Teach Them How to Manage Themselves, pt. 1 – chapter seven of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy
Mathieu | Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | No Comments »
This is the longest chapter in Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y so far, so I’ll be splitting chapter seven into three parts with this being part one.
Chapter seven focuses on helping Gen Yers learn to how to manage themselves at work. Bruce Tulgan says lots of Gen Yers come into the job having an advanced set of skills having developed their specialties at a young age. He cautions today’s managers who insist they didn’t have their hands held when it came to doing things like showing up on time, dressing appropriately or refraining from cussing on the job. Managers will have to do what they can to help Gen Yers fill in these gaps of maturity they also bring along.
Tulgan says managers need to teach them to care about the basics, teach them to be more aware of those gaps in their repertoires. and to fill those gaps one at a time.
Teach Them to Make the Most of Their Time
Generation Y are always in a rush to get things done right away and why shouldn’t they? They have grown up in an on-demand culture. Instead of thinking in days and months they think in terms of minutes and hours and while this might help them get smaller tasks done quickly, it won’t help them work on projects with longer horizons. Where this will really trip up Gen Yers is when a project that needs to be approached with time and care will end up being completed quickly with many errors leading to even more work than was originally intended.
So how does a manager teach the make the most of their time?
Teach Them to Set Priorities
In many of today’s corporations, Gen Yers will have a few managers assigning them tasks. When a this happens, the Gen Yer is forced to decide what to work on. For people of generations past, setting priorities was the very first step in project management, Tulgan says but that isn’t so with today’s young workers. He suggests setting very clear priorities when giving Gen Yers projects to work on and giving them explicit instructions as to what priorities one and two are and that the lion’s share of their time be dedicated to those priorities.
When you tell them what the priorities are, tell them why. Tulgan suggests you break it down like so: “I want you to work on X first because … and then Y because … and finally Z for this reason …” Over time they will learn to set priorities for themselves but until they do he recommends setting them for them or at least with them.
Help Them Eliminate Time Wasters and Help Them Live by a Schedule
It’s important to differentiate between what is a time waster and what is a distraction. Tulgan insists distractions may not be a bad thing like time wasters are. He makes the point that Gen Yers are used to doing their homework with an ear phone plugged into an MP3 player in one ear while a cell phone buzzing with text messages is going off in the other. He cautions managers who might find this unbelievably annoying to relax when they see Gen Yers do it as they’re used to multi-tasking and it may be nothing for them.
A big step to eliminating time wasters is to insist Gen Yers keep a detailed schedule of their day. In the book Tulgan gives a sample that includes very detailed listings like “8:10 a.m., went to the bathroom, 8:15 a.m., returned to desk, began work on e-mail response to client X.” He says keeping a detailed journal three or four times a day will help Gen Yers realize where they are wasting their time. If they need help eliminating their time wasters, use the small reward strategy as a carrot.
As noted in an earlier blog post, Gen Yers relish freedom at work, especially when it comes to setting their own schedule. But truth be told, this generation is one of the most over scheduled in the history of the Earth. The difference being, their schedules were set to their lifestyle.
Tulgan points out that if a Gen Yer had to stay up all night working on a paper, no one would get upset if they missed the first class in the morning. Similarly their schedules were kept by other people – namely parents.
The author writes:
“They need a lot of help getting lots of work done very well, very fast while they are at work. The trick to doing that is teaching them how to use a schedule to better plan their hours, minutes and seconds around their priorities – inside and outside work.”
One strategy discussed in the book was helping Gen Yers develop a work-back schedule from when their day starts at the job. For example
- 9 a.m. arrive at work
- 8:50 a.m. leave coffee shop
- 8:30 a.m. leave home
- 8:20 a.m. return from walking the dog
And so on.
There is only one way to harmonize work and non-work life and that’s to keep one schedule. The first step is to block off 56 hours a week for sleeping, ideally in eight-hour increments with an hour each day for down time. That leaves them with 105 hours a week for everything else. If they block in work and then fill in the rest with social time the likeliness they’ll show up on time and be productive at work goes way up.
Part 2 of Chapter 7
In the next part of Chapter 7, I’ll discuss the following topics author Bruce Tulgan lays out:
- Taking notes
- Keeping checklists
- Making a plan
- The value of being a good workplace citizen
- Defining what a good workplace citizen is at your place of business
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