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Millennial Stereotyping Is Hurting Corporate America

Oracle

How would you react if you opened your browser tomorrow morning and saw an article titled: “Five Office Mistakes Costing Your 65-Year-Old Employees The Promotion”?

Personally, I would be outraged. Age discrimination, particularly against older members of our workforce, has been a problem for many years.

And yet we’re inundated with similar articles about millennials, such as “Five Office Mistakes Costing Millennials The Promotion,” “4 Tips For Keeping Millennial Employees Engaged,” andThe Five: Tips for Managing Millennials.”

And most of us don’t bat an eye.

These seemingly harmless articles, posted by web content factories and respected business publications alike, are responding to the much-discussed talent gap, the forthcoming vacuum created as experienced employees retire and the percentage of young, inexperienced employees increases. These generation experts, with only a minimum of research, purport to offer quick tips on how to work with these young people.

As part of my doctoral work, I did a peer-reviewed study of differences in learning style preferences across four generations of employees at a railroad company. I asked the participants to select their top 5 favorite technology-based learning activities from a list of 22 and found that the preferences of all four generations were strikingly similar.

The managers at this company were surprised because they had read so much about “digital natives” and how important technology is to millennials. While we can’t extrapolate the results of my study to the broader population, they paint a picture of the dangers in making assumptions about people based on their generation.

Stereotyping, Plain And Simple

Swap out the word millennial for an older age or age group, as I did in the headlines below, and suddenly these labels seem less harmless:

Five Office Mistakes Costing Baby Boomer Employees The Promotion"

4 Tips for Keeping 60-Somethings Engaged

The Five: Tips for Managing 65-Year-Olds

Stereotyping based on race, gender, religion, and/or nationality is simply not acceptable in corporate America, so when did it become okay to stereotype people based on their 20-year-wide age bracket?

Resist the temptation to lump millennials into one neat bucket. The category, which applies to anyone born between 1980 and 2000, describes more than 80 million people in the US alone.

While some millennials are still in high school, others are already 12 years into their professional careers. The label leaves no room for understanding the differences of the people in that population.

Even academic studies authored by respected experts in the field of generational issues exaggerate those differences by relying on unfair stereotypes that mislead the reader.

Jean Twenge, a PhD and one of the most well-known authors, speakers, and consultants on generational issues, has conducted numerous such studies. One meta-study reviewed data, gathered from various research reports, from 1.4 million respondents over the course of 80 years, measuring personality, attitude, and behavior.

Using the Marlowe-Crowne social desirability scale, the authors measured every generation’s “need for social approval.” The higher their score, the more concerned people are with the impression that they make on others and the more likely they are to dress and act formally, the authors maintain.

However, the Marlowe-Crowne scale was not developed to determine formality of dress; it measures the degree to which individuals inflate their strengths and achievements or deny their deficiencies when completing questionnaires that assess their personality.

While the results reveal that Generation X and millennials scored equally at historically low levels, the authors make the unfair leap in concluding that Gen Xers and millennials prefer informal attire in the workplace. At one point the authors even describe the wrinkled sweat pants and flip-flops that millennials tend to wear.

We must begin to see this kind of research for what it really is: a fad that exaggerates generational differences in a simplistic fashion to drive book sales and internet clicks.

No Management Cure-All

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is hurting corporate America. How many well-meaning managers eagerly read these articles and books in the hopes of becoming better managers?

The stereotypes of millennials are wildly unfair. They’re portrayed as entitled know-it-alls who want to jump up the corporate ladder without paying their dues; who demand work/life balance but also want a collaborative work environment; who need time off for volunteer efforts (since they want to save the world) but resist putting in extra time at work when it is needed; who are super tech-savvy but oblivious to social norms.

No doubt some millennials fit some of those exaggerated descriptions, but many more don’t.

If millennials were all the same, managers would not have to work too hard to figure them out. The allure of categorizing, labeling, and stereotyping individuals based on their age or generation is driven by our need for easy answers.

However, millennials, like all humans, are complex and diverse creatures, a fact driven home by a 2014 study by Universum, INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute, and the HEAD Foundation. They surveyed over 16,000 people ages 18 to 30 in 43 countries and concluded there is incredible diversity among them based on many factors other than age, such as gender and nationality.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing millennials, recruiting millennials, or engaging millennials. Instead, we must do the less sexy work of understanding the individuals in front of us—their motivations, drivers, tendencies, personality quirks, and preferences. Anything else in the workplace is simply more discrimination. 

Jessica Kriegel is an organization and talent development consultant at Oracle. She works with senior executives on talent initiatives including strategic planning, leadership development, and inter-generational understanding. Kriegel has a doctoral degree specializing in human resources development and wrote her dissertation on generational differences. Her forthcoming book on the dangers of generational stereotyping is due to be published in March by John Wiley & Sons.