GETTING THEM to GIVE a DAMN How to Get Your Front Line to Care
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GETTING THEM TO GIVE A DAMN How to Get Your Front Line to Care about Your Bottom Line By Eric Chester Table of Contents Acknowledgments The insights and ideas in the pages that follow have come from my ezperience of working with young people all of my professional life. I am forever grateful for the opportunities I have been given to speak for them but confess that I have learned more from them than they have from me. Since I founded Generation Why, Inc. in 1997, I have worked with some amazing individuals and with some truly great companies and organizations. While there are too many to list, I m indebted to each of them. Special thanks to my sister and research assistant Christie Chester; my business mentor Mark Sanborn; my editor Barbara McNichol; my colleague TJ Schier; my visibility coach David Avrin; contributors Tawnya Lassiter, Karen LaFonda and Lee McCroskey; and to the great team at Dearborn Trade Publishing. A very special thanks to my children for allowing me to learn through their experiences and to tell their stories, and to my awesome wife, Lori, for her continual support and encouragement. Give A Damn \Giv • ə • dam\ vb 1 : CARE 2 : To feel a sense of personal obligation. 3 : To commit oneself fully to a job, pursuit, or cause. see also BUY IN Preface This book is about successfully employing teenagers and 20-somethings. As of this writing, this group was born between the years of 1980 and 1994, a segment of the American population I refer to as “Generation Why.” However, as I have come to believe through my research and writings, inherent dangers lurk when generalizing about a group of individuals born between certain years. While such generalizations makes for interesting dialogue and comparisons, this type of demography is far from an exact science. Research designed to spell out the differences among people in various generations can’t be exact. Obviously, there’s no way to say that a child born on December 31, 1979, is a typical Generation Xer, while somebody born the next day is a prototype Generation Why. No single day, week, month, year, or even span of years can accurately describe or predict the behavior of individuals born therein. Rather, researchers base generational studies on shared historical perspectives. While I personally agree with much of what is being written, I recognize that some of the characteristics used to label people don’t always hold water. So instead of referring to a particular generation, Getting Them to Give Damn discusses a comparison between “then” and “now.” Things are different “now” than they were “then”—“then” referring to when you and I grew up. Remember back when everyone was talking about jitterbugging? Or was it Sputnik? Ringo? Vietnam? Atari? Rodney King? Believe it or not, I work with managers as young as 25 who approach me after a presentation and lament, “What’s up with kids these days? I could never have gotten away with the things they’re trying to pull off!” THEN AND NOW In this book, then means the way things used to be in the workforce when life moved at a relatively slow pace, technology wasn’t pervasive, the management-labor dichotomy was well-defined, and workers ascribed to traditional values and standards. Now refers to the dynamics of today’s workplace. Getting Them to Give A Damn discusses the realities of employing today’s youth—referred to as “kidployees”—who have come of age in the late ‘90s and beyond. Please note, therefore, that broad-based references made about generations are intended to contrast the differences in the workplace between then and now. View any mention of the generations, particularly Generation Why, as a shorthand term that encompasses the current members of today’s entry-level workforce in general. We could call these people front-liners, but some don’t necessarily work on the front line. Indeed, they might have already passed the front line in their jobs. Or they might be working on the back lines, having no interface with the customer but still making a vital contribution to their team, department, or company. The back line represents busboys, maids, cooks, laborers, stock clerks, techies, assembly line workers, and so on—people who do their jobs outside of the customer’s view. Hence, though the subtitle of this book refers to front liners who interact with the customer daily, the term kidployee includes those who are relatively new to the working world. I also recognize that, in their day-to-day grind, today’s managers and supervisors don’t give a flip about specific birth years; they’ve got sales targets to reach, quotas to fill, reports to complete, and bosses to please. To complicate things, they’re overwhelmed with the arduous task of trying to get on the same page with entry-level workers who don’t respond to the same strategies and tactics that they once did when entering the work force. That’s precisely why I wrote this book! Why “Kidployees?”—Getting Them to Give A Damn is about our young, emerging workforce, not simply the 16 year old who takes your order at the drive-thru. After all, aren’t 22-year-old management trainees considered kids by their bosses? So I’m not calling them teenagers because this book also relates to those in their early 20s. In addition, I can’t accurately refer to them as first-jobbers because legions of 17 to 19 year olds have already worked in a dozen or more jobs. The word managers commonly use when discussing their young workforce is “kids.” When we go to the supermarket, for example, we refer to the young people who bag our groceries as kids. We also talk about the kids making millions playing basketball in the NBA, the kids we rely on to repair our computers, and the kids on an entirely different front line defending our country. The kids in each of these situations can be as young as 16 and as old as 24 plus they are on somebody’s payroll, which technically makes them employees. So I playfully use the word “kidployees”—those legally old enough to have a job, but too young to know that the words “rap” and “music” don’t belong in the same sentence. To further define 16- to 24-year-old kidployees, they are those who could well be having a first employment experience, either part time or full time. A kidployee could currently be in high school, have graduated from high school, have recently come out of a technical or trade school, or be going to college. Yes, a kidployee could even be a college graduate seeking an authentic, first-time career position. You might assume that most kidployees are employed by the retail industry, particularly in fast food, grocery, and restaurant services. Yet, millions of others also work in offices, in warehouses, call centers, as sales professionals, in customer service, as van or truck drivers, in health care, non-for-profit organizations, and in government. They could even be married with kids of their own. Kidployees Everywhere—It’s difficult to find any business or service that doesn’t have a front-line staff someplace in their operations. In certain professions such as advanced medicine, rocket telemetry, and biochemistry, employees tend to be more mature; they have graduate degrees and perhaps several years of experience. Kidployees are not found within these ranks. Yet, these fields are still directly or indirectly affected by kidployees. In health care, for example, kidployees represent a sizable number of people entering the field as nurses, orderlies, maintenance staff, janitorial staff, or receptionists. They could be lab assistants or research assistants; they might work in billing, in the cafeteria, or in shipping and receiving. Kidployees are commonly found in the tech sector. They’ve grown up immersed in megabits and microchips, and the tech industry seeks innovative young employees to fuel their projects. Tech managers often live on the edge and have no qualms about reaching down to the youngest ages of technical talent. In many instances, the younger the better because kidployees are likely to generate the coolest ideas and freshest approaches. The same phenomenon is at play in the semi-conductor, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical industries. Managers search for new, fresh blood and all that techno- savvy that arrives with it. In making such hires, however, they’ll inherit the kidployee work ethic, which, I assure you, differs vastly from what many managers wish it to be. Why This Information is Crucial—In many respects, the manager or supervisor seeking information about hiring and successfully retaining today’s youth doesn’t have many resources to tap. Those working in large organizations might turn to case histories or FAQs that have been placed on their own company’s Intranet—to their great advantage. But most managers don’t have such resources at their fingertips. Perhaps they’ve clipped articles from newspapers and magazines, found useful web sites, and talked to other managers. But in general, they find it difficult to round up information on how to encourage young workers to give a damn about their jobs. These managers simply don’t know where to turn—until now. Getting Them to Give a Damn serves as an all-purpose FAQ and answer guide delivering valuable insights and ideas that work. PART ONE: THE “THEN” VERSUS “NOW” PERSPECTIVE You Can’t Get Them to Give a Damn if You Don’t Know Why They Don’t Chapter 1 The Pagoda Principle The young boy’s first ever job “in the real world” was washing dishes at a small mom-and-pop Chinese restaurant a few blocks from his home.