The intention of this article is to shed some light on all current leaders who are wondering how to manage young employees, avoiding the difficulties that arise on a daily basis such as resignation from work, demotivation and lack of commitment.
Situation photo
The experience gathered during almost 10 years in consulting activities led me to contact an extremely diverse spectrum of agents.
Namely: small, medium merchants; heads of Universities and non-profit entities; and directors of major companies in terms of employee size and turnover.
And if a common point can be found for all of them, it is related to the difficulty that arose after the moment of incorporating a young collaborator.
The story has similar forms. "They don't last in the job"; "They want to be Managers right away"; "They can't stand the pressures", just to cite the most used expressions.
Given this, psychology proposes an approach to this problem, reserving the name "Generation Y" for people who currently range from approximately 18 to 28 years old. From there, it places global traits and characteristics in order to allow effective leader action on them.
My proposal will be somewhat different. Taking some concepts from psychoanalysis, the intention is to give more power to the established solutions.
Backing the way
In the first place, and without the intention of arguing with other authors, the psychoanalytic point of view is to avoid immediate classifications, which crystallize a subject and frame it in general coordinates, paying special attention to each collaborator in his particularity. That is to say, psychoanalysis proposes the good to say opposing the segregation that begins with naming, classifying or diagnosing with speed.
Continuing with this, it is valid to rescue that in the same nomenclature of “Generation Y” is the enigma involved, not being the homophony between “Y” and “Why? (why?)".
In daily practice we find two recurring situations:
- Young people with a defiant attitude, autonomous, individualistic, with little adherence to norms and high creative capacity. Young people with no ideals, confusion about their own goals, anhedonia or lack of pleasure in activities, tedium and a feeling of constant reluctance.
According to current psychology, the first group is the complex. However, the panorama in Argentina is more linked to the second, and it is precisely the characteristics mentioned in it that most entrepreneurs deny.
So, I'm going to focus on this point.
Steps to understand the phenomenon
The leader must be able to think that the circumstance in which a young person takes a first job brings into play a dynamic that could be called a desire crisis: the young person until now found stability in the desire of his parents, being “children of " Now, in and with work, he will have to take charge of his own words and actions, taking responsibility for them.
Thus, there are subjects who reveal a failed or delayed passage to adulthood; and that they make symptoms in the labor framework such as demotivation or untimely abandonment of the organization.
Winnicott in "The Anti-Social Tendency", 1956 article, mentions that some young people "… speak bitterly of their social inability and personal failure. They consider that they have not inherited some gifts to bear the demands and responsibilities of the world of the elderly… ”.
In the same vein, Vilá states that “The nonconformity of the modern adolescent, his life project of becoming an inserted person at the time, has given way to the young man who is regularly dissatisfied and wandering with a DIY biography made based on working in a continuous present ”.
Lacan taught the Name of the Father function as one capable of separating the child from maternal desire, through prohibitions and empowerments. Through interdictions but also permits. I understand that this can be useful to mark the acts of the Leader as one who can be placed in the function of separation between Desires of the Parents and Desire of the Subject. If this does not happen, the behaviors that so disturb the leaders-entrepreneurs will appear.
The Leader's Ethical Position
Classical theory teaches that Authority is not the same as Power. The first depends on the position, belonging to it; and the second is related to the person.
Thus, in companies we find people with authority and without power (formal hierarchies not legitimized by collaborators); and also the opposite, subjects with power but without authority (for example, the cases of informal leaders).
Then, it becomes essential to articulate both concepts, making them truly effective in practice.
Above said that young people, entering the workplace, go through a crisis of their desire, with some confusion about what they really want for themselves.
This is where the Leader's position takes on fundamental relevance and significance.
If he thinks that it will be only by way of punishment the way in which the young man must adapt to the new rules, he will find null results. Void because punishment does not have, today, the effects of yesteryear. The young man disbelieves in authority figures as possessors of punitive capacity. And he sees it not only in its leaders, but also in the degradation and frank cracking of social and political institutions. In other words, the young man is incapable of granting authority to his bosses, because he supposes that he does not deserve it or does not have it directly.
Therefore, it is necessary to anchor the power of new personnel management in another area. In which it places the Leader in the ethical position of the Facilitator. The authority taken in these terms will cause the young person to consent to it, instead of languidly submitting to it.
"It takes an adult who engages in counseling through an instrument, pragmatic and flexible authority, who can provide elements for each to do their own work, find their own subject that is a way of working on their symptoms."
Today's young people border on an ideal of completeness. No division. Of broken bond with the Other capable of sustaining it. That goes a long way toward explaining your lack of commitment at work and any other meaningful activity.
The Leader as Facilitator must encourage the involvement of these newly entered personnel through accompaniment that has listening as the main tool; and their subsequent call to choose and take responsibility for these decisions.
And it will be a risky Leader who abandons the function of answering everything and places himself in the place of ignorance and the generation of questions in the new employee. "For the behavior to be an enigma it has to (…) be read as such by an adult."
Furthermore: for this to work the Leader should not apply it to recipe mode. That is, not to take it alone as a technique comparable to the Socratic one.
In order to achieve the expected results and that the young person can be guided by the question rather than by the answer, it will be the Leader himself who has taken this for himself before. Specifically, no one is capable of transmitting the passion for an activity, if they were not questioned about it before.
And continuing with this, today there are many adults who disbelieve, also, of authority and position themselves in the family environment more as brothers than as parents, ignoring the harmful effect for any subject that implies the lack of referents, ideals, crosshairs or whatever you want to name them. This leads us to think that the obstacles to relate to authority tend to be repeated by young people, making them symptoms through their tedium, their lack of desire and difficulties to insert and sustain themselves in the workplace.
Preliminary conclusions
In this time of anxiety disorders, magical medications, serotonin dosages, technological gagdets and deterioration of those venerable images that guaranteed to a certain extent the confidence in a superior entity (Governments; Justice; Democracy; Parents, among others) psychoanalysis has things to contribute.
And it is in the workplace that it is possible to understand this contemporary symptom of youth in order to deal with it, to be aware of its presence and, why not, to diminish its appearance.
It is good that current leaders give themselves the opportunity to think that there are other solutions than those advocated by those who are part of and cause of the analyzed problem.
Of course it is a risky bet. But it is known that risk taking is a condition of existence for every leader.
