gen y in the workforce

hbr.org | February 2009 | Harvard Business Review 43

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HBR’s cases, which are fi ctional, present common managerial

dilemmas and offer concrete solutions from experts.

HBR Case StudyBY TAMARA J. ERICKSON

COMMENTARY BY

RON ALSOP,

PAMELA NICHOLSON,

AND JIM MILLER

Gen Y in the WorkforceHow I learned to love millennials (and stop worrying about what they were doing with their iPhones)

“RU BRD?”1

The text message from Ashok stood out in bold block letters on the small screen of Josh Lewis’s iPhone. Am I ever, Josh thought, stuffing the device back into his pocket and emphatically rolling his chair away from his PC and the backlit spread-sheets and formulas that had made his eyes bloodshot and his mood sour. He stood up, stretched, and took a minute to consider his plight: For the past three days, he’d been crunching U.S. and international fi lm sales, at-tendance, and merchandising fi gures nonstop for his boss, Sarah Bennett, the marketing chief of the movie di-vision of Rising Entertainment. Bennett and her team were in the midst of prepping the promotions, advertising, and brand-ing plan for the next Fire Force Five fi lm; her presentation to the company’s CEO, its head of distribution, and other unit leaders was planned for Friday.

Two more days – many more hours, many more stats to go over before I sleep, the 23-year-old marketing associate esti-mated. He plunked himself back down in his chair.

A recent graduate of the University of Southern Califor-nia, Josh had had visions of making fi lms that off ered strong

social commentary – like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Morgan Spur-lock’s Super Size Me – and distribut-ing them on open platforms so that his message could reach the great-est number of people. With some championing from his uncle – a well-regarded TV producer who knew people who knew people – Josh joined Rising Entertainment, one of the top three multimedia produc-tion and distribution houses in the world. The company boasted large fi lm, television, home video, music, and licensed merchandise units, with a catalog of thousands of properties. Josh expected that the studio, with

its location in the heart of Los Angeles and satellite offi ces in six countries, would off er plenty of excitement and opportu-nity – ever-present TV and fi lm shoots on the lots, hobnobbing with industry power brokers, the inevitable off ers from com-peting studios, and, of course, the terrifi c LA nightlife. But now, with 10 months on the job, and most of that time relegated to mundane, ancillary projects that informed the bigger initia-tives his boss was spearheading, Josh was feeling numb. Who would have thought that life in a big movie studio could be

1 Are you bored?

1827 Feb09 Erickson layout.indd 431827 Feb09 Erickson layout.indd 43 12/30/08 12:43:04 PM12/30/08 12:43:04 PM

44 Harvard Business Review | February 2009 | hbr.org

HBR Case Study Gen Y in the Workforce

so routine? he thought to himself.

Suddenly there was that familiar vibration from his iPhone and another text message from Ashok:

“WRUD? TAB?”2 A break sounded great. He replied immedi-ately – “BRT”3 – and set off for their fa-vorite meeting spot. As he was heading out, it occurred to Josh that he should let Sarah know where he was. He fi red off another quick text message.

Sounding Bored By the time Josh got to the high-backed purple booth in the corner of the com-missary, Ashok and Jessica were already there. Ashok Devi worked in Rising En-tertainment’s TV division as a promo-tions associate. Jessica Sadler had started out in the fi lm division but, for now at least, was working as an assistant in the company’s legal group – ostensibly to help out a team in transition but really to fi gure out if law school was in her future. The three had been at USC to-gether, studying a broad mix of business, communications, and fi lm, but they had become particularly good friends since joining the company around the same time, braving orientation together and now commiserating with one another about the fl aws in their respective work groups – in which each was among the youngest on staff .

“Aw, what’s wrong, Josh?” Jessica said, noticing Josh’s serious expression as he shuffl ed over to the table. “Did your mom call HR again?” Ashok, who was sitting next to Jessica, just grinned and shook his head.

Josh shot them both a look. “What-ever. I’ve been buried all week with ri-diculous busywork. Sarah’s all amped about this distribution and marketing plan for the Triple-F series. But I’m just not feeling it,” he vented.

“Have you tried explaining that to Sarah?” Jessica asked.

Josh had. A few weeks earlier, during a small team meeting in which Sarah was outlining her market-ing premise for Fire Force Five: Reignition – the details of which centered primarily

on TV ads and an aggressive print cam-paign – Josh had casually joked about how 1990s the whole plan was. It was as though DVRs, fi lm-related websites and blogs, virtual worlds, and YouTube didn’t exist, he thought. As though the question of how to capitalize on the free-content movement was still some-thing plaguing the guys in the record business and not anyone else.

