Supervision 104: How to be the boss you once hated- Millennials before and beyond

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

 -Franz Kafka

 At a certain point in time, every employee is young and new. Raring to go, he inducts his/her conscience with a ‘new’ way of doing things. Learnt from various spheres including but never limited to dreams and intuitions, he exercises a degree of freedom and expression that enables his ego to reconcile what he learnt formally in school and training and the realities he has been presented with. With the generational gap and era of the baby boomers leaving formal employment, having attained the mandatory ages, the new-kids-in-town (tongue in cheek) are freshly entering those positions. The millennials are being defined as those born 1990-1995.                   They differ significantly as day and night.

In its raw definition of stratified and organised work, bureaucracy as a concept proposed by Henry Fayol et.al espouses a form of disciplined and structured approach to tasks. It was developed in a period that relied heavily on repetition of tasks, division of labour and the conveyor belt system of work. It was said that a worker became an expert by continuously doing one task, over and over again. He or she became specialised. The amount of specialization or skilfulness greatly depended on a lot of things, apprenticeship, notwithstanding. But it overly relied on time exposed to that one task, over and over again. That not only called for persistence but patience amid a lot of reprimands from seniors.

In that pre-modern tech and social media era, most things were done by hand and called for a lot of direct engagement with the tools at disposal or of work. Bureaucracy delivered all the time. Everytime. However, the coming of age of the millennials who subscribe to an entirely new sub-culture is slowly redefining the work-place environment. The rebelliousness of youth, defined as the age group 18-35, the emergence of fast technology, the fast life admired by the group, at times called instant-coffee solution, super fast inter-connectivity, restlessness and never settle attitude including the societal breakdown in values that held; such as religion and marriage   among other intricacies have fundamentally assisted in throwing out the rule book. Conformity as bureaucracy proper, is on its deathbed. The old way of working frowned upon. Work should be settled as soon as it is given, despite the formula. Let me rephrase, shortcuts that get work done as fast as possible are the in-thing. In his book Bureaucracy (1962), the libertarian thinker and economist, Ludwig von Mises purposes to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not a result of bad policies or corruption but are necessarily built into bureaucratic structures due to the tasks these structures have to deal with.

 “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

We cannot dispute that they are already here and there is little we can do about it. As one age exits, another firmly cements its place. Plus, with a majority of Youth making over 60% of the populations in developed countries, we cannot gainsay their important or disregard them as THE new policy makers. The fundamental question therefore is, how do you manage this group of the Never-Settle or easily bored? How do you manage their creative genius and harness it for increased productivity? How do you as a supervisor ensure you have the attention of this important group long enough to inculcate values that will make them stay strong enough to make an impact in your organization? These questions are difficult to answer because of the uniqueness of this group and those coming after them

However, there are things that you can do as a supervisor to ensure you capture their imagination long enough and achieve your organizational goals. A supervisor dealing with this group should ensure they have a high degree of patience. This attribute will of course ensure that your sanity is first and foremost intact, but most importantly ensure that set deadlines not adhered to, should be extended as humanly as possible. Most experts are looking at staggering working hours to accommodate this group that opts to work late hours and report late mornings. But this glove cannot fit all.

You can opt not to be a bad supervisor if you are empathetic to their cause. Matters that affect them are or can seem trivial to a boss but can fundamentally affect delivery of service for an employee. the age gap between the group and most supervisors don't help either because of their gasp of various issues as held above.

Reprimanding of such an employee should be done privately and in a controlled environment and best when two. They take ridicule and reprimands at heart. They can display erratic emotions having mostly gone through a system where they were taught to always express their displeasure at anything anytime. Don’t be surprised at employees at this ages quitting in a huff. Handle with care. Finally you can be a bad supervisor if you hold the traditional themes that money or financial rewards is what keeps them in check. All I can conclusively say is that I have encountered youth in high paying jobs wanting to explore other paths because of the nature and disposition of the supervisor, regardless of the high salary enjoyed.

This group probably with time will settle as life offers lessons that only it can, slow and meticulous and patiently, but for one to be a boss not to be despised or disrespected and to draw out rewards for your organization from this group called millennials, put yourself in your Adolescent shoes, add Red-Bull and 1,000 litres of testosterones

“Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. ”

― Rick Riordan