How to manage Gen Z | Heather Elkington | TEDxDoncaster

lazy entitled no commitment no work ethic when I surveyed a 100,000 managers across the globe these were all the answers to the same question what do you think of your genz team members JZ born between 1996 and 2012 they are the digital natives Trends Setters are future politicians Future Leaders and they currently make up about 30% of our Workforce that number is going to increase every single year for the next 20 years but one thing that we can all agree on is how we how we manage gen Z hasn't quite been figured out yet but

to understand what these people need from their workplace we must first understand the world that they were brought up in as of today on average we spend seven hours a day on our phone just let that sit for a second 7 hours every single day social media filters unrealistic expectations for our life for the the world that we live in this is the way Jen Z were brought up authenticity really took a back seat but what that really means is jenzie can smell your BS from a mile off and then transparency we've been told to

dress a certain way look a certain way act a certain way at school and at work we hide our profit and loss from our employees we hide salaries from job ads everything we have been used to in the workplace is in is untransparent and this lack of transparency doesn't just mean things like pay inequality it also means jz's trust in their workplaces has been completely diminished when they enter the workplace they start with a complete lack of trust in its leaders and in its businesses but to be fair to us trying to figure out how

to keep gen Z engaged challenged and happy at work isn't for lack of trying we have tried open plan offices we have tried unlimited holidays we've tried work from home and then don't work from home but open plan offices although it sounded fun like the human connection sat talking to your work bestie all day what we realized is people were just distracted and I've worked in open plan offices and it was always really diffult to actually get any work done and whilst it seemed fun everyone in my team at the time would just go and

hide off in meeting rooms because they wanted to have some peace and quiet unlimited holidays some of the most Progressive companies in Silicon Valley San Francisco tried giving their whole team unlimited holidays take as many as you want but all it meant in reality was people didn't feel entitled to them so they didn't take any holidays whatsoever and nothing has had quite as much impact on our workplaces today than the global experiment that we all took part in which was the covid pandemic all the jobs we used to think had to be sat chained to

a desk behind a computer screen we have come to realize we can do almost all of them just as well from home so whatever your opinion on jenz and the world they've grown up in we can all agree we haven't quite figured out how to manag them yet the supply of management we have today versus the demand and expectations of gen Z for leadership is so far apart and he's getting further and further apart by the day so what do we do how do we catch up how do we close the gap about eight years

ago to the day I graduated from one of the top business schools in the country did a business management degree now I don't have a photo of me graduating because it was on my 21st birthday so I didn't go priorities much to my mom's dismay there but let's just pretend that's me graduated from one of the top business schools in the country with one of those fancy pieces of paper so and I I did a business management degree so we were taught how to manage teams how to manage businesses how to manage finances Etc so

when I landed my first proper job out of uni managing a team of eight people on one of the busiest shop floors in the world hars what could possibly go wrong I knew everything I'd read every single book I'd sat in every single lecture theater and I'd listen to every single Professor tell me everything there was to know about management right but sadly all those outdated management theories didn't help me much on the ground and I was a crappy manager I avoided difficult conversations I avoided giving people honest feedback I was ultimately just a crappy

manager and i' never ever felt good enough to lead a team until one day sorry got to bit wrong I never ever felt good enough to lead a team but over the next five years my career was a little bit of a strange and unusual an unusual one I moved into a startup in the tech world I was a second member of team I was a second member of the team and over the next three years we grew and grew into a multi-million pound company I went from executive assistant to marketing assistant to marketing manager

to operations director and eventually we sold that company to 2 billion pound corporate and now when we sold the company I went from operations director in a very small team in a very small company to all of a sudden being operations director in a team with 11,000 people managing five different teams across the globe and it was a very different world with all that going on I still never felt good enough to lead a team until one day one of the senior managers in Learning and Development at that company came to me and she'd been

noticing that I was pioneering a new wave of leadership my gen Z team members were happy which was unheard of in corporate we did these like surveys across the company every quarter to understand how happy people were how fulfilled they were how challenged they were and the scores that I was getting were really really high and she'd said to me can you come and lead a workshop for some other senior managers on how on Earth we manage gen Z and I'm like but I don't know how to to do it myself I don't know what

