I realized I needed to have a plan bigger than waiting for someone to recognize my stunning brilliance.1
—Stephen Parkhurst, Millennial, filmmaker
They’re so entitled. They think they’re amazing and just want to be given a pat on the back for showing up. They want to be told what to do all the time. They have no work ethic.
So goes the conventional wisdom on Millennials in the workplace.
In 2013, a twenty-nine-year-old aspiring film director named Stephen Parkhurst parodied the older generation’s take on Millennials in a video—Millennials: We Suck and We’re Sorry—that went viral, with over 3 million views and counting.2 In his script, Parkhurst cleverly combined an acknowledgment of Millennial behavior with a critique of the parents who raised them, so I called him in February 2014 to ask about his motivations for creating the video.
Parkhurst lives in New York City and works as a digital tech/projectionist at Deluxe, a company with offices worldwide that provides a wide range of postproduction services to the film and television industries. He graduated from New Hampshire’s Keene State College as a film production major in 2007, smack into the worst economy since the Great Depression. By 2014, he was working full-time at Deluxe while plugging away on his own films on the side. His video, narrated by four Millennials, begins: “We suck and we know it. We’re self-centered, we’re entitled, we’re narcissistic, lazy, and immature. And we’re super sorry about that. We’re the worst! If only we could be more like our parents.” The voices are male and female, white, urban, twentysomething, and hipster-looking, speaking from their sunny couches, their front steps, and the sidewalk outside their New York brownstone apartment, in faux-apology for the relative entitlement, failures, and apathy of their generation.
“We don’t know what happened!” they go on. “You raised us to believe we were special. So special we didn’t have to do anything to earn it. I got this trophy for existing in soccer [shows trophy]. That’s pretty special. No idea what went wrong. You tried your best.”
Quickly, the voices move from satire over at having been raised with too much praise to more macro issues, such as the economic and societal impact of baby boom policies and actions that led to: two wars, the housing bubble, the Great Recession, the dearth of full-time work, the destroyed manufacturing industry, gutted unions, the meteoric rise in college tuition prices, the student loan burden, and an environmentally devastated planet.
The crescendo of irony comes when one woman ponders, “Man, it’d be crazy if there was a generation that recklessly awful, huh?” And the video concludes, “So on behalf of all the Millennials we’d like to apologize for being so terrible. From now on we’re going to be just like the baby boomers. Cuz you guys? You NAILED it!”
* * *
Parkhurst created his video in response to the spate of articles published in recent years about Millennials’ lack of work ethic, such as Joel Stein’s 2013 article in Time magazine called “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation,” and a 2013 piece in the Boston Globe by Jennifer Graham, “A Generation of Idle Trophy Kids.” Criticism tends to be directed at the Millennials themselves, as if they caused their situation. But blaming them is patently unfair. Having known thousands of Millennials, and hundreds of them quite well, I know that they’re full of hope and heart, and, like every generation before them, they want to be successful. The negative characterizations of their behavior in the workplace reflect not some flaw innate in their beings but in the way they’ve been raised. I was glad to see Stephen Parkhurst fighting back.
THE MISSING WORK ETHIC
But, blame aside, the claim that Millennials aren’t showing up in the workplace with the kind of stick-to-itiveness and pitch in mind-set of their predecessors is more than just a sardonic sound bite. In 2013, Bentley University commissioned a study on workforce preparedness. Of the more than thirty-one hundred respondents, including leaders of higher education and business, corporate recruiters, high school and college students and their parents, and recent college graduates, 74 percent of non-Millennial respondents believed Millennials lacked the work ethic of older generations in the workforce and 70 percent believed that Millennials were not willing to “pay their dues.” (In contrast, nearly nine in ten Millennial respondents [89 percent] stated that they did have a strong work ethic.3 At the least, the mismatch in perceptions is striking and suggests a critical generational divide over the definition of work ethic.)
We parents can help turn around this work ethic/workplace mismatch. By following the strategies already discussed in Chapters 12 (the case for another way), 13 (give kids unstructured time), 14 (teach kids life skills), and 15 (teach them to think for themselves), you’ll have gone a long way toward preparing your kid to be the kind of person who will be treasured in the workplace.
