Transcript
A (0:00)
Older generations have been complaining about younger generations for all of recorded history. Today is no different. And I often hear leaders struggling with motivating their younger employees. In this episode, the most recent research and practice for what actually works. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 775, produced by Innovate, Learning, Maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. One inflection point that is true for almost every leader is not just the performance that they are being mindful of in the organization, but how do you mentor others to be able to perform well, to be able to be great contributors in the organization? And a constant question that I get is how do I do that better for the youngest employees? The folks may be coming into their career in their first few years of their career, and how do I do that effectively today? An expert who's going to help us to really be more effective at being able to motivate the young people in our organization. But by the way, the principals, as probably won't be a surprise, I think, are broadly applicable to so many of us. I'm pleased to introduce David Yeager. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the co founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research conducted with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton, on short but powerful interventions that influence adolescent behaviors such as motivation, engagement, healthy eating, bullying, stress, mental health, and more. He's the author of 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People. David, what a pleasure to have you on.
B (1:57)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
A (1:58)
There's a line in the book, a phrase, rather you repeat a bunch of times. You often put it in quotes. And it's one that we have heard so many times from so many different people. And the phrase is kids these days of often starting with a conversation of on a complaint about this generation just doesn't show up with the same level of motivation, intention, responsibility that I did in my generation. And you have been in the research on this more so than probably anyone else I've talked to. Are kids these days really that different than prior generations or is this just one of those, like, human things that we just like to complain about the generation that's behind us?
B (2:44)
Yeah, that's a great question. First, I would say that it's not coming from nowhere so there's a reason why so many managers are saying young people are different, and yet there's also a whole narrative that is not quite accurate. So let me just challenge a little bit of the conventional wisdom and then describe what the science is saying is legitimately different, please. So in general, when adults complain about young people, it's often more about them and their how they have developed and grown up and less about young people. And people don't like hearing that. But just to convince you of that, there are records of older generations complaining about the moral decline of the next generation. They don't work hard, they don't have self control, they're impulsive or whatever for as long as human beings have been writing things down. So Aristotle complained about this. It's like in Shakespeare, in Freud. Right. And what often seems like a decay or decline in the next generation is really the fact that we are older than we were earlier. And so most adults look back on their choices they made when they were young as kind of youthful indiscretions or kind of fun ways of gaming the system. And then when young people do the exact same behaviors, then we think, oh, society's going to hell in a handbasket. And there's a great psychologist at Harvard who is named Dan Gilbert and his graduate student. They published a paper on this. And they found that in national surveys, every single generation, for as long as, as we have been measuring this kind of thing for about 70 years in the U.S. every generation thinks the next generation is worse off. Okay, so why is that the case? You know, a lot of times what's happening is if you're a leader and a manager, then you have succeeded in whatever organization or role you've been a part of. But the people you're supervising are made up of people who might succeed and be promoted and who might not. And so on average, the majority of people are going to be people who have different goals, different skills, different ambitions, different desires. And so you're going to see a lot of things that are different from how you would have approached the same situation simply by virtue of the fact that these are different kinds of people. So one way to drive this home is I often say, you know, professors in college complain about the new crop of freshmen all the time. These kids don't work or they don't love reading long books anymore. And, and it's like, look, if you're a professor, you're the kind of person who finished school and then never left school. That's how much you love school. You're like, give me more school, and then I'm going to get a job and stay in school forever.
