Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: baby boomers

  • Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

    Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

    One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

    Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

    As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

    Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

    “We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

    That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

    Offering a career

    For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

    Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

    “For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

    Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

    Language barriers

    An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

    “It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

    The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

    Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences.  “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

    “We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

    Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

    Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

    Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

    Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

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  • The myth of the baby boomer

    The myth of the baby boomer

    Yesterday I was at the release of Deloitte’s State of Media Democracy report when something that’s been bugging me for a while became clear – have we got our definitions of baby boomers wrong?

    In the report’s demographic breakup  was the usual breakdown of age groups with the interesting twist of separating ‘leading Millennials’ and ‘trailing Millennials’.

    Such separation makes sense, how a sixteen year old uses the media is very different from that of a 26 year old, however there’s a good argument breaking up the baby boomer group the same way.

    deloitte-demographic-breakdown

    While there’s no denying the post World War II baby boom in most Western countries that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1965, lumping the entire group into one demographic bubble with the same economic characteristics seems mistaken.

    If nothing else, the baby boomers should be broken into two groups – those born before 1955 and those afterwards.

    Those born between 1945 and 55 had the benefit of being born into the a world rebuilding from the second world war and the massive improvement in living standards that accompanied the reconstruction.

    For those born after 1955 their work experience was very different; the 1973 oil shock marked the end of the post war economic certainties and also saw the beginning of increased casualisation of the workforce through the deregulations that accelerated under the Reagan, Thatcher and other Western governments in the 1970s and 80s.

    In many ways, the 1955-65 cohort of baby boomers have more in common with the generation who followed them – the Generation Xers, the term coined by the author Douglas Coupland who was born in 1961.

    Equally, the earlier half of the baby boomers have much more in common with those born between 1935 and 45, the ‘war babies’ were too young to fight in World War II and they benefited greatest of all from the post war economic boom.

    So perhaps we should be talking of the ‘Lucky Generation’ – those born between 1935 and 55 – and redefining ‘Generation X’ as those born 1955 and 80.

    While it’s easy to say “who cares”, there’s an important aspect to this. Much of our discussion about the aging population revolves around the boomers retiring and the load this puts on the community.

    Not to mention the foibles, beliefs and voting patterns of the boomers which again differ markedly between the ‘early boomers’ and ‘late boomers’.

    If we accept that the tipping point wasn’t in 2010 when the first baby boomers reached retirement, but in 2000 when the ‘lucky generation’ started retiring then this discussion about how we service a growing – and demanding – group of retirees becomes even more pressing.

    As in many things, life is a lot more complex than the lazy assumptions of demographers and economists would have us believe.

    The myth that the baby boomers are one big fat group with equal demands, needs and assets is something may turn out to fool many of our business and political leaders.

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  • A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    The Catholic church may be a two thousand year old institution with medieval beliefs and beset with scandal, but the clerics know how to handle business succession well.

    Pope Benedict’s resignation was not only unexpected but also almost unprecedented with it being six hundred years since a pontiff quit before dying on the job.

    In many organisations such an unexpected and rare event – dare one use the ‘black swan’ line – would create havoc, or at least paralysis. Instead the clerics handled the process smoothly.

    This contrasts with the succession planning in many companies. In larger business even when the CEOs handover is planned, there’s a period of write downs and blood letting as the new leader stamps their authority.

    Sometimes it gets very ugly indeed, particularly if the former CEO has been kicked upstairs onto the board.

    In smaller businesses, there’s no succession planning at all. Many businesses die when the owner retires if there’s no buyer for the operation.

    That shortage of buyers is a major problem for smaller business owners. Many baby boomers have planned their retirements around getting a good sale price for their businesses.

    If they can’t get the sale price, the boomer small business owners work until they drop.

    Which is what popes usually do.

    It’s often said the Catholic Church is the biggest corporation on the planet. Given how smoothly their bureaucracy deals with succession planning, that’s not surprising.

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  • Building aroung the blockages

    Building aroung the blockages

    “We have to wait for the baby boomers to get out of the way,” said the Gen Y girl after unsuccessfully trying to change a business culture.

    The problem is the boomers aren’t going to get out the way; they are fit, healthy and able to work for at least another decade.

    For most boomers, the promised golden age of retirement simply isn’t affordable as property prices stagnate and investment underperform.

    The smart ones also know governments can’t deliver the promises of ever increasing aged care services and middle class welfare.

    Waiting the boomers to get out of the way also assumes their younger replacements will be any better; the sad reality is many have the same views and 1960s or 80s ideologies of their mentors. Old heads on young shoulders.

    For those waiting for older generations to get out of the way so they can start changing institutions or business, it might be time to start building ones to replace stale and increasingly irrelevant incumbents.

    There’s been few times in history when circumstances have favored challenging incumbents as technology, economic conditions and social change give us the tools and opportunities to build new businesses and political parties.

    It’s hard work, but it’s a lot less frustrating than waiting for the boomers to die off.

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