I’ve previously posted on the alleged work ethic divide between seasoned lawyers and newcomers to the profession. The topic is again put on the table via this article from CareerJournal.com; this thoughtful post by Chris Bailey at the Alchemy of…

And all of this isn’t to further exascerbate a generational rift in expectations toward “work ethic,” but just to point out that as times change, so does how we bring ourselves to our work. As you say, Erin, its a matter of how can we find ways to communicate in a common language?

From my own experience — on the younger end of gen-x — I have had a couple interesting conversations that stem from the perspective of “kids these days.” Once I was questioning if a certain task truly was one I should be handling.

The woman I was discussing this with made the comment to the effect of people in my generation often question whether they should be doing something because they don’t see it as interesting or engaging, while when she was younger, she would have just done it without questioning the task.

The disconnect here was that I wasn’t asking if the task should be mine from a personal interest standpoint, I was asking from a bottom-line standpoint. Is this task one that could be more cost-effectively outsourced? Is this a task that uses me, as a company resource, effectively? I think this sort of question is often construed as a selfish one from a different generational perspective.

Long story short, I think sometimes the perspective that gen-xers just don’t have the same work ethic can be attributed to “lost in translation.”

More about me: I chair my organization’s diversity council, represent my company to the city of Jacksonville’s Study Circles program on race relations, bla, bla, bla… and have four interns under the age of 30 working for me. In 15 years of working for Fortune 500 corporations from the mailroom to the corner office, I have been fortunate to have been exposed to a broad cross-section of workers from the four corners of diversity.

In my opinion, and I tell this to my interns, is if you want to make an impact, you have to know the business. And business is complicated. Good ideas and passion are cool, but you have to understand the impact to the bottom line. Good ideas and passion are great, but if your not generating revenue, reducing expenses, or building competitive advantage, it’s not a good idea and your passion is misplaced. Paying dues is not about grunt work. Paying dues is about learning the business, the industry, the customers, the cost structure, the margins, the operations.

In the interest of brevity, I am going to bastardize something I read in 7 habits. Stephen Covey, a very very wise man, wrote, “Good management without good leadership is like organizing the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.” The disparity between the skill required to captain the Titanic (or some less tragic vessel) and that required to organize the chairs on its deck is huge. And there are many jobs of varying degree of skill between the two. But these are not always apparent to the manager standing on the deck. He sees the captain at the helm and thinks, “I can do that,” but he has no understanding of the responsibility required. This is whyall captains of big ships are bald or gray. And why there are no women captains. Women are much too sensible.

You write that many don’t believe in working their way through a company. I wonder if the idea of a “free agent nation” has had an impact on this concept? There are probably several other sociological factors at play here and I also wonder if there is something deeper going on?

If we bring in Kevin’s comment, perhaps younger professionals have been groomed to believe that organizations can best prosper by promoting individuals based on their innovative ideas rather than their tenure and status. Put in those terms, it’s hard to find fault with that reasoning. What GenXers probably don’t grasp as easily is that for all the ideas and passion you might have, it still takes some good old experience to glue them together.

I don’t think that it’s a drastic shift as much as it is a gradual moving away from the values of the boomers. My question is: if everyone wants to be the chef- who are the cooks?

But one of the real differences as you get into Gens X and Y may be the triumph of the meritocracy. What “older” people see as a sense of privilege and a failure to “pay dues” is actually a belief in talent and creativity. Younger folks, god bless ‘em, have actually bought into the idea that they should be judged based on the nature of their ideas and whether or not they’re any good, not on how many rungs of the ladder they’ve climbed. (And since no one these days expects to stay in a job for the rest of their life, those rungs don’t seem very interesting anyway.) If companies and organizations don’t change the way they structure their ladders, they may find themselves being run by the people who weren’t good enough to leave.