No one watches network TV any-more – or network TV ads, Josh had pointed out during the meeting. Instead

of relying chiefl y on traditional market-ing channels, he said, why not try new media? Make the movie theme song available for download for Guitar Hero. Or, even better, make one or more of the Fire Force Five movies available online and embed teasers for the latest sequel within them.

Sarah had immediately balked, not-ing the creaky Rising Entertainment website, which boasted very little traffi c and even less functionality. A “successful” online campaign for the third Triple-F movie in 2005 had nearly taken down the studio’s entire network – including critical sales force connections.

“So how about striking deals with, like, Hulu or There or Gaia? They’re well suited to handle the traffi c – much bet-ter than we are,” Josh replied. These days it was just so much easier to download music, movies, and TV shows how and when you wanted them. To have, as Jessica joked, old 90210 and new 90210

coexisting peacefully on your laptop. “We’d be leveraging one of Rising Enter-tainment’s biggest strengths, its library, in a way that gets the company out in front of the movement to free content.”

“All great points,” Sarah had responded. “But our budget is soft right now – every-thing is soft right now. I’m not sure we have the time and resources to throw at these channels.” Josh opened his mouth to respond, but the marketing chief cut off the discussion there and went on to her other notes.

That was the end of that, Josh ex-plained to his friends. “I guess I just expected that I would get to act on more of my ideas,” he complained, as they fi n-ished crunching through a large order of lime-cilantro chips and salsa. “And that the higher-ups here would have fi gured

out by now that the model’s changing.” By the time Ashok, Jessica, and Josh had gotten down to salty crumbs, the three were in fi rm agreement: Sarah just didn’t get it.

The View from AboveShould all the bullet points be fl ame balls? Sarah Bennett wondered, only half joking with herself. She was in the midst of building her PowerPoint slides for Friday’s meeting with CEO Sam Smithstone and, as always, fi ghting the urge to add crazy animation and spe-cial eff ects to her presentation. Aft er 10 years at Rising Entertainment, the 37-year-old marketing chief still saw her-self as a budding creative rather than an established suit. But she understood her role in the hierarchy: manage the people and the details.

Still, it was a far cry from where she started. A native of Long Island, Sarah had gotten her MBA from New York

2 What are you doing? Take a break?3 Be right there

Sarah stared anxiously at her screen: Where were the numbers she’d asked Josh to generate?

Weigh in with your solution to the dilemma in this fi ctional case study at genY.hbr.org.

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University’s Stern School of Business and held an undergraduate degree in film studies from NYU’s prestigious Tisch School. She moved to Los Angeles and worked her way up in Rising En-tertainment, from an entry-level copy-writer, to marketing associate, to head of the 22-person fi lm-marketing unit. Sarah had a lot riding on the latest Fire Force Five release. A big opening week-end would go a long way toward helping her lobby for one of the positions she was really interested in: EVP in either international business development or family fi lms.

The Fire Force Five series was one of the company’s strongest and best-known properties: The three Triple-F movies re-leased over the past 10 years had gener-ated more than $2.4 billion in box-offi ce receipts and almost as much in merchan-dise sales. The buzz was building for the

upcoming fourth release. Already, Sarah had leveraged the decade-long relation-ships she’d cultivated with reporters at Entertainment Weekly, Variety, and other magazines to place behind-the-scenes and making-of feature articles – each of which stoked the chatter and anticipa-tion among Triple-F fans. She’d overseen the production of a high-impact trailer that would be reviewed in Friday’s meet-ing, and she’d also been coordinating with Rising Entertainment’s publicity department to get most of the Fire Force quintet booked on the usual morning and late-night talk shows.

Now, Sarah was staring anxiously at the envelope icon in the bottom-right corner of her screen: Where were the numbers she’d asked Josh to generate? Sarah just couldn’t aff ord to stay at the offi ce tonight; every minute she was late to pick up four-month-old Rosie from

day care was costing her (fi nancially and psychically), and she had already logged plenty of overtime this week. Sarah was ready to alert her husband that he’d have to handle the pickup, when the Outlook message popped up: “You have new un-opened items.” It was close to 5:30 PM when Josh’s report arrived, and the last couple of case studies looked pretty sketchy, as if he’d thrown them together quickly. But there wasn’t enough time to send them back for revision, Sarah decided. She’d work on them further in the morning.

Sarah quickly dropped the numbers into her slide deck and was about to log off when she spotted the bright pink

“coaching” sticky note slapped on the side of her monitor. A few months ago she and the other frontline managers at Rising Entertainment had gone through a special HR-facilitated training session



HBR Case Study Gen Y in the Workforce

about integrating the newer, younger hires into the company. “Invest the time,” the managers were told. But what many of them heard was “Sugarcoat.”

