I wrote this book with a clear mission: To help leaders and managers—mostly those who are older and more experienced—bring out the best in their newest new young workforce.

Indeed, we have been hard at work on that mission since 1993. That’s when I first began the research that led to my first book, Managing Generation X, about bringing out the best in those of my own generation when we were the new young workforce. Today that mission continues, based on what is now decades of ongoing research tracking the attitudes and behavior of the ever-emerging ever-“newer” new young workforce.

We began tracking the Millennial Generation in the late 1990s. Ever since, we’ve kept our finger on the pulse of this very large and very important cohort through many twists and turns.

The publication of this revised and updated edition of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy is happening precisely because there have been so many twists and turns since the first edition of this book was published and also because our research about the Millennials has proven to be so accurate and because the best practices we’ve identified have proven to be so effective for leaders and managers. Leaders and managers of Millennials tell me every day that they have read and re-read this book to remind themselves about where young people today are really coming from and where they are going.

So many business leaders have told me that they buy this book for every leader they know who is managing young people today because the book is filled with practical step-by-step solutions for recruiting, on-boarding, training, performance-management, motivation, retention, and leadership development.

But it’s not just that. It’s also because so many of the other so-called “experts” on the Millennial Generation are still giving managers such bad advice—telling managers they should praise Millennials regardless of performance, reward them with trophies just for showing up, put hand-held devices in their hands and then leave them alone to manage themselves, let them come to work whenever they feel like it (and bring their dogs), eliminate managers, and try to make work “fun.” For 99 percent of managers, that advice is nonsense.

Millennials are NOT a bunch of disloyal, delicate, lazy, greedy, disrespectful, inappropriate slackers with short attention spans who only want to learn from computers, only want to communicate with hand-held devices, and won’t take “no” for an answer. Our research demonstrates clearly that Millennials want leaders who take them seriously at work, not leaders who try to humor them; leaders who set them up for success in the real world, not leaders who pretend they are succeeding no matter what they do.

I hear from managers on the front lines every day, and the results are clear. The real-world strategies and tactics in this book are working:

• Millennials need strong, highly engaged managers;
• Millennials need structure and boundaries;
• Millennials need guidance, direction, support, and coaching;
• Millennials need clear expectations;
• Millennials need to know that somebody is keeping score; and
• Millennials need to understand the quid pro quo of work every step of the way.

Yes, of course, Millennials want more money, more flexibility, more training, more interesting projects, and more exposure to decision-makers. Yes, they want more of everything! But they don’t expect any of it on a silver platter. They just want to know, every step of the way, “Exactly what do I need to do to earn that?!”

Every day, in our seminars, I teach leaders and managers the strategies and tactics in this book. Nonetheless, we are fighting against very strong widespread myths and a lot of bad management advice. This generation is still vastly misunderstood, and leaders and managers are still struggling to engage, motivate, and retain the best young workers today. Especially challenging are today’s newest new young workers—the second wave Millennials who are flooding into the workplace today.

Meet the Second-Wave Millennials—Introducing Generation Z

How do we recognize a new generation when we see one? Demographers, sociologists, historians, and other “experts” often debate this very question, just as experts differ about the exact parameters of each generation. The general consensus among demographers is that the great Millennial cohort begins with the birth year 1978. The working definition of the Millennials has been all those born between 1978 and 2000. But 22 years is simply too large a time frame to capture just one generation, especially in this era of constant change. Like the massive Baby Boom (1946–1964), the massive Millennial cohort simply must be treated as two distinct waves, coming of age in two very distinct decades. We refer to the first-wave Millennials (those born 1978 through 1989) as “Generation Y” and the second-wave Millennials (those born 1990 and 2000) as “Generation Z.”

Gen Zers were small children on 9/11/01. They graduated from high school and (maybe) went through college or university during the deepest and most protracted global recession since the Great Depression. They are entering the workforce in a “new normal” of permanently constrained resources, increased requirements placed on workers, and fewer promised rewards for nearly everyone. From day one, they find themselves bumping up against a crowded field of “career delayed” Gen Yers, not to mention plenty of even older workers who themselves may have faced their own career setbacks. Meanwhile, Gen Zers—unlike any other generation in history—can look forward to a lifetime of interdependency and competition with a rising global youth-tide from every corner of this ever-flattening world.