In this chapter we’ll look at strategies that build on those prior chapters, and teach kids to work hard—to pitch in and see a job through to its completion—so they’ll be prepared for active citizenry and the world of work. We want them to become—and they can become—people able to say, I should do this, and I’m determined to do a good job.
BUILDING A WORK ETHIC: THE ROLE OF CHORES
The life skills we discussed in Chapter 13—basic grooming, taking care of belongings, making meals, and keeping the home clean—are things each of us must do to look after the self, which is, for any of us, our first obligation. In this chapter we’ll use that list as the baseline of a larger set of tasks we’ll ask kids to do in order to teach them to pitch in, put some skin in the game, and see a job through to its completion for the betterment of the family, household, team, or other group. The authoritarian parents are already requiring these kinds of things of kids, but in a dogmatic way; the permissive/indulgent parents are not requiring it much at all. Taken together, teaching life skills plus a “stick-to-itiveness and pitch in” mind-set builds a work ethic in kids and is evidence of great authoritative parenting.
A kid who does chores has a greater chance of success in life, according to Dr. Marilynn “Marty” Rossman, professor emeritus of family education at the University of Minnesota. Rossman defined “success” as not using drugs, having quality relationships, finishing education, and getting started in a career. She relied on data from a longitudinal study conducted by the definitive authority on parenting styles, Dr. Diana Baumrind (the parenting researcher discussed in Chapter 12), and concluded that those who were most “successful” began doing chores at three to four years of age, whereas those who waited until their teen years to start doing chores were comparatively less successful. Rossman never published this particular research in a formal study, but many scholars and authors have subsequently cited Rossman’s conclusions on the value of starting chores early in life.4
George Vaillant’s famous longitudinal study of Harvard students from their time as undergraduates through their entire adulthood also concluded that chores in childhood is an essential contributor to success in life. In an interview for a 1981 New York Times article, Vaillant explained that “work plays a central role in an individual’s life”—so much that it trumped having a strong family background as a predictor of mental health in adulthood.5 Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist, author, and former faculty member at Harvard, says chores build the kind of “can-do, want-to-do feeling” that leads a person to feel industrious rather than incapable.6
So, chores matter a great deal. Yet children today spend significantly less time doing chores than did previous generations. A 2008 study from the University of Maryland found that children between the ages of six and twelve spend only twenty-four minutes a day doing housework, which is a 25 percent decline from 1981.7 In reporting on this study the Wall Street Journal opined, “In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.”8
Wellesley College sociology professor Markella Rutherford examined changing societal expectations about children and chores by reviewing articles in Parents magazine—the longest-running and currently most popular magazine about parenting—written between 1926 and 2006.9 She found that through the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, chores were a common subject in articles written by experts and laypeople alike; children were doing much of the work to maintain a household, including fire-tending, meal preparation, carpentry, maintaining household accounts, and looking after sick family members. Chores all but dropped out of Parents magazine discourse in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. When, in the 1990s, chores returned as a topic of expert and lay opinion, the chores referenced were “trivial tasks” compared to chores done by children in earlier decades, such as picking up after themselves, taking care of a pet, clearing the table after dinner, and sorting dirty laundry. Since the 1990s, articles in Parents about chores have tended to focus on how to motivate kids to do chores with external rewards such as “points” to be “cashed in” for spending on toys or other items a child might like, whereas in the past, the articles spoke of chores as ongoing work necessary to the functioning of family life and on children feeling “pride in a job well done.”
If we’re middle- or upper-middle-class, our daily lives are not taken up with the hard work that consumed our forebears. Much of the work of keeping a home has been outsourced to machines, technology, or to other humans we hire to assist us. Instead, our daily lives are taken up with our child’s schoolwork and enrichment activities. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau terms these activities—sports, the arts, tutoring—and a parent’s dedication to driving kids to and from them, “concerted cultivation.”10 And she notes how it exhausts us. With all that is on the typical family calendar, it’s a wonder, really, that any work gets done around the house at all.
