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This is a paper I wrote in 2015 on the idea that Millennials should be managed differently from other generations. I found they shouldn’t be.

We all want people to succeed, and it’s truly rewarding when we can be part of some else’s success. How awesome is management for allowing us to get paid to help people grow! Since so many people are managers, and thus have this opportunity, there is plenty of advice on how to take advantage of it. In fact, anyone with a computer and internet access can get their ideas into the virtually boundless conversation on management. Due to this ease of distribution, management guidance is authored by the full spectrum of professionals and is shared via an equally diverse set of news outlets and social media. This ensures all viewpoints have ample access to their collective target audience (mainly HR policy-makers and current and future managers). Inevitably, this results in dilution of effective, experience-based insight within a vast sea of untested and ineffective amateur guidance.

That target audience–of which I’m part–has few tools with which to decipher the good advice from the bad. Prior to returning to school, I managed employees for just under two years. During that time, I fell victim to seemingly sound, yet ineffective advice like “praise in public, criticize in private”. The manager who follows and analyzes this learns that some employees don’t like public praise, preferring it in private. Further, criticism–like punishment–is unlikely to encourage effective behavior, which is the fundamental duty of a manager.

For me, the ability to distinguish effective from ineffective management guidance came only once I realized this crucial management truth. The management system which best encourages effective behavior leads to the best results. It is sustainable and practical, as a mindset. The manager following this concept constantly asks, “is what I’m about to do likely to encourage effective behavior of each individual?” Decades ago, Peter Drucker wrote that the best managers of the future would be those who ask the right questions. While I think he meant managers asking questions of company leadership, I feel internal, critical thinking questions are equally vital. This realization brought me to critique everything I was told from news, podcasts, and even the business school I attended. When you hear guidance, if you can’t explain how it encourages effective behavior, adopt a wary disposition toward it.

So what is “effective behavior”? Taken broadly as a starting-point, behavior is simply the collection of work output and overt communication contributed by each employee. Thus, effective behavior would be that work and communication which leads to desired business results. Don’t discourage the effective behavior which earned praise in the first place by delivering it in a way the employee doesn’t enjoy. In this vein, I am wary of guidance suggesting to treat millennials uniquely as a group. Beyond managers, significant changes to recruiting and retention policies are found in common guidance. But HR departments can’t possibly expect to drastically change again once “millennials” are no longer entering the workforce. In other words, HR will need to figure out the timeless–not timely–principles of attracting and retaining the best talent. To stay fresh, they’ll just need to adopt new technologies and systems to apply those principles in innovative ways. At the best companies, this will be based on what works, not on the birthyear of their talent pool.

This paper will answer the question, “Should managers tailor how they manage to an employee’s generation?”. I’ll use the current focus of millennials as a point of reference. Other considerations are: “What source of guidance should managers seek?” And if they shouldn’t tailor to age group, “to what should they tailor how they manage?” I asked these questions myself while being bombarded with guidance on dealing with millennials. Most managers today are in the same situation. Because of this, the intended audience of this paper includes all managers of employees in America, not restricted to industry, career level, nor tenure.

Key Terms:

• “Millennial”: Not officially defined by year, but is a colloquial term meant to refer to today’s young working professional—research relates to various ranges of birth-years between ’81 and 2004.

• “Generation”: People within a range of years. The source used will be the one which is most likely to be accessed by managers looking to implement guidance on managing different generations (if the results of this paper suggest it’s important to do so).

• “Manager”: The superior to which an employee reports directly. In the context of this paper, “Manager” is responsible for the performance and reporting of their employees, and is held accountable for quality retention. This paper won’t distinguish between single- and multiple-manager designs, as found in matrixed organizations.

• “How they manage”: The deliberate tactics used to encourage effective behavior. This is not meant to reflect a manager’s principles; for example, respect and patience are assumed to be part of how every manager manages every employee. Alternatively, frequency of feedback, or # of projects for each employee would be in the context of this paper. For example, I’ll check SHRM articles for guidance on managing millennials and discuss in this paper whatever tactics they recommend for managers. If an article says to give millennials more frequent feedback, then “amount of feedback” would be included as one element of the phrase “how they manage”.

I began thinking there were two possible outcomes:

• “Yes”—the effective manager is one who finds out which generation an employee belongs to, and does certain things depending on each employee’s generational label.
• “No”—the effective manager focuses on aspects of each employee unrelated to generational status.

