While existing business paradigms have failed, a hidden resource in your organization holds the key for a successful future. So says Kirk Snyder, writing on the Huffington Post. That resource? None other than your cadre of Generation Y workers.
According to Snyder, Gen Y is redefining the very meaning of work and views the business world through “a polar opposite navigational system” compared to the people who helmed companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers. In that, he says, we can find the hope of economic salvation.
Gen Y holds the secrets to economic recovery because they were born into the future. Since childhood, with every mouse click their understanding of the world has been expanded. As a result, they see the world of work in its evolving form and their professional beliefs and behaviors instinctively align to fit these dynamic conditions. While it seems like most of Corporate America and Washington would prefer to go down with the ship, holding on to outdated precepts rather than adapting to a new way of being in the world of work, Gen Y instinctively possess solutions to recapturing and sustaining our greatness.
Snyder argues that Gen Y workers’ professional instincts, which include both a focus on the details and an appreciation of the bigger picture, will help reinvent old products and processes of work. They’ll incorporate more qualitative values — more communication, more collaboration, more inclusion — into the workplace. And they view their own success as being tied to the success of others to a much greater degree than any of their predecessors.
Want your business to weather the storm? Then be willing to embrace the radically different navigation system embodied by your Gen Y workers.
(image by David Boyle in DC via Flickr, CC 2.0)
