If you are around forty or fifty years of age, and you have to lead people under twenty-five, it is good that you read the lines that follow.
In my experience as an organizational psychologist, in recent years I have noticed a certain difficulty for companies when it comes to retaining and retaining these people.
There is no doubt that high turnover in the workforce is a contemporary phenomenon, and it is achieving critical dominance over others. Successive attempts by serious organizations to seduce are being unsuccessful, and they are not reaching the expected results. " Kids don't last, " many businessmen say, disappointed.
What to do in this context?
It is undeniable that we are witnessing a paradigm shift and this imposes a clear need to actively adapt to them. As an example, I mention those of a weak identification with any company; responsibility for results and not for hours; elusive motivation (somewhat disjointed from remuneration), among others. And of all of them, I am interested in placing myself particularly in one, which I consider of fundamental relevance for the object of study in question, and that is the Career Plan.
One of the main stumbling blocks that leaders go through today is the difficulty in thinking that these Plans do not bear the least relationship with their predecessors. Thus, they fall into identifications with young personnel that are systematically denied by reality. In this sense, the comparison heard so many times of: " At his age I could endure anything in order to keep and grow in employment."
Today there is no longer the option of a Career Plan, but we must start thinking about Career Plans. And this does not just imply a meaningless plurality. On the contrary, understanding this concept in all its depth will allow us to be able to do something with this circumstance, assuming an active and intelligent position.
My hypothesis consists in establishing that a young person glimpses his stay as a collaborator in a company, in a period no longer than three years. This amounts to urging all those responsible for its development, to conform to this logic, and begin to act accordingly. For example, to design their trajectory in a single position within the organization in the aforementioned period.
The generation born in the nineties does not consider a single Career Plan, and therefore, does not believe it is possible to belong to a company for a long time, much less retire from it.
One of the obsolete paradigms today is one that involved an extensive journey in the same firm. Today's is that the Career Plan is personal. And in that sense, capable of being thought and designed according to each person. Each young man in her particularity is her main manager. And the future is seen, from their point of view, as something difficult to imagine. Almost like an entelechy, whose correlate with concrete reality does not merit a step to the limit. Specifically, the vision of the present and the here-now is one of the main nodes of the youthful mind. And this explains the difficulty in seeing themselves under the same roof for life. They assume that the possibilities are endless, and that they are well worth experiencing.
It is not worth it, a young man would say, to stay in the same company for a long time, because it would be too boring. There is something like a quasi-prison conception, imagined as a limit to a supposed freedom.
In the globalized reality that we are immersed in, numerous gadgets are offered, mostly technological, which lead, on the one hand, to believe in the durability of everything, and on the other, in the certain chance of a permanent change capable of providing significant improvements either in the way of life or relevant aspects of one's existence.
This is the situation, and it corresponds to catch up from a leading place, different from that of resignation. I advocate that once these logics are understood, we can take charge of them, rather than claiming an abrupt modification in them, that they surreptitiously imply the longing for an idealized state of past things. It's about avoiding nostalgia for bygone times and getting our young employees to respond not only to our expectations, but to theirs as well.
