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One of the challenges a lot of my clients have is engaging younger people. I’m talking about people under 26. If you get this right a lot of the younger people will follow you, and engage with you, and want to be part of your group. If you get this wrong they think you like being like their parent, and you’re an old fuddy-duddy and you’re not up with the gang, right.
I’m going to talk about two things that younger people value that will help you engage them and manage them in a way that inspires them rather than feeling like you’re their boss. Talk to you in a minute.
Here’s the thing, all my frameworks are all based on experience. I know there is some theory around this, but that’s not really where I’m coming from. Where I’m coming from is what I’m noticing young people talk about, and what I’m coaching my clients on. Two things that I think people under 26 care about, and what they determine as currency. What we typically determine as currency is money, right, so if you pay people more we’re going to get more productivity. It’s interesting when it comes to younger people that’s not always the case, so I want to talk about the two things that they probably do care about, meaning and freedom.
Gen Y Currency
What do I mean by meaning? Meaning is the perception that I’m living on my own terms. If I get more meaning from my job I feel like I turn up every day and it’s leading to something. If I’ve got freedom it means I have two, or three different types of freedom. I’ve got financial freedom. I’ve got freedom of purpose. I might have freedom of relationship. I might have time freedom, right, where I can do my work where I want to. You can pay people more, but if they don’t have more of these two things you’re not going to get the discretionary effort from them.
Think Differently
What we’re looking for is ways that we can start to think differently about how we structure work and motivate people around this idea of freedom, so if I value freedom more than I value money, how can I make and create the perception that someone has the freedom around their own time? That they have the freedom of relationship and purpose around how they spend their time? How can I structure more of that into their role while still setting the expectations they need to get things done and meaning? How can I create a vision or a purpose?
The purpose is now within your team or organisation that has currency with a young person. So that they care about it and feel like it leads up to something more important than themselves. If you can shift the balance of their value of the meaning of their role, and the freedom they’ve got in their role, and that balance is as equal to the money or more than the money, you’re going to get a heap more from that person, a lot more discretionary effort than if you just pay them for their job, so how can you use this?
Ask yourself
Think about some of the younger people that work in your team, or in your organisation. Think about when you talk to them about what they value, what assumptions do you make? It may be different from what you care about. How can you use these ideas of creating more meaning in their role and more freedom in their days to increase the currency or the value they have of their job, and so how productive they’re going to be in it?
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
If you need help working with the younger people in your team, reply to this email, or send me a message down below, and we can think about how meaning and freedom might apply directly to the younger people you work with. Talk to you soon on The Reason & The Road.