Method

Document analysis (web and print media) “Meta synthesis” Unlike survey/interview data, the body of work that’s been published on the topic of generational differences in the workplace is easily accessible via the web. Furthermore, meta synthesis is growing in popularity as a qualitative research method “from researchers in diverse fields of inquiry” (Douglas et al., 2008) and can be used to evaluate concerns of previous research. For example, “the limited practical connections made with prior literature or the isolated nature of the research design” (Zimmer 2006). In this way, the present method will help us do exactly what we set out to do—to distinguish good from bad guidance. “Once the researcher has described the patterns, linkages, and plausible explanations through inductive analysis, it is important to look for rival or competing themes and explanations.” (Patton 1999) This made up the majority of my method for analyzing current guidance. I reviewed guidance and attempted to identify common themes using open coding. After I identified and recorded major categories of themes, I  used axial coding to evaluate the articles I read and others. By this method, I  identified sub-categories and sought supporting evidence for arguments previously identified. I didn’t seek to disprove hypotheses different from the original. Still, searching for and not finding support “increases confidence in the original, principal explanation generated by the analyst” as explained again by Patton. This provided a more reliable and thoroughly-vetted conclusion in the end, benefiting the reader who seeks to implement the guidance presented here.

Alternative methods

Surveys/Interviews I chose not to survey individuals because of the nature of this topic. Everyone has their own words to describe how they feel and what the “proper” way to manage is. This would’ve made coding unnecessarily difficult. Also, if I identified major themes among survey/interview notes, they would be gathered from a source (individual managers) that my audience wouldn’t access. In other words, presenting the collective wisdom of individual managers won’t help the audience understand which published guidance is effective. In a sense, it would be asking for guidance from the very people to which I want to give guidance.

As an alternative to meta synthesis, Systematic review is one option of review which I don’t feel is best. Klassen, Jahad, and Moher define it as “A review in which there is a comprehensive search for relevant studies on a specific topic, and those identified are then appraised and synthesized according to a predetermined explicit method” (1998, p. 700). This paper aims to identify the ineffective guidance found by the average manager. The purpose here is not to analyze research, since that guidance is almost certainly of higher quality than what is found on a simple Google search. The average manager (our audience) likely recognizes this, needing no encouragement from me to follow guidance presented in studies.

Another alternative, Meta-analysis (similar to systematic review) would be more appropriate were I reviewing carefully designed studies among similar populations. “Invariably, the number of studies included in a meta-analysis will be smaller than would be included in a systematic review of the same area because of the need for comparable statistics and populations” (Weed, 2005). With meta-interpretation, “there is an iterative process of concurrent thematic and context analysis, exclusions based on the analysis to date, and further “theoretical sampling”” (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). This method calls for evaluating the samples until you cease to find new insights and perspectives. At that point, you conclude with a final interpretation, describing to whom it applies as clearly as possible (Weed, 2005).

Choice of content to review

This meta-synthesis will present and critique the key findings and recommendations from various modern sources of management theory and practice. The purpose is to provide actionable guidance to managers. Thus, our method is to only analyze those articles and peer-reviewed research publications which make specific recommendations for managers, rather than the work which simply presents theory, analyzes current practices, or provides a commentary on, for example, why millennials are different from other generations. That type of writing on the psychology of working millennials abounds, as seen with daily articles published by magazines, blogs, and websites (e.g. SHRM). Conversely, our method examines the published guidance aimed at directing managers in the workplace by providing actionable behaviors or techniques. We will critique these recommendations, evaluating the reasoning and insights behind them hoping to end up with a purer set of more effective instructions for leaders today.

Advantages

• Relevance to our audience–The guidance we’re critiquing is the most likely guidance to be implemented by the average manager. Thus, our conclusions which differ from that current guidance can be assumed relevant to the average manager.

• • Simplicity—Our method will provide conclusions which will include specific, actionable guidance for managers. Thus, the average manager can easily implement what we suggest without expertise or education. Our recommendations may be difficult habits to develop, but they won’t be complex in design or nature.
  • Promotes further study–Again, since our recommendations will be clear, future research on this topic can reasonably pick up where we left off with relative ease by simply designing a study around any or all of our specific recommendations.

