been tried before in some form, sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong - its never all one thing or the other.

I literally wrote in my post that I learned from older generations and it was a two-way street.

I think every generation has something to answer for. I am (I think) a baby boomer, born in 1955. Times were very hard and parents very strict on their children, as was society in general. We appreciated small things and small treats and made do with what we had and had no great expectations of anything more - Was that right? Who knows. Rationing has just finished and times were hard, but it never felt that way for some bizarre reason. Then came the next generation (I think Gen X) - things were getting a lot easier and discipline becoming not quite so strict, and I think this is where (in my opinion) things starting to go wrong. I don't believe it's any one generation's fault, but a fault of society as a whole when discipline became a bad word, parents did not discipline their children as they should, would not believe their children were ever in the wrong and certain powers were removed from schools, police etc. I realise that's a sweeping statement because clearly not all parents fit that mould, but the lack of discipline and entitlement grew within Society to a point we are where we are now. Gen Z (I think are the current youngsters) have been brought up in a society where they were very rarely deprived of anything they want, are not made to be responsible for their actions, have lived / are living on debt / credit cards, swopping from one interest free credit card to another. Saved for nothing and have become very entitled. Again, I acknowledge this to be a sweeping statement as not all Gen Z are the same. There are many who are upstanding, conscientious, polite and hard working, but I am trying to generalise here, so please do not take any of this personally. It is simply my opinion of having lived for 67 years, am still working full time and save for everything that we have / had. If I was to be asked for a resolution (if indeed we need one) then it has to be discipline. Of course, discipline means different things to different people so a balancing act would be needed to get the right level. As I said at the beginning, no generation has got it all right.

You mean in the sentence where you describe the handful who were insightful enough to learn from you? Damning with faint praise springs to mind.

I learned a lot from the generation above (mostly boomers), including those who drove me nuts at the time. It certainly wasn't the subset who were "able" to learn from me.

I manage a few Gen Zeds. Had a great request from one yesterday

Wants to reduce working week to 30 hours to have time for exercise before/after work

One of the largest groups in poverty in the UK is older women.

There is a subset of every generation which does well, there is always a larger cohort which does not. Generational and issue politics is often stirred up to gloss over the bigger inequalities in society which are much harder to address.

You see I would describe that as being a jobsworth - they exist in every generation as well.

The reality is that in most young workers are of limited use - doing those mundane tasks is part of shadowing the experience level above and learning about the job. We all serve apprentice time, even if its called a graduate recruitment scheme. The trick is to get useful quickly so that you are not the person with nothing else to do when the room needs setting up.

I was correct in my assessment of boomers a generation above me as hidebound, prejudiced, and blind to what the future held.

For real. Except for those rare and precious few who learnt from you!

The irony of calling an entire generation ageist! 🙄

The cowardly OP seems to have fucked off but I hope they realise that every generation has thought this about the one that followed them.

^ And I say that as a gen-X'er!

I'm irritated with all of you! Sick of people barely out of school thinking they know it all. In my day, we knew our place and stfu when around older, wiser and more experienced colleagues.

You didn't, I assure you. Every generation just out of school/uni were full of little know-it-all shits. Yours was nothing special.

Jfc.

I'm a millennial, but smacking was still being praised as a fabulous disciplinary tool in the 80s, with any dissenters being roundly mocked. That didn't really start changing until well into the 90s and even then, I had teachers telling us it was fine for our parents to hit us out of exasperation. There was no lack of "discipline" or parents thinking their kids were always right. It was an age of "because I said so". (And people don't like the generation they raised on it? Blame yourselves.)

As for living on credit beyond your means, how can anyone who lived through the 2008 recession say it's a Gen Z thing? It was satirised in the Adrian Mole book that was published at the time. Adrian got into serious debt getting a talking fridge and posh flat and furniture on credit that kept spiralling and his half brother lost his entire Canary Wharf life. We had a global financial crisis based on it. Don't say that's a kids of today thing!

Someone else posted the same thing on MN months ago. Every generation finds the other annoying.

You can be sarcastic all you want but I've had a pretty successful career on the back of sticking to my guns about things I thought were right, even when inexperienced. And I've been proven right about a lot over the past 20 years, even when a lot of more experienced people dismissed me.

One of the most important things I've learned is to listen to where younger generations are coming from, which is what I do now. Couldn't do my job properly without respecting younger voices.

This is one reason why Back to the Future is so damn brilliant. When your parents tell you that when they were your age, they never parked with boys or went out with boys, they were never like you!

Then you go back in time and see they were just like you, in fact they also drank and smoked!

Really interesting thread…..I wonder if it’s less to do with particular generations and more to do with the social contract being one sided for many.

For example, younger people are more likely NOT to have voted for the current government, NOT to have voted for Brexit, NOT to benefit from many of the policies championed by the current government (eg they’re unlikely to be homeowners; are more likely to be impacted by insecure low paid work etc, which the current govt continues to facilitate).

Yet they’re told they don’t work hard enough, are over sensitive, lack resilience etc.
So essentially they’re told work harder but you won’t be rewarded (unlike older generations, who benefited from lower house prices, a more stable economy and more secure work).
It would be difficult for anyone not to feel marginalised and fed up.

England is rapidly becoming a country with decreasing social mobility that benefits the few at the expense of the many. I don’t blame anyone for feeling angry about that, regardless of their age.

Why is that ridiculous, though? They've made a request. You can either accommodate it, or you can't - if they requested reduced working hours without saying why, would you have treated it with more respect, assuming it was to do with their health or caring responsibilities or something else?

Anyone is perfectly entitled to make a request for a working pattern that suits them and their lives. You're entitled not to accommodate it if it doesn't work for the business or you don't want to.

I admire Gen Z for their commitment to making work fit around their lives, not the other way round. The youngest person on my team at work is so firm about her boundaries on when she can and can't work, what extra she will take on, and I wish I'd been the same at her age instead of giving myself massive burnout in my 20s for companies which ultimately didn't care about me. It helped facilitate a conversation with my (Gen X) business partners who didn't understand why certain team members were doing wild things like 'leaving on time', 'using all their holiday' and 'refusing non-mandatory overtime because they had plans'.

Why didn’t your generation teach this work ethic to gen Z then? They’re your children, how much can we blame the parents.

I think a lot of this is bullshit tbh, but if you are going to go around generalising about other generations you need to think about how they got there

To be fair to the Gen Z in this house he already works in a casual job plus studies max A levels. I did study but had no intention of working in a casual job until I got to university. Same with his and my friends.

As I said all the way through ReneBumsWombats that these were general comments and that every generation made mistakes - it was not personal. You have your opinions and I have mine and that's okay. I never said it was a kids of today thing, I was trying to generalise and I am sorry you have read it to be that way. Credit has always been available to some (not all) and not everyone who could get it or took advantage of it. However, there are some, even in today's generation who believe that smacking works for some children. Others do not. Some people think its okay to use credit as a way of affording things, and it is so much easier to get nowadays. Others wait until they have saved up for it. Again, its not personal. If you disagree with me, again that's fine. This is a discussion board after all :) (oh and I am not sure what jfc stands for - guessing its Jesus F*ing Christ? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

HNRTT but have many managers had the requests about 'I need to cut my number of days/hours for my MH (not of itself unreasonable) but still want FT pay (I know DWDG but no awareness this might give rise to some scepticism rather than be waved through)?