Generation Y Is Annoying to Manage, But That's a Good Thing

Generation Y is annoying to manage. We're annoying to manage because, get this; we actually want people to manage us! Gen Y grew up very close with our parents, and we got a ton of feedback from teachers, coaches etc. Because of this, managers are encountering entry-level workers who are basically begging and pleading to be managed closely.

The problem is that over the last 20 or 30 years, management has become a lost art. People are promoted after a few years on the job. They get more money, more responsibility, more work, and oh yeah, they get to manage three other people too.

Finding time to care about three other peoples career when you're so intent on advancing your own career is not an easy task. So the trend has been to let people figure it out on their own.

This worked great for Gen X, a group of people who take serious pride in independently getting the job done. But not so much for Gen Y. We would much rather work with our managers, our peers and our team to get the job done, and have fun doing it.

Because of this, Gen Y is creating an incredible shift in what management means, and the managers who accept and adapt to this shift are the ones who will be leading successful organizations in the coming years.

So, if you're managing Gen Y you can do one of two things. You can say they are annoying to manage and whine and complain about how needy they are. Or, you can embrace this as a gift. The next time a Gen Y employee comes into your office with a question on how to do something correctly, put everything aside for ten minutes and push him in the right direction.

The ten minutes of your time it takes to give detailed feedback or correct a mistake today, can save you days or weeks of fixing the mistake in the long run.

5 Startup Lessons From the Recession

Running a startup in a recession is not an easy task. All the experts say that survival is the name of the game, but entrepreneurs are hard-wired to move quickly, and simply surviving is not what you imagine when leaving your Fortune 100 job for life at a start up. It's been frustrating, but I've also learned a ton. Here are five lessons I've learned from running a business in a recession.

1. You can save money, you just have to do more work
In the past, we came up with a product idea, got a general sense of what we wanted the product to look like, and then passed it off to the designer. Inevitably, the designer would come back with a great design, but not necessarily what we were looking for. Then we would have to go back through multiple reviews and changes. This way of working is incredibly expensive and time consuming.

Now, we do a ton of work before passing anything off to a designer. We put a wireframe together, we review it multiple times and we do a complete creative brief before asking a designer to do anything. It's a lot of work, but that's what start-ups are all about. The harder you work, the more you learn. Extra preparation on the front end will save you a ton of money and time on the back end.

2. Some bills are more important than others
Deciding who to pay and when to pay them becomes a very difficult decision when you're trying to run a start up with little to no money. You have to constantly evaluate things that you would never normally think of, like, if I don't pay rent, will they kick us out or let us slide for a few months? Or, if I don't pay the accountant today, will I have enough in the bank to pay him in two weeks? Then there are other things like, how long can I personally survive without a paycheck?

The interesting thing is, when you're in a recession people are more understanding. Your landlord probably isn't filling his office space, so kicking you out is pointless. Your accountant can probably wait two weeks to get a $500 check, especially when he knows that $500 could keep your business alive. If you plan on bootstrapping your company, or waiting out a recession, you better get used to negotiating and in some cases, not paying your bills until you absolutely have to.

3. You will want to quit, and so will your partners
There's no doubt about it, if you're running a company with little money, you can't move fast, you get nervous and you will want to quit. Every single person at Brazen has wanted to throw in the towel at some point. Penelope and I have had discussions about whether or not we should shut down and I've had conversations with the other guys about whether they should be looking for something else to do.

But a good rule of thumb is that the companies that don't quit don't fail. I'm convinced that the only reason the failure rate is so high for start-ups is because most founders can't get through the dip. We've been in the dip for more than six months now. If all goes as planned, we'll be able to actually run our business the way we want to very soon. But until then, we'll keep supporting each other when we're ready to call it quits.

4. If you don't share your ideas, no one will know you have them
For the past six months I've been brainstorming different products that Brazen should launch. I have solid reasons for when we should launch them, how they will improve our traffic and how each one will help us achieve our goal of being the top network for young professionals.

The problem was that I didn't verbalize my ideas well. I have tons of PowerPoint's and spreadsheets with projections and wireframes, but instead of organizing everything and presenting it succinctly, I let it pile up. Finally, after talking things through for two months, we've determined the right direction for Brazen to go. Investors like it, the board thinks it's great and the team thinks it's the right thing to do. And other than a few tweaks and updates, we're using the ideas that I had stored away on my computer for months. Going forward, I'll be sure to present my ideas in ways that everyone understands so we don't waste any more time.

5. Sometimes the best breakthroughs come from arguments
A few weeks ago, Penelope came into my office on a rampage. She screamed and yelled, and she called me a jerk. So, I yelled back. This went on for a solid ten minutes before it dawned on me. She wasn't mad at me. She was mad that we have such an amazing business plan, we know exactly where we should be and we know how we can get there, but right now, we're not even close.