Sarah quickly dashed off an e-mail to Josh. “Great job! You’re the best.” Who was she kidding? He’d done a half-assed job, and he knew it. Like so many of the young people hired by the studio re-cently, Sarah thought, Josh was far more concerned with getting praise than with earning praise. How else to explain that

“look at me” move in the team meeting a few weeks back? Not that Josh’s ideas were bad, Sarah recalled. They just weren’t very well informed; he hadn’t bothered to think about things like, well, money and infrastructure and tal-ent. If I had tried something like that

when I was an associate, I would have been back at square one in a heartbeat, she thought.

No one had even bothered to show her the ropes until she’d been on board awhile, Sarah recalled. But, following HR’s directives, she promised herself she’d take time to explain to Josh exactly how his analysis had been received, how it fi t into the overall presentation, and how she’d structured the pitch – aft er the meeting. The clock was ticking.

Bypassing the BossSam Smithstone was already late for a dinner meeting with a couple of poten-tial clients at the Ivy. The freeway would be murder. So he didn’t take too kindly to Josh Lewis’s overly solicitous greet-ing in the hallway late on Thursday and his attempts to conduct a drive-by pitch.

“Stop by my offi ce at 8:15 AM tomorrow,” he told the marketing associate. “Or walk with me, if you want. But keep up.”

The break-time discussion with his friends the day before had emboldened Josh. As soon as he’d returned to his

cubicle, he sent Jessica and Ashok an ur-gent e-mail: “Who would know details of our current distribution and intellectual property agreements for the Triple-F fi lms?” Jessica shared the name of a vet-eran IP lawyer in her department. Ashok had no contacts to share but responded nonetheless with a morale-boosting

“XLNT!”4 Rather than devote even more time to Sarah’s assignment, Josh opted to turn in a “good enough” version near day’s end. Then he had raced off to le-gal to fi nd Jessica’s colleague. He’d spent most of Thursday morning and aft er-noon fl eshing out his plan.

Now, walking alongside the studio head, Josh took a moment to establish his pedigree, telling the executive where he went to school and why he chose

Rising Entertainment. As Josh chatted up the CEO with ease, Sam was instantly reminded of his daughter – who was around the same age, now living back at home, and would similarly corral him to talk gadgets, politics, and pop culture.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it here – so what did you want to run by me?” Sam said, trying to get Josh to cut to the chase before they reached the lobby.

Josh carefully but quickly laid out his ideas for putting the Triple-F series online as a marketing ploy for the new installment and employing nontradi-tional distribution and promotion chan-nels. Even before Josh was done, Sam stopped and smiled. “That’s some fresh thinking – I like it,” he said. “Can you talk through these ideas during tomorrow’s meeting? Maybe provide some P&L projections or a point-by-point compari-son of your plan against the plans we’ve used to market and distribute Triple-F in the past?”

“I can,” Josh replied, neglecting to tell the senior leader that he hadn’t actually been invited to the meeting and wasn’t even sure where it was being held. “I will. Thanks, Mr. Smithstone.” Sam was only seconds out the door when Josh grabbed for his phone and typed an urgent message to Ashok and Jessica:

“AYT?5 SOS!”• • •

“Oops!” Sarah literally bumped into her boss as they were both getting coff ee in the commissary early on Friday morn-ing. She had been so fi xated on the slight stain on her blouse – spit-up? orange juice? – that she hadn’t even seen Sam Smithstone approaching, Styrofoam cup in hand. Good thing there’s a cover on that, Sarah thought.

“Great work cultivating the new guys, Sarah. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Josh,” the CEO said in passing.

“I love his approach, and even better, I love the wiki he sent around last night explaining his idea. See you in a bit.”

Sarah stared aft er Sam. What? Wikis? She was amazed on every level, starting with the fact that the CEO even knew who Josh was. I wasn’t even sure he knew who I was, she thought. Her aston-ishment slowly abated – replaced with a burning desire to talk things over with her young marketing colleague, par-ticularly before the Triple-F meeting in a few hours.

Sarah pulled out her BlackBerry and punched out a message: “Josh, in my offi ce, please, in 10.”

How can Sarah and Josh work together more effectively? Three commentators offer expert advice.

Tamara J. Erickson ([email protected]) is a speaker and consultant on intergenerational issues in business. She is a McKinsey Award winner and the author of Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work (Harvard Business Press, November 2008). Visit her blog, Across the Ages, at discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/.