Disadvantages

• • Unknown variables—As with any research review, we can’t control for any variables which weren’t controlled for in the studies we review. Two potentially confounding variables are socioeconomic status and performance rating. Wealthy millennials may be different than poor millennials, and top performers are likely different than bottom performers. These distinctions would need to be addressed in research before concluding any generational significance.
  • Uncommon terms—Due to the colloquial nature of the term “millennial” we can’t be certain that our research only includes articles referring to the specific age bracket matching the audience’s perception of “millennial”. However, since the beginning hypothesis is that managers should not treat millennials differently, we don’t think this will cause any reduction in the effectiveness of our guidance.

Patton, 1999. Patton, Michael Quinn. “Enhancing the Quality and Credibility of Qualitative Analysis.” Health Services Research Dec. 1999: 1189. Health Reference Center Academic. Web. 13 Feb. 2016.

Douglas et al., 2008. A.C. Douglas, J.E. Mills, M. Niang, S. Stepchenkova, S. Byun, C. Ruffini, et al. Internet addiction: meta-synthesis of qualitative research for the decade 1996–2006. Computers in Human Behaviour, 24 (6) (2008), pp. 3027–3044

Zimmer, L. (2006). Qualitative meta-synthesis: A question of dialoguing with texts. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 53(3), 311-318. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2648.2006.03721.x

Klassen , T. P. , Jahad , A. R. and Moher , D. 1998. Guides for reading and interpreting systematic reviews. Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine, 152: 700–704.

Weed, 2005. Research Synthesis in Sport Management: Dealing with “Chaos in the Brickyard”. Mike Weed. European Sport Management Quarterly. Vol. 5, Iss. 1, 2005

Strauss and Corbin, 1990. Strauss , A. L. and Corbin , J. 1990. Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Results

Whose guidance is most likely to be found by managers?

At the time of this writing, I Googled “managing millennials” to recreate what a typical manager might do in search of guidance. The first page of Google results includes diverse sources to say the least:

• a Forbes contributor (leadership consultant) who claims millennials, “cannot be managed the way other generations have been managed.”
• an About.com contributor (professional facilitator, HR consultant) providing profound tips like, “Provide leadership and guidance” to millennials.
• Business Know How.com contributor (HR consultant) stating, “Millennials put friends and lifestyle above work”
• Two different bloggers who suggest providing more feedback to millennials than other generations.
• US News & World Report contributor (consultant) who suggests, “Younger generations feel better and do better at work with more feedback. You could probably say that about most people, but more experienced workers don’t typically crave the same amount feedback or at the same frequency.”
• PricewaterhouseCoopers.com article reiterating that “Unlike the past where people received annual reviews, millennials want to know how they’re doing much more regularly. Give them honest feedback in real time — and highlight positive contributions or improvements on key competencies.”

First I want to note the diversity of sources promoting these ideas. The high popularity of this topic has elicited opinions from all corners of the professional world. The result is a mixture of thoughtful principles and underdeveloped guesses of how to deal with a timeless workplace conundrum—how to communicate effectively with different people. Thus, “who” authors these articles becomes as important to evaluate as “what” is being said when it comes to how guidance should be implemented at work. In my opinion, it’s similar to guidance on auto repair; you can find tons of helpful tips online, but you can also do major damage if you follow guidance from the wrong source. While the quality of a source alone doesn’t make guidance right or wrong, fields like management and auto repair have a giant pool of participants. Any of the participants can provide their own insights, but only a portion of them are truly experienced enough to teach others. Seek experienced, successful mechanics for car guidance; seek experienced, successful managers for management guidance.

What’s the perception of today’s working generation?

Looking at the most popular guidance on managing millennials, it’s easy (dangerous) to come to a conclusion about your young employee. A 2014 study published in the Journal of College Counseling found a few major themes in academic staff perceptions of millennials. The 15 university staff members they interviewed had between 3 and 32 years of experience. In their collective perception, millennials consider themselves “exempt from rules”, have a “tendency to blame others”, expect problems will “go away” if ignored, and expect others (parents) to solve problems for them.

In the book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Howe & Strauss, 2000), the authors cited the following traits of the millennials: special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. Another study, published in a 2012 issue of The Psychologist-Manager Journal reported they’re perceived as “disloyal”, “needy”, “entitled”, and “casual”. It concludes, “we believe Millennials will expect organizations to continually re-engage them and remind them of why they should stay.” It’s simply a non-sequitur to say any of this about millennials, as though management should base practice on these labels.