I pointed this out. She agreed, and ever since then we've stopped blaming our lack of execution on not having money and decided to focus on putting processes in place and getting everyone to do their job. In a few weeks, the whole culture has changed. We all know exactly what we're doing, our meetings are productive, and we're all working towards the same goal, even if it's not as fast as we would like.

Why Isn't Mainstream Gen Y Buying Into The New Web?

Generation Y practically invented social media. Friendster was the original, but when Facebook came on the college scene in 2004, everything changed. College students took their offline friends and aggregated them in one place online. Guys browsed through their college networks to find cute girls they had seen at the library, and everyone posted photos from last night's drunken party or Saturday afternoon's football game.

Facebook was like being at a college frat party with all the people from your school, but online.

Well, things changed. Facebook opened up, Second Life created a virtual world for everyone to live in, LinkedIn connected all the older white-collar professionals, Twitter jumped on the scene and let all the narcissists scream, "Look at me," and Facebook followed the trend with their new redesign.

But Generation Y is not inventing the new web. Older people are. The new web is all about hyper-connectivity, real-time updates, and living your life online. And mainstream twenty-somethings aren't buying into it.

Twitter
According to Comscore, the majority of Twitter users worldwide are 35 or older. Young adults 18-24 only make up 10.6% of the Twitter population in the US and are less likely than the average user to tweet. 45-54 year olds are actually 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter.

The traditional social media early adopters are 18 -24 and Twitter is the new social media darling. Why isn't Gen Y biting?

LinkedIn
Gen Y is not on LinkedIn. The average age of a LinkedIn user is 40-years old. LinkedIn profiles do two things. They let you show the world all the great things you've accomplished (most twenty-somethings haven't accomplished much yet) and they let you connect with other business people in your industry (Gen Y has no idea what industry they're in and don't have many connections yet).

Want more proof that LinkedIn doesn't get Gen Y? They just did a major marketing and PR push to recent grads offering their premium service for 3 months free and pitching the site as a way to get jobs in a down economy. So far, this isn't working, and I don't expect it to anytime soon.

Facebook
Facebook is growing at an unparalleled speed, and the new adopters are older folks. The 35 to 54 Year old demographic grew at a rate of 276% over the last six months and the 55+ demographic grew more than 194% over the same time period, while 18-24 year olds only grew 20%. These same older adopters are joining sites like Twitter where it's all about real-time updates and hyper-connectivity.

When Facebook made a design change to simulate Twitter, there was a major user revolt, of course, many of the angriest people were long time Facebook users (i.e. Gen Y). Sure, change is difficult and oftentimes people buy in after some getting used to. But this one just seems different.

Want More?
A recent Accenture survey concluded that Baby boomers, defined in Accenture's survey as those 45 years old or older, are embracing popular consumer technology applications nearly 20 times faster than younger generations. Compared to a year ago, Gen Y consumers between the ages of 18 and 24, are decelerating their use of consumer electronics and related services including social networking, blogging, listening to podcasts and posting video on the Internet. Yet, there was a 67 percent increase among baby boomers reading blogs or listening to podcasts..

So why isn't Gen Y buying in to the new web?

Are we simply not a group of early adopters? Would we rather be the followers waiting to see what our older, more experienced peers latch on to before we jump in?

Or, does Gen Y have an innate sense that too much connectivity and too much time online is unproductive and does nothing more than allow you to run in circles and chase something that you can never actually attain.

Or maybe, Gen Y is still all about being cool, and Silicon Valley just isn't that cool. Facebook isn't even pretending to be cool anymore.

Chris Cox, Facebook's Director of Products says, "The people who started the company weren't cool. I'm not cool, if you look at the people who work here, it's much more nerdy and curious than cool….Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone."

He's probably right. Useful does apply to everyone, but hip, early adopters are always chasing cool. They're not chasing useful.

Personally, I think its a combination of the three and when the right tool comes along, Gen Y will take the lead. But whatever the reason is, the numbers show that mainstream Gen Y is not latching on to the newest social media tools, and for a group of people who are supposed to be the trend setters, this is a strange phenomenon.

Personal Branding is Not a Fad, and Why You Need to Read This Book

Tom Peters first wrote about The Brand Called You in a 1997 issue of Fast Company. Slowly but surely, in the 12 years since, Personal Branding has gone mainstream. Nearly everyone in the social media/web 2.0 world is aware that what we do, both online and off, defines our personal brands. College students get it too. At a University of Wisconsin panel last week, we polled the audience and more than 75% people had heard of personal branding.

