Managing A Younger Generation

For the past few years, my wife Carrie has been a stay-at-home mom to our two girls. It’s been a good phase in her life as it’s given her time to consider what she really wants to do professionally. So with me in the middle of a career shift, she decided to give the restaurant scene a try and is now a server for a very nice, upscale seafood joint just a couple of minutes from the house. What’s interesting is that the roles have now flipped; she is now the one who gets to share work stories and observations on management. One  such story about generational differences took me back to an experience that I had as a manager.

The restaurant she works in is typical in that it employs plenty of young people. Most are in their early 20s and a couple are 18 and 19 years old. It’s also typical of upscale restaurants where the managers are older professionals. Carrie told me about a heated conversation she witnessed in the kitchen between one manager who is in his mid 40s (and just promoted from kitchen manager to front manager – a more prominent and visible position) and a server who is 18. Without getting too deep into the content of the discussion, the young server was upset with some logistical problems with how tables were assigned. The manager took this as her being insolent and told her that if she made one more snide comment, she might as well just go home. I asked Carrie if she thought the server was being snide and she replied that she didn’t get that impression; the server was simply standing up for herself.

Probing a little deeper, it became clear that there was an interesting dynamic going on here that can be a factor when older professionals supervise much younger employees: manager as parent. Carrie told me that the restaurant manager had children about the same age as the server. I discovered this same dynamic in one of the supervisors I managed in my previous job. She, too, had children about the same age as a few of her employees. In our weekly meetings, she would occasionally refer them as her kids and noted that they had some of the same characteristics (though they were rarely the positive characteristics). As I observed these employees and their interactions with the supervisor, it was obvious that some unhealthy attitudes and behaviors were being developed on both sides. By viewing her younger staff members in the same light as her kids, she
was unwittingly disrespecting them and stifling their potential. And
her staff felt like they had another maternal authority figure.

Over a period of meetings, I coached her to see them not as her children, but as colleagues and fellow professionals. We talked through some questions like:

• What does thinking about them as your kids get you?
• What kind of performance do you expect from all of your staff, even those closer to your own age?
• What positive traits do you see in your younger employees?

For her, the consequences of taking a more maternal frame of mind wasn’t readily apparent. When she became conscious of how much harder it actually was to be "Mom" rather than "Boss," she began the process of change. And the results were dramatic. The younger employees reported that they felt more free to take action, more open to engage in debate with their supervisor, and more adult. Who wants to go to work to feel like a kid, anyway?

In the end, employees will act in the way they are treated. Treat them like kids and they’ll behave that way. However, give them the space to be professionals (including screwing up like all of us have done when we started out) and they’ll likely respond in ways that exceed our expectations.