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Monday, October 20, 2014

The Baby Boomer
Wake Up Call:

A Horror Story or Love Story Depends on Your Generational Perspective.



Excerpt from Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia, Page 163,  
"Me? Get Involved? Are You Serious?"


Image courtesy of stockimages
at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I recently sat down with Tim Davis, a behavioral coach. Tim is more than six feet eight inches tall and is of Italian and Irish decent. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he paints an imposing figure even when he is sitting down. I asked him to tell me his best Gen Y story. As he leaned forward to answer, his intense gaze was softened by both his reading glasses and a huge grin.

“Oh, that one is easy. I’ve been coaching an IT manager who just got the ‘Boomer wake-up call.’” By now, you know what this means. It takes time, but eventually some Boomers are forced to realize that their old dogma is useless and the old paradigms are over, especially the one that says age and seasonality automatically earn the top position.

Tim explained to me how a Fortune 500 client had hired him to coach Nathan, a Baby Boomer in his late fifties with a few years to go before retirement. An IT veteran of more than twenty-five years, Nathan worked for one of the top insurance companies in the world. With the company headquarters in New York City, it went without saying that day-to-day operations were busy and cutting-edge.

Nathan was under great pressure from the CEO to go digital across the board, starting with the New York City office. And to get the job done as quickly as possible, Nathan had been given carte blanche. He could hire as many Gen Y Millennials as he felt were necessary, with HR fully prepared to expedite the hiring. Nathan was ecstatic about this opportunity to take the company’s technology up a level.

Nathan decided to hire four IT specialists ranging in age from twentyfour to thirty and put them to work. Things seemed to go well for the first couple of weeks, but over time, Nathan started to notice that his young protégés weren’t exactly following orders. They started to ignore major deadlines and prioritized workflow according to what they wanted to work on for the day. Many of the smaller tasks began to pile up, and Nathan was getting short-tempered with his team.

In Nathan’s Boomer world, younger generations were supposed to listen and obey their superiors’ commands without question. These Gen Y tech-heads didn’t seem to get it. He felt strongly that they must answer to him since he was the boss. In his mind set, they were the ones who were out of touch with reality.

When Nathan finally sat down on a Friday morning to make sure all the deadlines would be ready by five o’clock, he was met with an empty conference room. After twenty minutes of waiting, he stormed down the hall to the IT department.

Nathan couldn’t hide his anger. “Why didn’t anyone come to the meeting?”

“We had a defrag emergency.”


“All four of you needed to work on it?” They looked at Nathan, dumbfounded. Why was he so angry?

Nathan gave them a piece of his mind and a list of every single complaint he had amassed since Day One. Months of frustration had welled up. “None of you get it! I have deadlines to meet, and you have been puttering around for days on nothing but crappy, self-indulgent projects that, quite frankly, aren’t going to get us any closer to our goals!”

Nathan continued to berate, complain, and threaten.
The entire team—Gary, Rob, Ken, and Nancy—stared back at him without speaking, like deer caught in the headlights.

After Nathan ran out of things to shout about, he went to complain to his superior. In the world of twenty years ago, Nathan would have been justified. Work styles fit into a black-and-white paradigm: Work hard; get rewarded. Screw up; get terminated.

As Nathan sat in front of his director, Valeria, he was running on adrenaline. Maybe that added to the shock he felt when he heard her answer, “Nathan, I need you to go back down there and apologize to your team.”

“What? Valeria, they are missing major deadlines.”

I understand your frustration, Nathan, but . . . How can I put this delicately? Times have changed. Gen Y has an innate skill set and comfort with technology. Not only that, but they aren’t into traditional hierarchy. This is hard to say, but I need them more than I need you.

Managers who have your skills are a dime a dozen, Nathan, but the technology that those young IT specialists have in their brains is what I need now. So, you have two choices: You go down and apologize to them. After that, I want you to get some coaching that teaches you specifically how to speak to Gen Y.”

“And my second choice?”

“You can clean out your desk, and I’ll have your last check mailed to you.”

Nathan of course said yes, he would apologize, and he immediately called Tim Davis, the coach recommended by Valeria.

As he started the coaching sessions, Nathan began to see that Valeria was right. He needed what so many Boomer managers need: an upgrade in his management style. Originally the term for the process of updating business software, “upgrade” became a common word in the gaming industry as well. It wasn’t long before it became a metaphor for updating just about anything, including people who needed to learn new skills and attitudes.