And then there’s the pressure of homework—which often automatically excuses a kid from having to do any work around the home. In a talk given in September 2014 during the Challenge Success organization’s annual conference for educators, parents, and kids, psychologist Wendy Mogel, best-selling author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and The Blessing of a B Minus, said all a kid has to do is say “I have a test” and we parents wait on them hand and foot as if they are “fascist dictators” or “handicapped royalty.”11 The old cliché “my dog ate my homework” has gone by the wayside; now kids do mountains of homework and don’t have time to look after—or play with—the dog.
Extracurricular activities, tests, and homework are important, but equally important is that we teach our children the skills and values that come from doing chores. Through chores, they will learn:
• responsibility for contributing to the work of the household or the team;
• autonomy in handling tasks;
• accountability to meet a deadline and a particular level of quality;
• determination to get a job done well;
• perseverance when challenges are met; and
• the value of taking the initiative instead of waiting to be asked.
Even if our child’s sweat equity is not needed to ensure the smooth running of our home, they must contribute, know how to contribute, and feel the rewards of contributing in order to have the right approach to hard work when they head out into the workplace and become citizens in the community. In short, chores build the kind of work ethic that is highly sought after in our communities and in the workplace.
BEYOND LIFE SKILLS: BUILDING A “PITCH IN” AND “JOB WELL DONE” MIND-SET
Chances are your kid can understand the importance of learning the life skills listed in Chapter 13. If they’re young they’ll enjoy doing for themselves and helping you out, and they’ll want to be given more to do. If you’re not getting started until they’re tweens or teens you might face some resistance and resentment about the things you’re preventing them from doing because you’re making them do such and such. But the advantage you have with your tweens and teens is that they can see high school graduation looming; a simple reminder that they’ll be out of the house before they know it and will need to be able to wake themselves up, deal with laundry, and feed themselves is probably enough of a rationale to get them to do the various life skills that are about looking after the self.
A work ethic, though, is about taking care of more than number one. It’s about pitching in to help in a situation even if there’s no direct benefit to you. It’s about the old adage my mother always used to say: “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” If building life skills means you know that your kid can pour himself some orange juice and clean it up if he spills, work ethic means knowing that your kid will pitch in and help when someone else spills something, instead of thinking “that doesn’t concern me” and walking away.
But how do we get our kids to feel the impulse to help with things that aren’t intrinsically about them? Unless they’re that rare child born with a sense of empathy and obligation to help others, they need to be taught. For how to do this, Rossman’s research is instructive, as is the work of parenting experts Jim Fay and Foster Cline, coiners of the term “helicopter parent” back in 1990 and founders of the company Love and Logic Institute, Inc., as are the oodles of articles on the Web such as Patricia Smith’s 2009 article in education.com, “Pitch In! Getting Your Kids to Help with Chores,” Esther Davidowitz’s 2012 article “Get Kids to Pitch In” in parenting.com, and freelance health writer Annie Stuart’s piece “Divide and Conquer Household Chores” for WebMD.com. Based on my review of various sources and my own life experience, here are my tips for how to get kids to step outside of the comfort of doing as little as possible and into the zone of doing one’s part.12
1. TODDLERS AND PRESCHOOLERS
The theme for your littlest ones is “cash in on their enthusiasm,” says Esther Davidowitz, former editor in chief of Westchester magazine. Little ones love to feel like grown-ups so they’ll delight when you ask them to stack a set of magazines, when you give them a cloth to dust with, or if you point to a pile of laundry and ask them to take it to the laundry room and sort it into whites and colors. Don’t expect perfection. By having them participate and contribute, they develop a sense of competence about doing a task and confidence that they’re following instructions and are valued for it.
2. ELEMENTARY SCHOOLERS
These guys can give you lots of help around the house. Take the kitchen, for example. They can bring groceries in from the car, unpack groceries and put them away, set and clear the table, and load and unload the dishwasher.
Break each task down into simple steps. When unpacking the groceries, for example, tell them to separate out the freezer, refrigerator, pantry, and other items. Then send them off to deliver some of the items to the proper places—veggies and fruits are usually stored lower down in a refrigerator, so have your little ones be responsible for putting the produce away. Have an older kid put away the things stored higher up, such as milk and juice. Have a younger one stuff your cloth grocery bags into one larger bag for easy retrieval next time. Again, don’t expect perfection. It’s no fun for them if you ask them to do something and then micromanage every step. They won’t do it as well or as efficiently as you—accept that—but they’ll get better and better over time.