“ That’s some fresh thinking – I like it,” the CEO told Josh.

4 Excellent! 5 Are you there?



Today’s bosses may sometimes feel like babysitters, but they’ll have to get used to spending time with young workers.

THIS IS a classic case of impatient Genera-tion Y meets “pay your dues” Generation X. Similar scenarios are being played out in many workplaces as Gen Yers, with their great and sometimes unrealistic expectations, clash with older workers. Josh Lewis is in a hurry to see his ideas implemented and get into a more senior position at Rising Entertainment, while Sarah Bennett believes in putting in your time before expecting recognition and promotions. It’s telling that she wasn’t even sure CEO Sam Smithstone knew who she was, despite her role as marketing chief for the movie division.

Such generational confl icts are inevitable but certainly manageable when members of the various generations are willing to listen to one another and make accommodations. How to heal the relationship between Josh and Sarah? For starters, Sarah must repri-mand Josh for blindsiding her by going over her head and presenting his marketing tactics directly to Sam. Like many Gen Yers, Josh doesn’t respect the corporate pecking order. His generation has little tolerance for lines of authority and proper protocol. Some corpo-rate managers even call college-age job appli-cants “student stalkers” because they fi re off e-mails to everyone from the CEO on down to try to get the inside track to a job. But such brash behavior won’t fl y at most companies. Josh needs to respect Sarah’s authority and try to work with her, not bypass her.

Sarah should fi rmly tell Josh to air his future grievances with her rather than go directly to her boss, but she also must take steps to deal with the frustrations that motivated him to be so headstrong. Like many Gen Yers, he wants to know that his work is meaningful and have input into big decisions. He also needs con-

structive feedback about his suggestions. Too often, it seems, Sarah has dismissed his ideas as impractical and considered him too inexpe-rienced to participate in important strategic meetings. She has failed to appreciate his valuable knowledge about new media and so-cial networking and his creativity in dreaming up fresh marketing ploys that will appeal to his generation, the prime movie-going audience.

Today’s bosses may sometimes feel like babysitters, but they’ll have to get used to spending more time with their young workers. The investment should pay off in improved morale, productivity, teamwork, and innova-tion. Clearly, Sarah has been struggling to bal-ance her time at the offi ce with her family responsibilities. But that doesn’t excuse her failure to encourage more communication with Josh. She needs to fi nd opportunities to explain how his contributions matter and af-fect the success of the company’s marketing programs. Josh and Sarah should plan regular sessions to hash out their differences. While Josh might prefer text messaging and e-mail, it is critical that he and Sarah meet face-to-face for more substantive conversations about workplace attitudes and expectations.

Managers like Sarah also are fi nding that they need to show respect for Gen Yers and encourage them even if they can’t give Gen Yers what they want as fast as they want it.

“It doesn’t mean we can be as indulgent as managers as we are as parents; we have to slap them back a little,” a managing director at Merrill Lynch once told me. “But as parents of young people just like them, we can treat them with respect. Maybe they can’t sit in and listen to the presentation they helped put together for senior management. But we can tell them, ‘If not this time, maybe next time.’”

Ron Alsop ([email protected]) is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant, and a former reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

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HBR Case Commentary How Can Sarah and Josh Work Together More Effectively?

Sarah hasn’t given Josh the feedback that he, like many Generation Y employees, needs to stay engaged.

SARAH DOESN’T have time to get angry. She needs to familiarize herself with Josh’s idea and make sure all the supporting data are there. Given the CEO’s enthusiasm for Josh’s marketing proposal, I think Sarah should actually commend, rather than criti-cize, her young report for taking initiative. She should invite Josh to accompany her to the meeting. But she should remind him that he needs to keep her informed so she can man-age the details of the project and the expecta-tions of the CEO.

The generational differences between Sarah and Josh contribute to the miscommu-nication they’re experiencing. Both of them have failed to clearly convey what they expect from one another, and Sarah hasn’t given Josh the feedback that he, like many Generation Y employees, needs to stay engaged and per-form effectively. The two also have different approaches to balancing work and life. Sarah keeps them more separate than Josh, who seems comfortable using technology to work from anywhere.