Someday Generation Y Millennials will need a major upgrade. But an upgrade starts with your oldest components first, which means guys like Nathan. Those who don’t get it drag organizations down. To a Baby Boomer, taking classes to learn how to get along and communicate with Generation Y makes no sense whatsoever. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It would be, if Gen Y didn’t have us backed into a corner: their skill set of technological expertise has been timed perfectly to meet the demands of an ever-expanding Information Age.


Like it or not, the new kids on the block have money and freedom, and that equals power.
They are also hardwired differently from the rest of us.



What Boomers do excel in is this: They have better communication skills, empathy, and life understanding, skills that Gen Y lacks completely. And it is these very skills and understanding that need to be taught to anyone under thirty-five. It can be hard to explain to someone that IMing, texting, and fielding over a hundred emails a day may not be real communication. Only with the help of Boomers can Millennials achieve the empathy for others that they so often lack and learn that every member of an organization is valid.

When someone has sat in front of computers all day for their entire life, they lose the ability to communicate with an actual person. Boomers can teach computer-immersed generations that text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and Twittering might seem like communication, but aren’t necessarily so. Just as several hours on Facebook lulls one into a false sense of having a rich social life, this type of staccato interaction through technology is not communication; it’s only an aspect of it. Worse yet, all this texting and Twittering and Facebooking can give people the illusion that they are actually spending “time” with friends.


The best communicators rise to the top in every organization, political arena, and endeavor. Communication as skill set is awarded top dollar. Each generation needs to be proficient at it on all fronts.



There are two things a manager like Nathan must learn about Gen Y workers before he can hope to manage them effectively: why they are so eager to work on their own stuff, stuff that may seem unimportant to the business, and why these workers may ignore their manager.

First let’s delve into why Gen Y only works on what they like. Whether they wanted it or not, Baby Boomers were given a well-rounded education; meanwhile, the later gaming generations could cherry-pick their curriculum. They picked what they liked best, and teachers designed their teaching around a child’s skill set. Learning by memorization was tossed in favor of kinesthetic learning. These young wunderkind also grew up with a micromanaged schedule of karate classes, soccer practices, and dance lessons. They have logged in more than ten thousand hours on video games, where they self-managed their time and direction, and now you expect them to sit in a cubicle for nine hours at a time? Hello?

Yes, this has created one generation after another that only specializes in what they like to do rather than what is necessary.
Boring work is either placed on the back burner or outsourced or, worse yet, rushed over by cutting and pasting someone else’s previous work. Gen Yers choose exciting careers and shun the mundane . . . because they have been taught to do so.

While Boomers were trained to do something once, and do it right the first time, Generation Y was trained to hurry up and get it done and fix the problems later. Now do you see why there is such an informational gap in corporations around the world?

On the other hand, your thirty years of experience means nothing to young people, for one big reason: In their view, the only knowledge that counts has to do with technology, and the majority of the technology that is being used these days, such as Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps, didn’t exist [ten] years ago. In their view, you can’t possibly know anything about new technology because Boomers have no experience with most of it . . . and no understanding of its worthiness.

Another cause for their disdain is that they have been raised to see an authority figure as a peer, not someone to look up to. They simply do not see hierarchy at all. Their ideology is “If you can do it, so can I, but unlike you I won’t take thirty years to get the corner office.” If you try and boss them around the way you are used to bossing your staff, they’ll stare at you as if you’ve lost your mind.

 

Peers don’t obey peers.


Nor is Gen Y into listening to you talk about how awesome you were back in 1977 or some other dead year. (Note to self: Stop talking about your 1974 Duster, Brad.) They see this behavior on your part as arrogance. Your boasts mean nothing to them because they themselves are always “on,” and they expect everyone else to be on top of their game too. Like professional athletes, Generation Y is into improving and upgrading constantly in order to stay employable. Stopping to rest and reflect is not built into Generation Y. They just want to get to another, cooler level in the game.

Using these concepts, Tim started coaching Nathan on the finer points of managing Generation Y. Instead of calling meeting after meeting, throughout which he barked orders, it was time for Nathan to integrate his knowledge base into the young workforce he was managing and set the example for leadership. Tim encouraged Nathan to drop the hierarchy he held in his mind, along with any assumptions that his seasonality meant he was “boss.” Instead, he taught Nathan to ask his team how they wanted to work, within limits. The goal was to create an environment of genuine engagement, communication, meaningful deadlines, support for goals, and company loyalty.

Second, Nathan stopped his twice-a-week meetings. He started to understand that his meetings had only wasted people’s time and interrupted their ability to work toward his deadlines. Instead, Nathan instituted social network–style instant messaging software to keep his crews in constant up-to-the-minute communication during the day, whether for ad hoc communication or one-on-one meetings. As Nathan’s staff expanded, face-to-face meetings became irrelevant and IMing could speed up each department. When he did have a meeting, it was packed with people who understood that this must be something important.