I'm doing but I put one together five principles that I've been doing every single day been working towards that I didn't even kind of realize that I was doing and I started running these Workshops the response was just it was it was almost like pioneering this new wave of leadership that now we're in this remote first flexible first world with Gen Z coming up through the ranks people were thankful that we were making changes in management the first of those principles was transparency has anyone heard of Netflix yes one of the biggest companies in the

world 220 million subscribers 25 billion pounds in revenue and one of the co-founders and CEO of Netflix cited that the most important move they ever made in their culture so important that you wrote a book on it was this principle of opening the books opening the books for all of the thousands of their employees to see the financial data to see customers coming in customers coming out how marketing Works they essentially made the back end of their business so transparent that everyone in the business could make much better decisions with the with all the information

that they had and so when I read this a few years ago I put it into our business building what I called a stakeholder report so that the entire team could see what the money that was coming in the money that was going out the customers that were coming in the customers were coming out and ultim ultimately the team felt so much more empowered they felt like human beings contributors instead of cogs in a machine but transparency doesn't just have to be financial data transparency could be something as good as something as small as admitting

when you make a mistake or being honest about a certain piece of differ ult feedback the next principle is authenticity so remember when I said that gen Z can smell your BS from a mile off the managers that will win the managers that will build the best healthiest CH most fulfilled organizations today are those who will undo the fact that the world is so inauthentic the managers who are willing to drop the telephone voices drop the guards drop the barriers and be the most authentic version of themselves progression the only way we can be truly

satisfied and motivated at work is when we feel a sense of progression now the word motivation comes from an old Latin word which is motivus which literally means to move forward the only way truly we can feel motivated is if we are moving forward in something now ideally that would be our roles responsibilities salary maybe um where we are in the company but I appreciate that's not always possible so when that's not POS when that wasn't possible for me in my management role I would make sure the team were always moving forward in something else

like their skills the value that they bring to the world if I could ask them more questions to get to know them better to understand how I could help them progress further down the line next is elasticity so if I just cast your mind back to the work from home versus office we live today in something called the gig economy that means if you if your team if your team member wants to pick up a quick job on Uber if they want to sell something from their spare bedroom on Etsy if they want to sell

food on deliveroo if they want to rent out their spare room on Airbnb they can do so with such low barriers to entry we live in the gig economy and ultimately for businesses and for leaders what that means is our team don't need us that much anymore we don't rely on our full-time salary as much as we used to the world of Entre entrepreneurial opportunity exists like it never has before so when as businesses we start to put barriers and cages in place saying things like you must come into the office for 5 days a

week you must be here at 9:00 a.m. you must come and work behind a desk with a laptop with a computer our team will just Rebel because there is ultimately no need for them to be there they have other ways of making money we have to make our guidelines as elastic as possible we have to give people as much Freedom as we possibly can over their time over the tasks and how they complete them and then lastly is safety 50,000 years ago we relied on our tribe for safety to help keep us safe our tribe

and our instincts and only when we were safe could we focus on things like social interactions education new skills new tools WS Innovation only when we felt safe at the core now at work we have to make people feel innately safe as well safe to fail safe to experiment safe that they're not going to feel embarrassed because if we don't make them feel safe at the core they won't be able to make social connections they won't be able to upskill themselves they won't be able to find new tools and so if we don't make them

feel safe and I'm sure all of us have been to work and felt like this at some point you go in with your defenses so far up because all your trying to do is not rock the boat you're trying to keep yourself and your job safe so why would you innovate why would you come up with new ideas all you're trying to do is say the safest thing possible we can keep our team safe by so something that I used to do was um build failure into reporting so at the end of every month when

we have those um monthly metric reviews where we look at kpis have we hit them have we not build failure into that reporting how many experiments have around this month how many of them failed and how many of them succeeded another way I would make my team feel safe is just by being really vulnerable myself like admitting when I was wrong admitting when I was making a mistake being okay to feel embarrassed sometimes myself now the next time we think they're lazy entitled have no commitment and no work ethic I understand there is friction and

always has been between new generations and the way they've been brought up and the way they come into the workplace but the question I'll ask you is is this not the world that you want to for your kids your grandkids for your team for your workplace a world that relies on the principles of transparency authenticity progression elasticity and Safety Management right now is broken but if we commit to these principles we truly can make the world a better place to work for everyone thank you w