As a large employer of college graduates, Enterprise has taken steps to address these kinds of issues, in two important ways:

Training. One of our regional operations in central Pennsylvania has even set up a coaching regimen for entry-level workers

deliberately based on the Gen Y mantra of “I want it all, and I want it now.” Senior manag-ers there asked employees what was impor-tant to them and how the company could help them achieve their personal and professional goals. The employees requested coaching in four areas of their lives: fi nancial stability and success, relationships, health and fi tness, and career. The senior team at this operation addresses each of these topics in a manage-

ment training program it calls “The Juggling Act.” The idea is that “having it all” requires having a plan and executing it with equal disci-pline at home and at work. Employees receive coaching in practical skills, such as scheduling time for friends and family; planning healthful brown-bag meals rather than being a slave to fast-food options; preparing a personal bud-get and bill-payment strategy; and using their benefi ts package for retirement planning and other services.

Feedback. At another Enterprise site, which has a high percentage of Gen Y em-ployees, one of the managers developed a feedback system that holds each employee accountable for the branch’s service quality. Once a week, coworkers publicly rank their teammates in the offi ce from top to bottom, based on their customer service efforts dur-ing the week. Employees are asked to explain why they voted for the top person and to sug-gest how others could improve. The resulting increase in service-quality scores has been so signifi cant that the program has been ad-opted by Enterprise operations throughout the company.

Last, even though our management train-ees value autonomy, they still seek affi rma-tion of their decisions. They get it by working alongside their supervisors in rental offi ces

and in weekly meetings to review perfor-mance goals.

If Rising Entertainment employed some of those techniques, Sarah and Josh might be able to create a productive relationship based on mutual understanding. It’s clear they have a common objective – the success of the next Fire Force Five fi lm. As much as anything, each needs to respect the other’s ideas for achieving that objective.

Pamela Nicholson is the president and COO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, based in St. Louis.



If Josh really needs to be a maverick, he can go off and start his own company.

I ’M AFRAID Josh isn’t doing much here to disprove the theories that some people have about Generation Y: a life experienced through machines, no respect for what’s gone before, and a constant need for praise, en-tertainment, and instant gratifi cation. Josh is intelligent and tech-savvy, sure, but he won’t get very far by trying to make a name for him-self on the backs of his boss and the members of his work group.

Like many other companies, General Tool & Supply is struggling to hire and retain more Gen Y workers. We’re a large distributor for about 1,000 manufacturers of tools, adhe-sives, lifting devices, and so on. Our problem is that Gen Y workers seem to have outsized expectations about what we’re going to do for them. At six months, some Y hires have won-dered why they weren’t getting pay raises and

promotions. To my mind, most in this gen-erational cohort seem loath to commit to one organization – they appear to be looking for a paycheck more than a career. And once I hear and see that in an interview, I’m done.

Josh’s behavior is wrong on so many levels. He’s been hired to do a job, not this other thing that he’d like to do. He has no respect for his boss; that’s apparent in his actions. But he is also putting his team’s work in jeopardy by not completing, to the very best of his ability, the tasks he was assigned. That’s unacceptable. Our organization, which is made up of a bunch of self-directed work teams, is very fl at, so we rely heavily on collaboration. Each of our 60 sales associates has to contribute if we’re to meet our goals. Instead of pulling his weight, Josh decided to push his own agenda – dur-ing a deadline crunch, no less. Most impor-tant, Josh didn’t recognize that it was criti-cal for him to do fabulous work – even when assigned the most mundane of tasks – that would represent who he is.

For her part, Sarah could have done a much better job of validating Josh’s idea; it was a compelling one, even if it wasn’t completely thought out. She could have admitted to not knowing a lot about new media or suggested they talk off-line later – or maybe asked Josh to spearhead some web experiments for the marketing group. Sarah also should have taken back control of the Triple-F pitch meet-ing by telling the CEO at their morning run-in that Josh’s idea was still in development, not something that was ready for discussion but something the team might add in once research on costs and other fi gures had been completed. Because she didn’t do that, the boss is now expecting something Sarah is not sure she can deliver.

To work better together, Sarah and Josh both need to recalibrate their expectations.

Sarah needs to take extra time to validate Josh’s ideas and help him understand what it means to be a team player. For so many Yers entering the workforce, the attitude is “I’ll be a full-time freelancer, and work will be fun, fun, fun.” Sarah needs to counteract that by being completely transparent with Josh about the level of performance required (a new idea needs to be fully researched) and the level of communication required (formal presen-tations rather than hallway chats). For his part, Josh needs to fi gure out how to pitch his good ideas through established channels, within the established team framework. If he really needs to be a maverick, he can go off and start his own company, where he can fol-low his own business rules. Or, he can go to a different fi rm that has a maverick culture.

Reprint R0902BReprint Case only R0902XReprint Commentary only R0902ZTo order, see page 111.

Jim Miller ([email protected]) is the execu-tive vice president of sales and marketing at General Tool & Supply, a distributor based in Portland, Oregon.


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