Third, Nathan encouraged each team member to set their own goals and tasks, rather than look to him all the time. Each employee was required to post weekly goals on their own home page on the company’s intranet.

Their direct managers were instructed to manage and support these goals by publicly viewing the pages and privately offering support, checking in on what each person needed in order to accomplish their goals as well as monitoring deadlines. Teams were encouraged to support one another and pick up the slack. Each member was required to handle two high-level projects and four lower-level ones during each work cycle. If someone needed help to meet a deadline, the whole team was encouraged to help.

All Nathan had to do was check each team member’s goals and where they were at in terms of accomplishing them.


This approach changed the way Nathan’s division managed their time. Each member of a team could get their work done whenever and wherever they decided, as long as deadlines were met. This meant that if someone wanted to work later in the day, fine. If eight hours’ worth of work could be finished in four, then the reward was that they could move on to the next task. Also, eight hours during any given week were to be used for one’s own personal projects. These projects were posted to the person’s goal page. The personal project could be something as complex as designing anew app to make the company work more efficiently, or something as simple as planning a company ski trip. Either way, the personal project had two criteria: It had to be something that the employee was passionate about, and it had to benefit the entire group.

These steps freed up Nathan to manage just his managers instead of trying to manage the entire network by himself.
He eliminated the bottleneck that had inhibited communication and decision making—which had mainly been caused by him. The result was increased productivity and newly responsible employees. No one missed a deadline after the new system was implemented. Nathan had shifted his management style from “angry parent” to mentor and production shepherd and had gained his people’s respect.

Look, Gen Y Millennials do NOT understand linear time. It doesn’t make sense to them: Why sit at a desk for eight hours when one can get the same work done in four hours and then go home? This may sound outrageous to Baby Boomers—flexible work time?—but see it from their perspective: Come up with a great idea at 2:00 am, work on a proposal until 7:00 am, print it out, bring it to the office, show it to the right people, and expect to go home at 10:00 am. Workday done.

Younger workers think and operate more like entrepreneurs than employees. They have had parents who managed their schedules and were involved in their school life. They have had thousand and thousands of self-directed video game missions, where they chose every single aspect of the adventure; in other words, they aren’t watching the video game as if it were a movie. Instead, they are engaged and involved in it. They are rebelling, if you haven’t noticed, by doing things their way. So instead of fighting it, why not treat them like entrepreneurs and get the most out of their quirky behavior and technologically driven ideas?

Sitting in an office and having everyone report to a boss is an incredibly inefficient paradigm, especially in today’s chaotic environment. Leadership must learn a different route. Show respect and support for your people’s initiatives and skill sets, and you’ll get the most out of today’s workforce. Everyone must be involved in order for a company to stay relevant and cutting-edge today. By trusting in the fact that people are self-managing, you can be free to lead effectively.


And just in case you haven't figured it out by now, #Millennials act the way they do because Baby Boomers raised them to be this way.


Hope you enjoyed this one...

And as always, thanks for reading,









Brad Szollose 
Bridging The Generational Divide: Multigenerational management expert, award-winning author, business consultant and keynote speaker


PS: If you are interested in one of our white papers entitled... 

YES, send me a copy of What Every Business Needs to Know About Millennials!

What Every Business Needs
to Know About Millennials:

Understanding How Technology Transforms Corporate Culture, Generational Behavior, and Impacts Management, Interaction and Expectations 


Email us with your name, title and email address.
Your information is confidential.

Ask me how I can help your company evolve into the 21st Century.


Brad Szollose is the foremost expert on Cross-Generational Issues and Workforce Culture, management consultant and keynote speaker who helps smart companies understand just how much technology has transformed corporate culture and behavior… and how that impacts management interaction, expectations and sales in The Digital Age.



But this is not based on management theory: With a 30 year career as an entrepreneur he knows firsthand what it’s like to grow a company from a simple idea in a coffee shop to an internationally recognized brand.


Brad is a former C-Level Internet Executive who went from entrepreneur to IPO in 3 yrs—co-founding K2 Design, the very first Dot Com Agency to go public on NASDAQ. His company experienced 425% hyper-growth for 5 straight years, expanded from 2 business partners to 4 with 60+ employees and offices worldwide. At its height, K2 was valuated at over $26 million. 

