I attended a number of discussions on Generation Y. The people born during the 1980s and early 1990s are called Generation Y. 

In my opinion, the Generation Y arrived with the emergence of technology era. They are well versed with technology.  Today, we are feeling a bit uncomfortable with attitudes and aspirations of Gen Y! 

I guess our seniors must have experienced the same thing we when started working.

Let's try to discuss top three aspects on grooming our next generation.

1. First Seek to Understand

Without building a deeper understanding, it’s impossible to do anything significant.  We must first make a genuine effort to learning about our next generation. They have been brought up in a world characterized by rapid and significant changes. These changes include information management, technology, new products and gadgets. They want everything at the click of button. 

However, they have stronger survival skills. Irrespective of culture and location, they can adapt themselves in different many jobs.

They have many career opportunities. In addition, they are ready to explore newer avenues.

One of my Generation Y friends took admission to a leading B School. I congratulated him for a great future ahead. After three months, I was surprised to know that he left the college. Then, he started his own company. He worked hard and made his venture successful.

Similarly, another friend was working in a company. He was a joined the company as a fresher. After a few days, my friend resigned. I tried to counsel him. My friend left the company because he was not satisfied with his job and the progress of his company. 

Let me share a small story here. I was responsible for development of few "young guns", as I prefer calling them. When I started investing more time with them, I learnt many lessons. Once, we were hiring talented applicants for our company but the process of recruitment was not designed in tune with the candidates. Unfortunately, we were experiencing high attrition levels. In some of the cases, they were leaving us even before completing the training period. What a sad state of affair? We were invested dollars for hiring and training. But we failed to retain them. As shared in my earlier articles, it is the responsibility of ‘leaders to own and transform the situations.’

We worked on our end to end to processes. Made our approach more people centric, changed recruitment strategy, designed escalation mechanisms, reinforced regular and structured coaching sessions and actively sought feedbacks. However, we worked harder as an amazing team to bridge gap between their expectation and our delivery.

We could cut down attritions to near zero levels while improving quality of our developmental efforts. Our efforts were truly rewarded, when our young guns started giving positive recommendations and became active mentors for next batches. They became our true brand ambassadors!

2. Daily Management for a Sustained Success

Many of us have achieved successes in our own ways. Some of us took longer time to get the coveted roles in our organizations. Let's agree on one aspect, Generation Y is smarter than us. This is indeed a great attribute. But it put more pressure on us. We need to challenge and give them more exciting assignments.

As shared earlier, during our talent management experiences, we started assigning many high impact projects to our young guns. Many projects were done outstandingly good. They gave us pleasant surprises by solving several complex business problems.

While it's good to assign projects, Generation Y needs a bit of handholding and coaching. And that's the job of leaders for setting their younger team members for bigger success. They will need our inputs on handling difficult people and complex situations. Many at times, they may end up committing few mistakes. In one situation one lady wrote, long e-mails regarding her placement to a few seniors. Issue was simple till the time e-mail was exchanged. After painful 3 months, the issue got sorted out. In another case, a gentleman was flaunting his superior financial status to many people. That started comparison syndrome and he ended up losing support of people. 

3. Campus to Corporate Transition, Make It First Time Right

Our young guns, bring enormous energy, knowledge at the workplace. During my many reviews, I realized that they needed few structured inputs on company culture, sensitives and way of working. We designed a good training program with many interesting case studies and role plays. That program added enormous value to them. We have been able to prepare them for a transition before they take a plunge into their profession. While many of us think that the best development happens through hands on experience, an ideal mix of 70:20:10 viz. Hands on experience: Regular Coaching: Structured Training, adds more value to any development effort. It's always better to proactively prepare our Generation Y, instead of leaving them to struggle on their own. Our successful and sustainable future depends on our immense abilities to groom Generation Y! Let's make generation more successful than us!

By Amit kaushal