Kitchen spills are a great opportunity to build that “pitch in” mind-set. When it happens, call out to whichever kid is in the vicinity, “I need your help.” They won’t know how to be most helpful until they’ve had some practice cleaning spills, so tell them, specifically, how they can help—tell them to wet the sponge and start mopping up the juice, or tell them to grab a broom and dustpan from the hall closet and to sweep while you hold the dustpan. Don’t rest until the task is done completely. Then express satisfaction that it was a “job well done.” Be sure to thank them, not with an over-the-top amount of praise that treats them like they’ve climbed Mount Everest, but with eye contact and a smile, perhaps a hand on the shoulder, and a kind, simple “thank you.” Giving that type of feedback to a kid will make them want to experience that type of praise for effort again.
3. MIDDLE SCHOOLERS
These guys can venture out of doors to do tasks that won’t lead a prying neighbor to worry that your child has been “left alone.” Have them wash your car when the weather is right. Have them shovel the snow from the front walk. Have them do yard work such as weeding, transporting a mound of dirt from the driveway to the flower beds, raking leaves, tossing the post-Halloween rotting pumpkins into the compost, or setting up holiday decorations. Have them bike to your local convenience store to pick up an item you need. If by this age they haven’t been asked to do much by way of helping out, you’re likely to get a raised eyebrow or an outright “what?” or “why?” or an excuse as to why they can’t. Unless the excuse is legitimate, press forward. Your rationale need be nothing more than “I need your help.” Many parents find that a cause-and-effect approach helps move kids along, such as saying, “I need your help. Please rake those leaves. When you’re done we’ll go to the store and get the materials you need for your school project.”
Life is full of so-called grunt work, and doing the icky, yucky unglamorous tasks are a great way to build work ethic. Someone has to clean that spill, wash out the trash or recycling bin, deal with the ant infestation, move all the boxes that got mildew because of a roof leak, or shovel the dog poop. Why not your middle schooler? Remember to show your gratitude, again, not as over-the-top, jaw-dropping praise, but as a simple, sincere “Thank you. I know that was gross. I appreciate it.”
By this age you can develop your kid’s work ethic further by asking them to anticipate the next steps involved in a task, or the longer-term sequence of related tasks, rather than waiting to be told what to do next. You can ask, “I want to be sure that garbage doesn’t overflow next time. What can we do about that?” Or, “We keep running out of toilet paper in the bathroom. What can we do about that?” Being able to be proactive about next steps is critical for our kids’ success as citizens and workers. If they don’t seem to know what to do next, ask them what they think the next steps are. Resist the temptation to create that checklist for them.
4. HIGH SCHOOLERS
These guys are big enough to do most of the things you’re doing, and can be responsible with machinery, heights, and other such risks. Inside the house they can clean out the refrigerator (chuck old stuff, wipe down the shelves and interior); wipe down the oven, microwave, and stove; and change the bag in the vacuum. Outside they can wash windows, mow the lawn, and go onto the roof with you to clean the gutters.
You want to see them sweat. Have them haul the Christmas tree to the curb. Have them work alongside you with hammer and nails to mend the fence. Have them help you organize the attic or garage. When they put in that kind of physical effort, it improves their concentration (as any parent of a kid with ADD/ADHD knows), builds their strength and stamina, and gives them that workman’s pride in accomplishing a physically demanding task.
Work ethic is about rolling up your sleeves and doing what needs to be done, anticipating the steps involved, and being proactive about it instead of waiting to be asked. Is there an elderly neighbor who struggles to bring in her newspaper every morning or to bring her trash cans to the curb? Tell your teen a story about a time you helped a neighbor out. You just might find that your teen starts to anticipate ways to be helpful like that in your life or in the life of a neighbor.
THIS IS A PARENT’S RIGHT AND RESPONSIBILITY: DON’T SHRINK FROM IT
1. Model it. Don’t tell your kid to go do work while you lounge on the couch. The best way to teach work ethic is by example. Pitching in is what every family member is expected to do, regardless of age, gender, or title. Let them see you working. Ask them to pitch in. When you’re setting out to do something in the kitchen, yard, or garage, call to a kid, “I need your help with this.”