His results only management model (ROWE) was applied to the first wave of young Generation Y workers producing great results—winning K2 the Arthur Andersen NY Enterprise Award for Best Practices in Fostering Innovation.

Brad Szollose is also the *award-winning author of Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia which explores the subject of new leadership styles – mainly how to get the tech-savvy Generation Y and analog driven Baby Boomers working together. ISBN-13: 978-1608320554

Known for his humorous and thought-provoking presentations, Szollose received the highest testimonial of his career from a C-Level audience member: "I just had my mind blown." Brad’s keynotes and workshops are highly interactive, heart-warming, humorous, and filled with high-content information that challenge assumptions and help leaders and managers create a better work environment for innovation to thrive.

Today, Brad helps businesses close the Digital Divide by understanding it as a Cultural Divide – created by the new tech-savvy worker...and customer. 



* 2011 Axiom Business Book silver medal winner in the leadership

* #1 Amazon Best-Selling Author

"I just had my mind blown..." - A.S., Vistage, New York

Liquid Leadership by Brad Szollose is available at all major bookstores and for Kindle, Nook, iPad and Sony ereaders. Internationally published in India and S. Korea.

Monday, October 6, 2014

Who is Joining Me This Wed. Oct 8th 2014?

in Grand Rapids, Michigan



This Wednesday, October 8th, 2014, I am inviting you to join me at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park for The BHS Fall Speaker Series. I will be driving an open keynote session about Millennials, and mainly, How To Lead in The Digital Age!

Here is the poster below and the link for you to sign up. We are almost sold out, so get your tickets quickly: http://surveymonkey.com/s/2014seminar








Thanks for reading,









Brad Szollose 
Bridging The Generational Divide: Multigenerational management expert, award-winning author, business consultant and keynote speaker

Ask me how I can help your company evolve into the 21st Century.


Brad Szollose is a much sought-after generational expert, management consultant and keynote speaker who helps smart companies understand just how much technology has transformed corporate culture and behavior… and how that impacts management interaction, expectations and sales in The Digital Age.



But this is not based on management theory: With a 30 year career as an entrepreneur he knows firsthand what it’s like to grow a company from a simple idea in a coffee shop to an internationally recognized brand.


Brad is a former C-Level Internet Executive who went from entrepreneur to IPO in 3 yrs—co-founding K2 Design, the very first Dot Com Agency to go public on NASDAQ. His company experienced 425% hyper-growth for 5 straight years, expanded from 2 business partners to 4 with 60+ employees and offices worldwide. At its height, K2 was valuated at over $26 million. 

His results only management model (ROWE) was applied to the first wave of young Generation Y workers producing great results—winning K2 the Arthur Andersen NY Enterprise Award for Best Practices in Fostering Innovation.

Brad Szollose is also the *award-winning author of Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia which explores the subject of new leadership styles – mainly how to get the tech-savvy Generation Y and analog driven Baby Boomers working together. ISBN-13: 978-1608320554

Known for his humorous and thought-provoking presentations, Szollose received the highest testimonial of his career from a C-Level audience member: "I just had my mind blown." Brad’s keynotes and workshops are highly interactive, heart-warming, humorous, and filled with high-content information that challenge assumptions and help leaders and managers create a better work environment for innovation to thrive.

Today, Brad helps businesses close the Digital Divide by understanding it as a Cultural Divide – created by the new tech-savvy worker...and customer. 



* 2011 Axiom Business Book silver medal winner in the leadership

* #1 Amazon Best-Selling Author

"I just had my mind blown..." - A.S., Vistage, New York

Liquid Leadership by Brad Szollose is available at all major bookstores and for Kindle, Nook, iPad and Sony ereaders. Internationally published in India and S. Korea.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Cloud Culture 8:
Three Critical Ingredients for Digital Age Relationships.

[Collaborate Series 8/8]



Translation:
Are You Ready to Apply These Lessons?


This post is the Final Post in a collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and Rob Hirschfeld about how culture shapes technology.

During this blog series, we've explored how important culture is in the work place. The high tech areas are especially sensitive because they disproportionately embrace the Millennial culture which often causes conflicts.

Our world has changed, driven by technology, new thinking, and new methodologies yet we may be using 20th century management techniques on 21st century customers and workers. There is an old business axiom that states, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Yet how much of our process, interaction, successes, and failures never wind up on a spreadsheet, yet impact it?

Customers don’t leave bad companies; they leave companies that miss the mark when it comes to customer engagement. To better serve our customers we need to understand and adapt to the psychology of a new customer … one who has been trained to work as a Digital Native.

