June 4, 2009
The care and feeding of your sweeping generalizations
At the place where I work we get a monthly wellness newsletter. It’s published by the Wellness Council of America, and sometimes its advice strikes me as relevant and helpful, if not necessarily to me then to someone who has kids, is nearing retirement, etc. Other times, though… mmm, not so much. This month, though, pretty much took the cake. The back page features a pair of articles on “GenXers”: Working with Members of Generation X and The Life and Times of a GenXer. These caught my eye, being myself a member of Generation X, at least according to some measures (including the one used in these articles, which measure Gen X as folks born 1965-1980). And, um… wow.
First of all: o hai, welcome to the mid-nineties! Seriously — I’m pushing thirty here, and I’m on the very tail end of Gen X. If people haven’t yet figured out how to work with people my age and up to fifteen years older, then I think maybe they’re doing something wrong.
Second, I couldn’t help but feel sort of bemusedly insulted by some of these tips:
- GenXers are terrific multi-taskers and used to a lot of stimuli. Keep them motivated by providing an environment in which they are challenged, and have opportunities to grow, and projects and assignments to keep them interested.
- Avoid corporate jargon and buzzwords, and talk in short “sound bytes” to keep a GenXer’s attention. Compose e-mail messages using short, concise wording when you communicate with a GenXer. Share information with them often and especially after an important event. Ask for their feedback and then listen to them—you might learn something!
- Keep meetings on track and focused. GenXers may become bored in meetings in which too much discussion precedes final decisions.
- GenXers are independent and require space. Don’t micromanage, but instead, give basic directions and then allow them to figure out the best way to get results.
- Reminiscing about 60-hour work weeks and wondering why younger staffers hit the door at 5 p.m.? Keep in mind that GenXers value a healthy work-life balance, and won’t spend as many hours in the office. Don’t try to force feed your values onto members of another generation.
Don’t get me wrong: I do see some of myself, some of my friends, and some of my coworkers (especially, in fact, those from Gen Y/the Baby Boom Echo/whatever it is we’re calling it these days) in these tips. But, come on — we’re adults; this makes us sound like we’re grade schoolers with short attention spans! (And really, isn’t “keep meetings on track and focused” good advice for the workplace regardless of what generation one’s dealing with?) Also, overgeneralized much?
Ah well — it made me chuckle, anyway…
In and on the news…
So much has happened lately: the issues of torture and the abuse of detainees continue to rear their ugly heads. President Obama nominated Justice Sotomayor for the Supreme Court (and the wingnuts, predictably, went completely batshit) on the same day the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. Dr. George Tiller was murdered. On all of these subjects I tend to find myself vacillating between being at a complete loss for words and babbling incoherently, and ultimately I feel like there’s really nothing I can say that others haven’t already said better. I’m not a journalist; I need time to let things stew before I can adequately articulate my thoughts and feelings. To wit, when Evil Bender told me on Sunday that Dr. Tiller had been murdered, first I said, “No,” partly disbelieving him entirely and partly hoping Tiller had been shot and rushed to the hospital and had been thought to be dead but would actually turn out to be alive. My next response was to tear up and say, “Motherfucker.” Neither word makes for a particularly substantive blog post.
Okay, so why am I going into this now? Well, something goofy came across my desk this morning that I thought would make for a nice lighter-side post, but I was concerned that without having at least acknowledged the other things going on in the country these days, it would come off as insensitive (at the least) and/or as if I’d been living under a rock. So. There we are.
Fucking-A, dude.
I am the Lizard Queen! 