It is axiomatic these days that workplace productivity must increase. And most strategies for driving these increases focus on business processes, technological efficiencies, and acute financial management. I believe that an equally impactful strategy would involve an additional focus on the issue of relationship management within organizations. Draining and underdeveloped workplace relationships clearly erode productivity and undermine morale. And ironically, those relationships that employees grumble and complain the most about are least addressed by the leadership of most organizations. One of these, most fraught with opportunities for productive change, is the relationship between middle-aged supervisors and young, entry level workers.

The Problem
The gap between managers/supervisors who have been historically trained and rewarded for “supervising” employees, and an entry level workforce that is increasingly unreceptive at best, and hostile at worst, to being “supervised” is profound and destructive.
The gap is manifested by complaints from managers/supervisors that the workforce is unreliable, undependable, and generally difficult to deal with. What we hear most often from supervisors is the lament that they feel like babysitters, not managers.
From the workers’ side, we hear that their supervisors are mean, uncaring, and that they act like petty dictators. What they often add is that they feel like the people they work for don’t treat them like human beings.
The result, in the workplace, is relationships that are tolerated by both parties, or in less favorable environments, involve subtle sabotage and a range of passive-aggressive behaviors. We need not settle for any of this.

The Causes
With some exceptions, there are a number of cultural factors that have created the dysfunctional aspects of this supervisor-worker relationship.
Many managers and supervisors working today were raised, trained, and rewarded for doing what they were told to do, not questioning their “orders,” and focusing their work on task accomplishment. They had, and have an intrinsic respect for authority and are baffled and turned off by people who don’t. Most significantly, though, they were
taught early in their lives (with much reinforcement later in life) that how they felt about what they were told to do was of little or no importance in the big scheme of work and life.

A whole lot of young entry level workers could just as well come from another galaxy. They have very little intrinsic respect for authority (it has to be earned, which irritates a lot of their supervisors; they rile against being “ordered” to do something; and they want to be related to as more than a cog in the machinery. Though they rarely articulate it this way, what they want is to have their feelings acknowledged. And what they are looking for is a highly reciprocal relationship on a person-to-person level. Their supervisors don’t quite know what to make of this, since their paradigm for work (and often personal) relationships is a one-way, single-channel interaction dictated by the party invested with control and authority.

The young, entry level worker has been raised in a culture much more attentive to feelings and self-information than their supervisor and much more sensitive and reactive to mechanical, impersonal interactions. They have also experienced significant delays in development and maturation caused by either controlling or chaotic families (both of which undermine self-esteem, self-initiation, and self-responsibility), or the confluence of education, affluence, and technology; or both factors. The result is that all developmental stages are pushed back by about ten years. Accordingly, adolescence now occurs between 20 and 30 years old, not between 12 and 19. This delay simply exacerbates the irritation factor between the worker and the manager.

Understanding your coworkers can enable you to establish a good working environment that is a win-win situation.