Here’s why: what if research found that millennials didn’t expect to be “re-engaged”? Would they recommend not trying to provide millennials reasons why they should stay? Preposterous; the effective HR department (whether or not it’s mainly HR’s duty is another issue) and manager do this as part of effective management, for all employees. The study also suggested their findings represent a “tremendous shift in thinking for human resource departments”. With this I also disagree, considering effective companies have been using internal communication (or propaganda) since the mid-19th century (Ruck & Yaxley 2013), well before modern HR departments existed (Chimoga 2014). It’s simply a matter of what’s most effective as a business practice, regardless of how old your employees are.

The most common guidance applies to all generations

A few major trends are seen in guidance on managing millennials. Based on my research, managing millennials well looks a lot like managing most employees well, especially when it comes to top performers. I’ll address these main perspectives first, with commentary and response to each. Then I’ll present the less common themes I discovered.

Anyone studying this topic will certainly read about millennials’ job-hopping tendencies. Job-switching statistics do, at face value, suggest millennials aren’t interested in long-term employment with their first company post-college. So, how does this impact the manager seeking to be effective? If true, the obvious conclusion is that managers need to find ways to keep them. The first issue with this guidance is that, even if true, it doesn’t distinguish what makes high-quality millennials leave compared to poor performers. Why do we want to spend equal effort retaining all millennials, knowing top-performers are the ones we want to retain? Also, research presented in the book Retiring the Generation Gap (Deal, 2006) shows no difference in job-hopping among generations. Personally, I think it’s even possible that this rate has declined when adjusted for the ease of switching jobs today, compared with previous decades.

Consider today’s technology. Apps on our phone can tell us when a new job opportunity opens in our area, industry, etc. We can conduct high-quality interviews remotely. I can find the perfect home in a new city without leaving my couch (all of which will become easier and easier). With this in mind, shouldn’t we see the rate of job-switching drastically rising? The fact that it isn’t suggests millennials may be even more loyal early in their career than previous generations. I predict a closer look at the data might reveal a difference in the location of each job (millennials probably job-hop across cities more than previous generations, though the total number of jobs remains the same).

The second issue with the “job-hopper” idea is that, when we seek guidance for developing a retention strategy to mitigate this risk, we find advice that actually is effective for all generations. For example, I read that, “while pay is important, it’s clear that millennials won’t stay with companies for money alone” and “a quality one-on-one relationship with an experienced mentor represents the ideal situation”. I’ll address the similarities among generations in the “Discussion” section, but suffice it to say top-performers in all age ranges require non-financial incentives and benefit from effective mentor relationships. This is not unique to millennials.

That creates a third concern with managing based on the “job-hopper” fear; a manager who sees millennials as more likely to leave risks disproportionately focusing on these younger employees. Doing so, obviously, reduces this manager’s ability to develop his or her older employees.

A second common theme I found was that millennials want more frequent feedback than other generations. Again, let’s focus on what this means for a manager seeking to adjust how they manage. It suggests that they don’t benefit from frequent feedback to older employees. As with the job-hopping concern, a little thought beyond the surface helps us see that it’s simply effective management to tell your people how they’re doing in as close to real-time as possible. This idea is rapidly growing in popularity currently, as we see more visible companies moving away from annual reviews in favor of a closer relationship between manager and direct built on frequent feedback. At one firm’s “Effective Management Conference” they routinely ask their multi-generational audience to raise their hand if they would like more feedback from their boss. As expected, almost everyone’s hand is raised; this debunks the myth that desired frequency of feedback is age-dependent. It says more about the poor state of management currently (not that anyone can expect differently, considering many aren’t trained how to give effective feedback).

The third common theme I discovered was the idea that that a shift in culture has taken place. Millennials, supposedly, have different values and should thus be managed differently. I admit, I’m not certain the basic claim is wrong; I can’t say with certainty that this age group, overall, has the same values as previous generations.

