ARE YOU READY TO MANAGE YOUR \’GEN Y\’ EMPLOYEE ?

 ARE YOU READY TO MANAGE YOUR \’GEN Y\’ EMPLOYEE ?

This is a generation that proudly calls itself ‘Gen Y’. Born in the the late 80s or early 90s, the boys and girls who belong to this privileged class are smart, confident and have undisputed supremacy when it comes to being tech savvy, be it MS-Excel, googling or gadgets. They also think and feel that they are really very special, the central figures of  a very special story.

Since they are now entering corporate life as freshers and thus the drivers of future growth, it may be pertinent for us to ponder on whether are we geared adequately to manage their unique psyche

So in the Indian context, let us consider the example of Lucy; a Gen Y lad just turned 24 this September; she started her career @ Rs 24 lacs p.a. at a leading FMCG post her MBA from a prestigious B-school. Currently she is apparently enjoying life to the hilt and is so pleased to be what she is, a role model for juniors and the dream “daughter-in-law” of every father. Yet, if you scratch below the surface, you will find that Lucy is kind of unhappy.

To assign a mathematical model to this analysis, we defined happiness as follows:-

If the reality of your life is better than what you had expected, you are happy and if reality (actual/perceived) is worse than expected, you are unhappy

It will be instructive to bring Lucy’s family background into the discussion. She is the only daughter of Mr & Mrs Sachdeva, residents of Delhi. Mr Sachdeva, born in 1964, has been an officer in SBI while Mrs Sachdeva, 4 years younger to him, has been a school teacher at Kendriya Vidyalaya throughout her working life

They were raised by Lucy’s grandparents, who were part of the G.I. Generation, or \”the Greatest Generation”, struggling their way through pre-Independence days in India and part of a group of 5-6 siblings, as way the norm of the times.

The thrust clearly was on economic security and so Mr Sachdeva & Mrs Sachdeva chose stable government jobs immediately after graduation , slogging their way through tough & competitive examinations. Good Jobs in the private sector were few and far between

They were clearly ambitious and wanting to get to get to that lush, green lawn of a career; , but that they’d need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

In the pre liberalisation days, career prospects weren’t that rosy. India grew @ 2-3% p.a., the proverbial “Hindu rate of growth”. What Mr & Mrs Sachdeva achieved was phenomenal in their own eyes; it was a gratifying career that made them fulfil most of their expectations from life.

Most importantly they were able to give their bundle of joy, Lucy, a perfect schooling at DPS, R K Puram- culminating in her scoring 96% marks in Class 12 Board Exams. She joined Economics Honours at St Stephens and then belled the CAT to enter IIM Calcutta at a young age of 22.

God had indeed been kind to Mr & Mrs Sachdeva.

They were much better placed than their own GI parents.

India was indeed starting to shine after 1991, the very year Lucy was born. With a renewed optimism, they instilled a supreme confidence in their daughter that she could do whatever she wanted, that she was special and that with her kind of talent, only the sky was the limit. Lucy, just like her peers, started believing into this instilled sense of being a special protagonist on the world stage and this got deep into her psyche.

This made her immensely hopeful about her career, so the extent that Mr & Mrs Sachdeva’s goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity just wasn’t enough. A lawn worthy of a girl of her IQ would have flowers galore.

This brings us to codify certain perceptions about Gen Y

• Children @ Gen Y are wildly ambitious

The Gen Y needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn’t quite exceptional or unique enough for him/her

The phrase “follow your passion” has become a buzzword in the last 20 years.  The term “secure career” got out of the layman’s lexicon, only to be replaced by “fulfilling career”

Yes, Gen Y wanted to be economically prosperous like their parents but they just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn’t think about as much.

And apart from being much more focussed and ambitious on the career front, Lucy has also been given this message during her childhood as well

This brings us to the second fact about Gen Y

• Children @ Gen Y are delusional

Yes surely; “everyone” from her school, college and neighbourhood- Rahul, Preeti, Deval, Anshika etc would carve a niche for himself/herself in the corporate world, but her life and career path must stand out from the rest. So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual @ Gen Y feel that that he or she is destined for something even better—

On top of the flowery lawn

We call its delusional because of the way, the word “special” has been perceived by them

SPECIAL: better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.

According to this definition, most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean anything.