2. Expect their help. You’re not a concierge. You’re their first teacher: their parent. The greatest impediment to instilling a work ethic in our children just might be ourselves, particularly if we’ve been on the permissive/indulgent side of the parenting spectrum and have tended to be very focused on our kids’ happiness and enjoyment while being quite aware of how busy they are with homework and extracurriculars. But we’re trying to grow our kids to adulthood, where they’ll need the skills that come from chores. Chores at home become the “grunt work” of employment—the stuff they do to “pay their dues” and advance up the employment ladder. They may not like being asked or told to do things, and they’d certainly rather be on their phones or some other device, or with friends, or really doing almost anything else, but they will come to feel a sense of accomplishment for having done whatever you’ve asked.
3. Don’t apologize or overexplain. A hallmark of parenting in middle- and upper-middle-class families today is that parents talk-talk-talk. Talking through a kid’s day at school to unpack what they experienced and learned is a great way to build critical thinking skills, as we saw in the prior chapter. Talking a problem over with a child is a great way to help them come to a decision and to show you care, which is a hallmark of authoritative parenting. But chores are an arena where the authoritative parent articulates the rules and values of the household. Talking their ear off about the why and how behind your request that they do chores, or how you know they won’t like it but they really need to, or how you feel badly asking them to do it, isn’t useful. Overexplaining makes you look like you feel the need to justify your request. And if you apologize in the asking, along the way, or after the fact, you’ll undercut your own authority as a parent who has the right and responsibility to ask your kid to help out. Your kid might grumble in the short term, but in the long term they’ll thank you.
4. Give clear, straightforward instructions. Figure out what you want done and say so. When a task is new to a child, explain the steps. Then back off. Don’t hover as they do it. Don’t micromanage. You’re not trying to get them to do it exactly the way you would. You’re just getting them to do it. They won’t learn how to do it for themselves if you’re there nudging them to do it this way or to try it that way. They won’t feel a sense of accomplishment and a desire to do it again or to do more if they haven’t actually done it themselves. They won’t learn to be proactive next time if you’re there to tell them precisely what needs to be done. Let them try and fail and try again. Tell them, “Let me know when you’re done and I’ll come over and see how you did.” Then, unless it’s something dangerous where your supervision is required, walk away.
5. Give appropriate thanks and feedback. Don’t overpraise. When our kid does the simplest thing—takes out the trash, brings their dishes in from the table, feeds the dog—we tend to overpraise it with a “Great job, buddy!” or a “Perfect!” However, a simple, kind, confident “Thank you” or “Nice job” is sufficient. Save your over-the-top praise responses for when they’ve really gone above and beyond in their effort, or accomplished something truly exceptional.
Chances are they’ve done a decent job, maybe even a pretty darn good job, but they’ll also need some constructive feedback on how to improve—as will be the case in the world of work one day. A friend of mine is a senior manager at Google overseeing a team of Millennials. Often when she gives constructive feedback to her young employees she hears, “What? It can’t be me. I’ve never gotten feedback like that before. It must be you or Google that’s the problem.” Don’t let your kid’s first performance evaluation in the workplace be the first time they receive constructive feedback.
The bulk of the time you’ll be able to point out one or two things they might do differently next time: “If you hold the trash bag like this, less stuff will fall out.” Or, “You see that stripe on your gray shirt? It’s because you washed it with your new jeans. It’s better to wash new jeans by themselves the first time, or else they’ll bleed onto the other stuff.”
And if your kid didn’t actually complete the task, or completed it but not at a high quality level, you need to let them know. Say, “This was a good start at cleaning up after dinner. I see you did the dishes. But those pots still need to be hand-washed, and the counter needs to be wiped down.” Then smile—you’re not angry with them, you’re teaching them—and go back to what you were doing.
If, as your child gets more accustomed to helping out around the house, she starts doing things without being asked, that’s the more appropriate time to reach out with words, eye contact, and body language that communicates, “I noticed what you did, and I really appreciate it.” Even then, that’s enough. Don’t belabor the point. Just walk away or go back to whatever you were doing. Know that your kid will be beaming inside.