Despite this, many college students and young professionals aren't exactly sure how to effectively build a brand. Lucky for them, my buddy Dan Schawbel's new book, "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand To Achieve Career Success" will teach you exactly how to do it. Anyone who wants to give themselves the best chance to succeed in this new, hyper-connected world, needs to check it out.

If you're still not convinced, here are a couple reasons why I know that personal branding is not a fad, and why you should buy Dan's book, or at least read his blog

Everyone's an entrepreneur
The average stay at a job for Generation Y is about 18 months. Job hopping is the norm these days, and even the recession isn't going to change this fact. So, if you're changing jobs every couple of years, you need to think of yourself like an entrepreneur. Reid Hoffman, the CEO of Linkedin says, "Every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. Because it used to be that you got a job at one company and you were there 20, 30, 40, years. That's been dead for decades. That's even dying in Japan. The salary man no longer even exists in Japan."

Entrepreneurs start companies, and the smart ones spend a lot of time branding those companies and branding themselves. If every individual is an entrepreneur then it makes sense that you start managing your personal brand too.

Google is Branding You Right Now
It's true. You have a personal brand and someone can find it on Google. If it takes hours of searching to find some information about you online, then you're probably doing a poor job of creating your personal brand. If the first thing someone finds is your Facebook page with pictures of you beer bonging in college, then you're doing a poor job of managing your personal brand. Regardless, Google is branding you as a party animal, or a music lover, or a blogger or completely out of touch. First impressions are important, and increasingly first impressions are happening on Google. You may as well make a good one.

Personal branding lets you learn about you
I have to admit, when I first heard the term personal branding, I thought it was kind of lame. But as I've progressed in my career and in my life, I see the importance of defining who I am to the world and more importantly, I see the importance in defining who I am to me. Entrepreneurs deal with this all the time. I often find myself in meeting asking the question, "What is Brazen Careerist? What are our values? What's our mission?" When you figure out those questions, you can accurately define your company's brand. Well, it seems pretty important to ask the same questions of an individual. What do you stand for? What are your goals? Where do you want to end up in life?

Creating a personal brand allows you to look at where you are right now, and think about where you want to be and then you get to project that self knowledge to the world. That's pretty powerful stuff.

So, what are you waiting for? Buy the book. Build your brand.

Why You Can't Afford to Ignore Your Audience

Brazen is officially one-year-old this month. We actually launched the site on March 1, 2008, so I'm a couple of weeks late with this announcement, but better late than never.

If you were with us the first day we launched you'll remember the photo on the front page was of a woman in a tank-top shirt showing her stomach and flashing a handful of $100 bills for everyone to see.

It was obnoxious, a little risqué, and quite frankly, a poor representation of our brand. We really figured this out about a month after we launched. Ryan Paugh and I were driving down the road in Madison and we saw a billboard. As we crept closer, we couldn't believe our eyes, the woman from the homepage was on the billboard, staring us in the face, flashing $100 bills and telling us to go to Ho-Chunk casino!

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Brazen Careerist and Ho-Chunk casino should not be using the same stock photos. And in this case, Ho-Chunk got it right. We made a branding mistake. But that's cool; we've made a ton of mistakes in the past 18 months. Luckily, we've learned from every mistake we've made, and I'd like to think we're a better company, and better community because of it.

Now we're taking a step back and trying to figure out what to do next at Brazen. We have a million ideas. In fact, our tiny development team could probably spend the next two years building the ideas we've already thrown around. But we want to make sure that the next thing we do really benefits the community.

So we're asking for feedback from Brazen Careerist members, readers or potential members who are just waiting for us to do something really cool before they join. If there was one feature or addition that you would like to see on Brazen Careerist, what would it be? Feel free to leave a suggestion below, or join the conversation on the official Team Brazen blog where I lay out a couple of our ideas.

The biggest lesson we've learned at Brazen and a lesson that can be applied to every company is that the audience is ALWAYS right. The people you are trying to reach ultimately decide what is appropriate for your brand and what isn't.

For example, if you're a recruiter trying to fill an entry level position, it doesn't matter how cool you think your company is, or how lucky you think someone would be if they get the job that you are trying to fill, you really have no idea what recruits will think until you ask.

In this case, I would ask your newest employees. Find out what attracted them to the company and what things you should highlight when you're branding your company as a great place to work. Then try a few things out and determine which are the most successful. After a few interviews, you can even ask the recruits directly what attracted them to the company.

Even if you don't get the response you're looking for, when you ask your audience exactly what they want and you listen to them, you won't have to guess about what may work and what may not.

A surefire way to be successful is to have an army of people who find your company, product or service useful AND truly believe in what you are doing. But for people to care about what you're doing, you first have to care about what they want.

From here on out, we'll be asking for as much input as possible from our community before starting a new project. I would highly recommend your company do the same.

(And don't forget to leave us some feedback here or on the Brazen blog!)