Sometimes, the Boss is Wrong

One of the frustrating things about Millennials is their assumption that their ideas are always welcome and their presumption that they are on the appropriate level for even offering them.

For example, my colleague and co-blogger Claire was just beginning a staff meeting with her Millennial worker bees about the process of advising students when one of them interrupted to say, “Wait, I have a better idea of how to do it.” Not exactly the way a supervisor wants to be presented with an idea, but, as it turned out, it was a better idea.

I’ve been surprised by the many ways Millennials can interpret a simple command. I call it “the Google effect.” Google provides lots of possible answers to a search command, some of which are just what you’re looking for and others not even close. I recently asked my Millennial students to research several people who were prominent in the field of public relations, including a man named Amos Kendall. The students who researched Kendall noted that he had served as Postmaster General, but failed to discover that he had been the first presidential press secretary, which, to me, was the most salient fact with regard to our Introduction to Public Relations class. Baby Boomer that I am, with the same assignment I would have been trying to figure out what was Amos Kendall’s relevance to the instructor–the “give the boss what he wants” approach.

These are the sorts of generational disconnects that drive people to read (and me to write) this blog.

It would be easy to rag on Millennials for their arrogance or for completely missing the point by offering their own “interpretations,” but that would be a disservice to their uniqueness as a generation. As Anna Quindlen once wrote, “This core generational belief, that there is usually more than one answer to any question, is threatening for their elders, raised on ‘because I said so’…Socratic is better than rote. Discussion teaches more than dictums. And paths set in stone are, we’ve discovered, often rocky as we move along them.”

Maybe we should follow Claire’s example and give their ideas, however they’re expressed, a chance or, at the very least, a hearing. Even if they’re occasionally wrong, at least one of us is going to learn something.

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