6. Make it routine: If you set expectations that some chores are daily, others are weekly, and others are seasonal, your kids will get used to the fact that something always needs to be done in life, and that pitching in and helping out is a way to feel useful and good and will be recognized. Over time if you’ve been saying to your kid, “Hey, I’d like you to pitch in and help me with this,” and if, when you see them struggling, you pitch in to help them, your kid will start to look for ways in which they can “pitch in” when they see another family member, friend, neighbor, or coworker in need.
THEY MUST WORK FOR THEIR DREAMS: BELIEVING IN THEMSELVES IS NOT ENOUGH
Stephen Parkhurst’s video is his response to media critiques of Millennials with which he disagreed. Still, looking around at his peers, Stephen saw some truth in what was being said about his generation. “Yes, we have a sense of entitlement. I’ve felt it myself,” Stephen told me.13 His parents always said that he just had to believe in himself and he could do anything. For a while, he behaved as if that was literally true; he was all self-esteem and no work ethic, and it didn’t get him very far.
“When I first got out of college I bounced from job to job trying to get somewhere with my films, but nothing was happening. I sort of had this idea that the problem was where I was living, like, it wasn’t me, it was that I wasn’t in the right place yet. I remember thinking, ‘I’m twenty-five! Why am I not a famous director by now?’ We went to college and did what we were supposed to do, and weren’t immediately rewarded as we thought we should be.”
In April 2009, just after the financial markets crashed, Stephen gave up and moved back home to Portland, Maine. He set his filmmaking dreams to the side and took a job working as a valet at a hotel just to make ends meet. Two years later, he had what to him was a horrifying thought—that he’d still be a valet at age forty.
Something clicked for Stephen in those moments of despair parking other people’s fancy cars. He came to realize success in film wasn’t going to be handed to him. “No matter how much I may think ‘I’m great,’ nobody else cares about that. In the valet years I came to realize that instead of just moving about, I needed to have a plan bigger than waiting for someone to recognize my stunning brilliance.”
Stephen moved to New York to build his network and skill set by working in the film industry as a digital tech/projectionist at Deluxe. Even though he’d rather be making his own films for a living than working behind the scenes on someone else’s, he now knows it will take a lot of hard work to achieve his dreams of being a filmmaker, and a plan, which is now unfolding. He has a lot of student debt but feels good about the life he and his girlfriend are carving out for themselves in New York, and about his work at Deluxe and on his own films. “I feel that I’m on the right path, whereas for quite a few years I wasn’t on any path at all, I was just stumbling through the wilderness. Now it’s like, ‘There’s my career, it’s up ahead,’ instead of ‘Hey, where’s my career?’”
HOW WORK ETHIC COMES ACROSS IN THE JOB HUNT
Stephen is willing to do the grunt work in order to pay his dues and move up the ladder. Alexa Gulliford wishes she saw more young employees like him. Alexa is managing director at Groupe Insearch, a corporate search firm that places recent college graduates in support positions at Bay Area technology companies, financial services companies, and corporate retailers. (Think Twitter and Salesforce.com, venture capital firms and hedge funds, Sephora and Restoration Hardware.) These companies want great young adults for entry-level positions, so Alexa is out there “sorting and sifting” candidates. Too often she sees candidates who roll their eyes in interviews when the “grunt work” (a.k.a. administrative tasks of a job) is discussed. What Alexa and her corporate clients are looking for are people who are eager to roll up their sleeves and pitch in.14
Alexa turned her observations and client feedback into tips for young applicants about how to demonstrate work ethic:
1. Be interested in the work itself. Don’t say, “It’s okay, I’m fine with doing the administrative part.” Say, “I’m going to kill it with the administrative part.” Say “I’m so excited to do this job and the work that goes into it.”
2. Be interested in paying your dues. Don’t suggest that this job is a pill you’re willing to swallow to get your foot in the door. “Foot in the door” is a no-no phrase because it demonstrates in quick summary fashion that you’re only interested in promotion and something down the road, not the actual job you’re interviewing for. No one wants to hire the foot-in-the-door candidate.