However, I am certain that managing based on this assumption is not as effective as managing as if it weren’t true. I argue that this is not burying my head in the sand, because of what it looks like in practice. Once again, let’s think about the implications of what we hear, and how a manager would behave as a result. Let’s assume Millennials value “more equitable and ethical workplaces”, “engaged teams” and “openness, generosity, and friendships” more than previous generations, as suggested by a Chief Diversity Officer at a major clothing brand. Does the effective manager of millennials give a project to his or her millennial based on any of these qualities, rather than their strengths, developmental goals, and company need? Are we to be suspect of the ethics of older employees? Are hiring decisions supposed to take this into account if we need an especially “open, generous” employee to round out our team? Through deeper inspection we again recognize shallowness rather than effective guidance upon which to make management decisions.

Discussion

Before further examining generational differences and similarities, I want to reiterate the effect of technology on today’s employment environment. Specifically related to searching for a job, I think it’s so incredibly easy to find a job today, compared with previous decades, that bad managers are losing good people much more easily than before. In other words, we’re seeing all this guidance and thought on why Millennials are leaving because it’s riskier than ever to be a poor manager. This explains why the guidance we read today  is simply effective management, which the best managers in the 1950s did, and is guidance that will always be effective.

Jennifer Deal’s book Retiring the Generation Gap reported the results of surveys given to over 3,000 professionals across generations and organization levels. Her team’s research found that differences among individuals within any single generation are greater than differences among the generations as a whole. In other words, the average Millennial’s values look strikingly similar to those of the average Baby Boomer, Gen-Xer, or Silent. A helpful way to describe this idea is that values are not behaviors—values are fairly constant over time, behaviors (how people show values) change. For example, a Millennial might text his or her boss status updates while a Baby Boomer might only report status in-person. Depending on the manager’s communication preferences, he or she should certainly coach each employee on effective communication behaviors. However, both employees seem to value timely reporting, which is effective.

Perhaps the best finding from the book’s research for our audience is this:

“As long as you’re credible, farsighted, you listen, generate trust, and are encouraging to your employees, you’ll do fine with people of all generations”.

The book also found similarities among generations in learning desires, noting, “what people want to learn is based on the needs of their job, not generation, and how they want to learn it (computer, on-the-job, etc.) depends on what is to be learned, not generation”. Everyone wants to learn, more than just about anything else.

Other similarities exist. Top-performers from each generation want a coach and appreciate frequent feedback. All generations consider organizational politics to be a nuisance. Most people, regardless of age, dislike change. Loyalty—measured as % weekends worked, number hours worked weekly, and min/max years you “should” stay at a company–is fairly consistent across generations. Even trust isn’t affected—all generations trust (distrust) other people and their organization similarly.

My experience mirrors these findings. I’ve been fortunate to have managed Millennials, Gen-Xers, and a few Baby Boomers. If I can summarize my learning in one sentence, I’d say the principles applied to retain top-performers look very similar regardless of an employee’s age. The same is true for managing poor-performers and average performers. With this in mind, if I could choose one topic of research to be more funded, it would be on how retaining top-performers can be done systematically. I feel the popular management guidance lacks focus on what really matters (those top-performers). I’m constantly reading books on topics related to this, yet I can’t recall a recent business book which even hints at the importance of making this distinction–Drucker isn’t recent—though I’m not suggesting they don’t exist. Thus, today’s even moderately effective manager is he or she who has the self-discipline and foresight to seek best practices on their own across a wide range of sources (e.g. books, podcasts, published studies, and doing interviews).

Yet, even before getting down to top- vs bottom-performers, a good manager needs to first avoid the pitfall of categorizing their employees into any groups. What makes this so difficult is the fact that, though a “Millennial” “Gen-Xer”, etc. doesn’t exist in reality, these terms are constantly used to describe people. Still, to hold those concepts in mind is misleading, at best, and likely dangerous. A generation—just like any group of people—is made up of individuals who have discernible personal values, to be discovered by those with whom he or she has a relationship. Thus, the effective manager seeks first to develop a professional relationship with each individual, be they 20, 40, or 60 years old. This can be done by specific managerial behaviors (regular face-to-face conversations about what’s important to that individual, frequent behavior-based feedback, consistent ethical behavior, etc.). The elegant simplicity of effective management exists in using a uniform process to identify uniqueness. The self-discipline required to first identify and design an effective process is what’s lacking today. The effective manager must first understand his or her own purpose and ability, then develop a strategy to execute. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening the ax.” Translated to our topic, I’d be surprised if the average manager is trained to do anything but fervently start chopping from day one on the job, considering neither the sharpness of their ax, nor even where to make the first strike.