So this delusion comes into play when Lucy enters the job market. While after years of hard work, Mr & Mrs Sachdeva managed to get jobs into respectable organisations like SBI and Kendriya Vidyalaya; for Lucy  a great career was but obvious for someone who was as special as her . It was just deciding what, when and where she wanted to join after her education

So as she entered IIM Calcutta, her only confusion was whether she wanted to get into I-Banking or Consulting or Marketing or General Management, in the stated order of preference.

The funny thing about the situation was that the life is not actually a bed of roses and infinite blood, sweat and often tears get into the making of a great career – even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.

But Lucy was just not able to accept this.

Term 1 at IIM Calcutta was disastrous for her; the Bell Curve took her by surprise. How could everyone be better than her? Even with a 19/20 in her Economics Quiz, she was barely able to score a B+ as nine IITians in her batch had aced it 20/20. There were people all around, who spoke more eloquently than her, who gelled well with others, overall much better than her !!

This was quite a shocker for her.

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor finds that Gen Y has ‘unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback,’ and ‘an inflated view of oneself’. He says that”a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting.“

For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, ”Do you feel you are generally superior to your co-workers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?“ He says that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief.”

And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, Lucy found herself struggling during Summer Placements at IIM Calcutta

Lucy’s extreme ambition coupled with what came across as her arrogance (delusion about her own capabilities) left her high and dry as the Day Zero shortlists for Placements @ IIMC for Summers.

NONE of the ‘bulge bracket’ I-Banks or Private Equity Funds shortlisted her, they wanted only IITians with exceptional quantitative skills or ones with aggregate grade A+ in Term 1 & 2.

She got rejected in the GD at Bain and after scraping through the first round at Mckinsey, she just couldn’t advance to the next round

Eventually at the end of tiring 3 days, she called up her parents and communicated with a great sense of disappointment that she could only manage summers @ this leading FMCG company. Her stipend for 2 months would JUST BE RS 150,000 as against Rs 400,000 offered by the JPMCs and MSs of the world to her batchmates.

Mr Verma was on Cloud Nine. He was elated that his daughter could manage to get Rs 75,000 per month just during internship; it was almost equal to his last drawn salary at SBI at the time of retirement. He just couldn’t believe that his daughter was in tears. “Papa, I am sorry I just couldn’t live up to your expectations”. He was at a loss of words.

Mrs Sachdeva was consoling Lucy like anything.

She did manage to get a PPO from the FMCG Company as they were quite satisfied with her analysis on rural demand as part of her summer internsip

But Lucy was extremely UNHAPPY now; how could life be so cruel; the 2 years at IIM Calcutta shattered her as a person

The third problem that applies to Gen Y is this

• Gen Y is Taunted

While certainly some of the people from Mr & Mrs Sachdeva’s batches that graduated in the late 80s made it really big in life; it was heard that one Akash Srivastava now owned an expensive mall in Dubai. But they really didn’t know much nor did they care.
Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.

Social media creates a world for Lucy where

1. The Facebook Newsfeed tells everyone else what the others are doing
2. Most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and
3. The people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best -( awesome Portuguese food with awesome friends @ awesome Europe vacation). On the other hand, struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:

So Lucy feel grossly inadequate – recently had a consultation session with a leading psychotherapist at Mumbai.  She explained that she is unable to come to terms with the fact that she is earning only Rs 24 lacs p.a. at one of India’s most venerable FMCG brands; almost the same as median CTC at IIM. With every passing year, the gap between her salary and that of Raghav (who landed with a 50 lac+ CTC at the I-Banking vertical of Credit Suisse) would only increase. And sadly she now couldn’t remove him from her Facebook list as that would be mocked upon by batch mates

So what could we as Gen V, W and X do for the future drivers of our growth

Can we make the Gen Y realise the importance of patience – life spans out amazingly well for everyone at some point certainly. There is no dearth of opportunities in the current era for talented people. You need to keep working hard and wait for Lady Luck to smile. A young fresher, be it CA or MBA, may be infinitely talented but will certainly have to get their hands dirty in the corporate world. There is no shortcut to success

“The grass on the other side is always greener” is an old adage; but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass on their Facebook timelines looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just focus on what you need to do, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.

If you are born in late 80s and early 90s, are you also facing a similar dilemma in your life! Do you have a similar Lucy in your organisation who is frustrated in spite of you paying her one of the fanciest salaries in town? Are your recruitment and employee engagement strategies aligned to this new reality?

Sonia Singal

Co-founder -cajobportal.com, mbajobportal.com

• Please note that the names used are for illustration purpose only. Resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely co-incidental
• Adapted to Indian context from an article contributed by Tim Urban to Huffingtonpost in the year 2013