While the first-wave Millennials (Gen Y) were children of the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, the second-wave Millennials (Gen Z) were children of the war and uncertainty of the first decade of the 2000s. By now, all Millennials have been indelibly shaped by the 2000s and 2010s—an era of profound change and perpetual anxiety.

As a whole, the Millennials embody a continuation—and Generation Z, perhaps the culmination—of the larger historical forces driving the transformation in the workplace and the workforce since the early 1990s:

• Globalization;
• Constantly advancing technology;
• The painfully slow death of the myth of job security;
• The never-ending ever-expanding information fire hose;
• The accelerating pace of everything; and
• Increasing human diversity in every dimension.

In that sense there is great continuity in the long generational shift from the Boomers to X to Y to Z. After all, regardless of generation, we are all living through these historical changes together.

In another sense, Gen Zers represent a whole new breed of worker. Advances in information technology have made them the first generation of true “digital natives.” They learned to think, learn, and communicate in an environment defined by wireless Internet ubiquity, wholesale technology integration, infinite content, and immediacy. They are totally plugged in—through social media, search engines, and instant messaging—to each other as well as to anyone and everyone, and an infinite array of answers to any question at any time. As a result most Gen Zers grew up way too fast. That’s why they seem so precocious.

“So then,” managers often ask me, “why do they also seem so immature?”

Here’s why: At the same time, they have been insulated and scheduled and supported to a degree that no children ever have been before. Remember, pre-Boomer parenting was, in large part, focused on teaching children humility, diligence, grit, gratitude, and grace—what was always simply known as “building character” has become so out of the norm that it is resurfacing now in the form of a “movement” in educational circles. By the 1970s, of course, first-wave Boomer parents were busy awakening their consciousness and tended to be more hands-off as a rule—due in part to rising divorce rates, more dual working parent households, and a general increasing permissiveness—leading to the cliché about Gen Xers being a generation of under-supervised “latchkey kids.” But the major sea change came in the mid to late 1980s, led by second-wave Boomer parents. All of a sudden, the norms of parenting shifted sharply toward safety and self-esteem—constant supervision and lots of trophies. Ever since, it seems, we’ve barely left our children alone for even a minute! What began as the “self-esteem”–based parenting was morphing by the 1990s into the Gen X led “helicopter-parenting.”

By the early 2000s, the helicopter-parenting trend reached a new apex. Relationship boundaries have been blurred for Gen Zers because they’ve grown accustomed to being treated almost as customers/users of services and products provided by institutions and authority figures. Parents and their parenting posses (relatives, friends, teachers, coaches, counselors, doctors, and vendors in every realm) are mobilized to supervise and support the every move of children, validate their differences, excuse (or medicate) their weaknesses, and set them up with every material advantage possible. In China, where there are so many only children due to the longstanding “single child policy,” a similar trend in child rearing has yielded a phenomenon referred to by many there as “Little Emperor Syndrome.”

These second wave Millennials, Generation Z, will usher in the final stages of the great generational shift.

As the older (first wave) Baby Boomers are now steadily exiting the workforce, the simultaneous rising global youth-tide of Generation Z represents a tipping point. By 2020, Generation Z will be greater than 20 percent of the workforce (much greater outside the West in younger parts of the world—especially South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America). Indeed, the 2020 workforce will be more than 80 percent post-Boomer—dominated in numbers, norms, and values by Generations X, Y, and Z.

In this rising youth-tide, why ever would Gen Zers see established institutions as their anchors of success and security? They never will. Instead they will be most likely to turn to their most reliable anchors growing up:

• Hand-held super-computers,
• Proximately powerful grown-ups, and
• The ability to construct a unique identity—a personal brand—which they can wield in public (mostly on social media) and revel in privately.

Indeed, Generation Z—East, West, North, and South—might be seen as a rising global generation of “Little Emperors,” each seeking to build his or her own “personal brand.”

Sorry to say, this book offers no easy solutions. The book does offer many, many difficult partial solutions for recruiting the best Millennials; helping them get on board and up-to-speed in your organization; form new bonds with your organization, their new colleagues, and their managers; perform successfully, add value, keep learning and growing; and earn more and more of what they need and want. If you want high performance out of this generation, you had better commit to high-maintenance management. That is, ultimately, the message of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy.

Bruce Tulgan