If You "Understand" Millennials, It's Time To Reconnect Your Brain

Oddly enough, the Millennial Generation, also referred to as Gen-Y, is not so well defined, even when it comes to the boundaries for who fits and who doesn't. One common range runs from 1980-2000 although some people use a narrower birth band. Think you know what Millennials are like? Let's take a look.

Surveying The Experts On The Millennium Generation

Jean Twenge, in a 2007 book, called them the ME Generation, claiming this generation is riddled with Narcissism.
Emily Jarvis, in 2012, characterized Millennials as:

Millennials -- they are often motivated, pushy, impatient and innovative -- they want change and they want it now. 

Fellow author, Susan Heathfield writes about Millennials:

• Millennials want to look up to you, learn from you, and receive daily feedback from you. They want "in" on the whole picture and to know the scoop.
• Millennials are ready to take on the world. Their parents told them they can do it - they can.
• They are used to working in groups and teams. In contrast to the lone ranger attitude of earlier generations, millennials actually believe a team can accomplish more and better - they've experienced team success.
• Your millennial employees are used to loving parents who have scheduled their lives around the activities and events of their children.
• Boring is bad. They seek ever-changing tasks within their work. What's happening next is their mantra. Don't bore them, ignore them, or trivialize their contribution.
• Millennial employees are multi-taskers on a scale you've never seen before. Multiple tasks don't phase them. Talk on the phone while doing email and answering multiple instant messages - yes! (Ed. This despite the fact that research has shown that human beings are not capable of true multi-tasking).
• Your millennials are used to cramming their lives with multiple activities. They may play on sports teams, walk for multiple causes, spend time as fans at company sports leagues, and spend lots of time with family and friends. They work hard, but they are not into the sixty hour work weeks defined by the Baby Boomers
• Millennials want to enjoy their work. They want to enjoy their workplace.

Actually, one thing about descriptions about Millennials, or for that matter, any generation, is that it's a lot like Alice's Restaurant, from the 60'. You can get everything you want at Alice's Restaurant...

Now, Re-Connect Your Brain

Before you take any characterizations of this generation as true, here are a few things to think about:

If we use the boundaries of 1980 and 2000 as the outer limits for this generation, it includes people who are currently twelve years old and people who are thirty-two years old. If you take one hundred Gen-Y twelve year olds, and one hundred thirty-two year old Gen-Y's, will the twelve year old resemble each other or will they resemble the thirty-two year olds?

Will you find obvious similarities between the two groups, compared with similarities if you compare either of them to different generations - let's say a group of people aged fifteen (from a later generation) or people aged thirty-seven (from an earlier generation?

Or will you find that the differences between the twelve year olds and the thirty two year olds, both part of the Millennial generation, are so huge that there's no way they resemble each other in terms of many of the characteristics attributed to the generation?

The answer is obvious. Twelve year olds have almost no resemblance to their older Millennials. They don't look the same, or talk the same, or prefer the same things, or behave the same, even though they are supposed to share all the characteristics of the generation.

Maybe we're expecting too much. Since the birth year boundaries are debatable, let's make the range smaller. Let's take 1985-2000 (if we change the 2000 boundary, we no longer have a millennial group, so we'll leave that constant).

Anything different if we compare fifteen year olds to thirty-two year olds? No. The younger millennials show almost no obvious resemblances to their other generation brothers and sisters.

So, What Do We Know?

When it comes to generations, we know a lot less than we think, both collectively, and as individuals, yet we continue to act as if the categories we use (generational names) have both truth value, and practical value in guiding our behavior (see Susan Heathfield's article on managing Millennials).

Part of the problem is obviously that the categories are much too large. In our examples above, we see that Millennials are somewhere between twelve and thirty-two years old, and with an age range that large, the affects of age, maturation, and life stage render any generalizations incorrect, but worse, misleading.

We know, for example, from the work of David Foot, author of Boom, Bust, Echo, that where people are in terms of their life stage (first child birth, child rearing, student, buying first house, etc) has far more influence on what people believe and how they behave than what generation they are part of. So, if you compare thirty year olds from today, to thirty year olds from twenty five years ago (from another generation), you'll find that even though they come from different generations they are more similar to each other than are their "generational brothers and sisters" who are in different life stages and different ages.

Seniors from ANY generation are more risk averse, politically conservative, and hesitant to embrace change than teenagers, REGARDLESS of what generations they are part of.

It's not generational labels that matter. It's life experience and stage of life, and that renders generational stereotyping useless. That's not to say that the life experiences of a generation born in 1940 are the same as those for people born in 1985. Wars, technology changes, culture and environment DO affect people who live in different times. Shared experiences of  "generations" are part of the equation for understanding people, when the experiences and events are extreme, and particularly traumatic (e.g. wars, great depressions). Less traumatic events, not so much..

For example, if you look at people who have escaped war zones (i.e. Vietnamese refugees, refugees from WW I and WW 2, you'll find they have some similar traits (e.g. sense of scarcity, distrust of governments), but that those commonalities have nothing to do with generations. People who escaped death by trekking across Europe to safety in WW1 will share some traits with those who did the same thing in WW2, despite the fact that they are not part of the same generation.

People who have only rudimentary education (i.e. grade 3 or 4) will share many characteristics regardless of when they were born, or WHY they did not receive more education.

What Do You Think Now?

Do you still really understand Millennials? Does it still make sense to use generational labels to classify people, or is this starting to sound like many other stereotyping systems about race, or gender, or even culture?

Why do YOU use generational stereotypes? Do they still make sense?