What would that look like? Tech people who interact with patience, collaboration, deep knowledge, and an openness to input, adapting to a customer’s needs in real-time. Wouldn’t that create a relationship that is second to none and unbreakable? Wouldn’t that be a leg up on the competition?

By understanding that new business culture has been influenced by the gaming experience, we have a deeper understanding of what is important to our customer base. And like a video game, if you cling to hierarchy, you lose. If you get caught up in linear time management, you lose. If you cling to bottlenecks and tradition you lose.

Three Key Takeaways: Speed, Adaptation, and Collaboration

 

Those three words sum up today’s business environment. By now, you should not be surprised that those drivers are skills honed in video games.

We’ve explored the radically different ways that Digital Natives approach business opportunities. As the emerging leaders of the technological world, we must shift our operations to be more open, collaborative, iterative, and experience based.

Rob challenges you to get involved in his and other collaborative open source projects. Brad challenges you to try new leadership styles that engage with the Cloud Generation. Together, we challenge our entire industry to embrace a new paradigm that redefines how we interact and innovate. We may as well embrace it because it is the paradigm that we’ve already trained the rising generation or workers to intuitively understand.  

What’s Next?


Brad and Rob collaborated on this series with the idea of extending the concepts beyond a discussion of the “digital divide” and really looking at how culture impacts business leadership. Lately, we’ve witnessed that the digital divide is not about your birthday alone. We’ve seen that age alone does not drive the all cultural differences we’ve described here. Our next posts will reflect the foundations for different ways that we've seen people respond to each other with a focus on answering "Can Digital Age Workers Deliver?"

Thank you for following this series...



Our point of view: About the authors

Rob Hirschfeld and Brad Szollose are both proud technology geeks, but they’re geeks from different generations who enjoy each other’s perspective on this brave new world.

Rob is a first-generation Digital Native. He grew up in Baltimore reprogramming anything with a keyboard—from a Casio VL-Tone and beyond. In 2000, he learned about server virtualization and never looked back.

In 2008, he realized his teen ambition to convert a gas car to run electric (a.k.a. RAVolt.com). Today, from his Dell offices and local coffee shops, he creates highly disruptive open source cloud technologies for Dell's customers.


Brad is a Cusp Baby Boomer who grew up watching the original Star Trek series, secretly wishing he would be commanding a Constitution Class Starship in the not-too-distant future.

Since that would take a while, Brad became a technology-driven creative director who cofounded one of the very first Internet development agencies during the dot-com boom. As a Web pioneer, Brad was forced to invent a new management model that engaged the first wave of Digital Workers.

Today, Brad helps organizations like Dell close the digital divide by understanding it as a cultural divide created by new tech-savvy workers ... and customers.

Beyond the fun of understanding each other better, we are collaborating on this white paper for different reasons.
  • Brad is fostering liquid leaders who have the vision to span cultures and to close the gap between cultures.

  • Rob is building communities with the vision to use cloud products that fit the Digital Native culture.







Brad Szollose Bio:


__________________________________________________________________

Who Is Brad Szollose?: 

Brad Szollose, host of Awakened Nation®
First things, first. How do you say Szollose?
It’s pronounced zol-us.

From founding partner and CMO of K2 Design, Inc. the first Digital Agency to go public on NASDAQ to international leadership development expert, Brad Szollose has worked with household names like MasterCard, American Management Association and Tony Robbins, to create leadership training programs for a new generation.

As an award-winning creative director, he has been the creative force behind hundreds of high-end corporate events, personal and consumer brands, and website launches. Brad is the recipient of the Corporate Identity Design Award and the Axiom Business Book Award along with various awards for website and print design.

Brad's unique management model was awarded the Arthur Andersen New York Enterprise Award for Best Practices in Fostering Innovation Amongst Employees (Workforce Culture).

Today, the world’s leading business publications seek out Brad’s insights on next-generation leadership development, branding and modern Management Strategies, and he has been featured (both print and online versions) in Forbes, Inc., Advertising Age, USA Today, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, International Business Times, Le Journal du Dimanche (France), and The Hindu Business Line to name a few, along with television, radio and podcast appearances on CGTN America, CBS, Roku Network and other media outlets.

Brad continues to challenge the status quo with the 10th Anniversary Edition of Liquid Leadership, and his new podcast, Awakened Nation®: a Deep Dive into Extraordinary Conversations.

After 35 years in New York City, he now splits his time between Las Vegas and Denver. In his free time, he enjoys hiking in the mountains, working Star Trek quotes into everyday conversation, and painting and drawing the stunning landscape of the American Southwest and The Rocky Mountains.