Context Anyone?

Text posted Thursday, June 28, 2012
The following story was told to me by a senior executive in a large automobile parts supply company: ”We were downsizing the organization, but we were trying to do it through controlled attrition. So we were offering buyouts for senior people in certain categories who were willing and able to leave the company inside of twelve months. When the younger people got wind of this, we were inundated with requests from them. They wanted to know why they were not being offered the buyout. I fielded some of these requests myself so I had a chance to say, ’But you are ineligible.’ They would say, ’Why?’ I’d say, ’You’ve been here less than a year.’ And they would say, ’So?’ They honestly didn’t get why they were in a different position from the employees who had been here for twenty or thirty years.”

Still, Gen Yers’ lack of context seems to stem from more than just youth and inexperience. “When I was young and inexperienced,” said a fifty-something sales manager in a pharmaceutical company, ”I may have been cocky, but I knew age and experience mattered and I knew I didn’t have either. Recently I set this new guy up with some paperwork. When I came back a few hours later to check on him, he was gone. I looked across the hallway and realized he had set himself up in a different cube than the one I put him in. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me that he liked the other cube better. Of course, you like that one better. The other one is bigger, has a window, and a bigger desk. That’s why it goes to someone who’s been here more than six hours. It’s like they don’t even realize that some of us have been working here since they were in diapers. They don’t see it, or they just don’t see why it matters.”

As the sales manager for the pharmaceutical company put it, ”Nobody has ever said to them, ’Because I said so!’ It’s like they exist in a vacuum. Nobody has ever pulled them aside and said to them, ’Look, we’ve been at this for a long time. This is how we do things around here. You’ve just arrived. This is where you fit in to our picture.’”

Stay strong!
Bruce