Can Generation X Stay Put and Step into Leadership?
Lucrative, secure jobs are coming for those who can fight their nomadic impulses.
“I’ve been here two years; that’s the longest I’ve ever been in a job,” said Jenny, a woman I worked with in my last job. Or was it the job before that? It doesn’t much matter who or when or where. I’ve heard that said phrase so many times at so many jobs from so many Generation X workers that it has become what it is: a norm. And I myself cannot righteously throw rocks at my generation’s glass house because it’s been a decade since I held down a job for more than two years.
Usually I stand up before audiences and tell them that this is something you just have to accept about Generation X, that their proclivity for nomadic job jumping is part of their collective nature. You can’t fight it. When pressed on this point, I usually state that the only way organizations are going to get my generation to stay put in a job for any length of time is by rebuilding a sense of job security. That means essentially beginning to reweave the employment contract so that Xers believe they won’t be cast aside at the first sign of economic weakness or the first whiff of a merger. That suggestion usually doesn’t go over very well.
In my heart, however, I know that Generation X is currently in a unique position to step into middle management in many industries if we can fight our own tendencies to drift from company to company. The retirement or semi-retirement of the baby boomers in the next two decades is going to create a vacuum in middle management and organizations are going to be desperate to fill those positions. That desperation is already palpable in places like the federal government and the aircraft manufacturing industry.
If you want to fill a room at any conference in America, do a presentation on succession planning. It’s the hottest topic out there. In the past, succession planning used to mean that executive leadership had a plan for grooming the movers and shakers within the organization to fill top positions. Increasingly, succession planning means “how are we going to find enough managers to make sure the organization can keep running?”
Did I mention the army? The army ranger who sat across from me at the food court at Regan International said mid-level commanders can practically name their retention bonuses. Their numbers, he said, aren’t going to improve in the foreseeable future.
So what do we Xers need to do to be able to step into the breach and earn itself some well-deserved battlefield promotions? The first step is easy: stay put. You can’t manage people well if you don’t have relationships and networks within the company. And it takes time to build those relationships. More importantly, you need to build up some institutional knowledge about your company before you can be an effective middle manager. That too takes time. Your credibility with the people you will manage depends on your ability to navigate the local corporate politics in your company, and you need historical perspective and the kind of managerial GPS system that only develops over time.
Oh, that’s another thing: you need to fight your own gag reflex regarding office politics. No one really likes corporate politics, but it would be difficult to find a generation more loathe to embrace the grey areas of organizational group dynamics than Generation X. Politics is a fact of life in organizations, so you might as well take a deep breath and dive in. The upshot to mastering office politics is that once you are in middle management with other Xers, you will be able to change the way the games are played so they are more in line with your own strengths. More importantly, developing your own skills in office politics will add to your job security, and for Generation X, security equals survival. We like survival.
If office politics is tough, I don’t know quite how to talk about the next skill set Generation X needs to develop. People skills. There, I said it. Xers as a cohort need to develop better people skills if they plan to actually interact with and manage people.
I know, I know. The dearth of people skills among managers has been a cross-generational, decades-old complaint. While I would love to be merely rehashing old “Management 101” arguments, in the case of Generation X our lack of people skills is something chronic. It’s more than rhetorical; it’s the truth.
So how do you get people skills? You won’t get them from an article, especially this article. The best first step is to read some books* and maybe take some classes or enroll in some soft-skills training programs. Then you will need to start interacting with people and expanding your network of friends/acquaintances/colleagues.
The worst part of this experiment in managing people is, of course, actually using what you’ve learned with live people. And just like a new parent, you will screw up a lot. If the company will let you practice by managing interns and contractors, you might not be forced to eat your mistakes (firing an employee you’ve mismanaged).
Evolving into positions of middle management is going to be very painful for Generation X, and there’s no way around it. The boomers had similar tribulations in that they grew up believing they should “fight the man” until they got promoted into management and “became the man.”
Normally I wouldn’t exhort people to self-inflict like this, but I see an opportunity that my generation should not pass up. Like buying real estate in California 50 years ago, the organizational landscape is going to be up for grabs very soon. Taking advantage of this opportunity gives my generation an opportunity it almost never sees, i.e. a chance to acquire some job security, significantly increase our incomes and shape the way companies do business.
Or we could continue our nomadic wanderings from job to job. In that case, we will probably end up as more of a “working class,” while the managerial class will be quickly filled by the next generation of go-getters waiting to assault the job market en masse.
*Since Xers don’t read management books, find the books on CD section of your library/bookstore and get one book for your next commute: Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager. If you tune your cynicism down to simmer, you will probably learn a lot from this management primer.