3. Once on the job, be proactive and take the initiative. Be able to anticipate the next steps. Think to yourself, “He asked for X for this meeting. I’m going to have to do Y and then Z after that.” Alexa says if employees can’t think to themselves, “I know what happens next, I know how to stay ahead of the game,” and then act upon those instincts, it will prevent them from advancing.
Listening to Alexa share her corporate recruiting experience, I can see how the checklisted childhood might have been helpful for a third grader, or even seventh, but if we’ve led them to believe someone will always do the grunt work and will always provide the next steps for them, we’ve basically led them astray. Reading my mind, Alexa adds, “We teach our kids to wait for cues. To wait for instruction. That’s what keeps them from having the type of mind-set employers want to see.”
HARD WORK AT HOME LEADS TO PROMOTIONS IN THE WORKPLACE
Hannah is a twenty-five-year-old Millennial who has exactly the mind-set employers want to see. She works as a senior project manager at a Texas financial services firm where she’s been promoted a number of times in the few short years since she earned her political science degree from Duke.
“I didn’t realize how differently I was raised until I got to college,” she tells me.15 She is the eldest of three kids in an affluent Bay Area family where much could have been done for her but wasn’t. “My parents raised me and my siblings to be very independent. They gave us many chores and reinforced the value of doing things by yourself and not getting help all the time.” In college Hannah saw students whose parents “babied them” by flying in to decorate their kid’s college apartments, buy them groceries, and do their laundry.
During her senior year at Duke, when she started going through the job application process, she narrowed her focus to companies that are big sports sponsors and “decided I would be willing to do anything there.” Except for showing her parents her résumé, “I went through the process on my own, and got the job on my own merits.” A number of Hannah’s friends took for granted that they’d get a job through their parents’ connections. “In today’s economy there’s nothing wrong with that, but I really valued getting a job on my own, being successful on my own, paying all my bills from the beginning.” Her voice brims with confidence as she says this. “In contrast, a lot of my friends’ parents pay their rent and their car insurance, and so they stay in this comfort zone of halfway to adult but not having to deal with what’s stressful or hard about being an adult.”
Hannah knows being “halfway to adult” doesn’t bode well in the workplace. “If you start to behave in ways that are consistent with the stereotypes about Millennials, it will impede your progress at work. Being hand-held as a kid and having entitlement in the workplace tend to go hand in hand. If a kid wasn’t forced to do chores or their parents helped them with anything that was hard, the workplace may be the first time they’ve had to deal with that.”
I ask Hannah about the chores she had to do as a kid and she rattles off a list: “Making our beds every day; putting away our toys, books, and clean laundry; helping do the dishes and make dinner; helping with laundry; weeding and watering plants and helping with gardening; running errands for my mom (once I could drive); washing the windows; general spring cleaning; sweeping out the storage area; dusting our baseboards; and cleaning the cars.”
Hannah continues, “The opportunity to rise to the occasion and prove yourself to managers and coworkers is there, but I’ve seen people go the other route.” Some of her friends have “gone the other route” and are on their third jobs after only eighteen months out of college. “They quit because they didn’t love it. They can’t grasp the concept that their first job is entry level and the purpose is to learn. It can force you to step up, or you can have parents who continue to support you by helping with bills as you job hop.”
“I have a coworker, my age, who has a super-inflated sense of self, doesn’t work very hard, delegates a lot, and thinks her current role is a little beneath her. When the promotion cycle came up, she was shocked not to get promoted. For a week or two after not getting the promotion, she left work at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m., sulking. She’s tarnished herself in her manager’s eyes because she sulks like a little child instead of working hard. Her parents humor this behavior. They tell her, ‘Oh, if you don’t get what you want, you can just quit.’ She never learned to throw herself into her work. Her parents have always told her how great, amazing, and awesome she is. It totally colors her ability to honestly assess herself vis-à-vis her peers.”
While Hannah’s coworker is sulking around the office, Hannah continues to get more responsibility. Often she’s asked to sit in on interviews. The company is trying to screen for someone who knows what she wants and is willing to work hard to get it; what they want is another Hannah.