Two articles recently grabbed my attention. First, an article entitled: This Fixable Problem Costs US Businesses $1 Trillion each year due to voluntary turnover. Then, another headline explained why: Millennials are officially a majority of managers—so get ready for a combination of burnout, buddy vibes, and boundary issues. I’ve seen this before, in fact I lived it. Over 15 years ago I was one of those early millennial managers. I joke with friends that running a team felt like having the inmates run the asylum, we were children managing children. Most of us had never managed anyone before, yet we were suddenly leading teams of our peers. It was trial by fire, and while formative, it came at the expense of real people.
At 27 and with my first child on the way I was actually considered one of the “real” adults in the room. But I had just as much training as the next 20 something year old who had climbed their way up the management ladder. The first big problem I encountered were the wildly unrealistic expectations of my former colleagues and now direct reports. We worked for a mission oriented nonprofit which meant that we all were putting in long hours doing work that was meaningful. But, given that many of us were raised on the idea that we could change the world, our values skewed towards things like relentless pursuit. That was a literal value. The result? Relentless burnout.
The dual irony though was that while we maintained a high bar for some, this wasn’t always evenly applied to everyone and often weaponized for women and people of color. I remember wondering, How do I coach someone who’s too fragile for constructive feedback? The answer, at the time, was: I didn’t. We avoided conflict, creating a culture where some grew and others stagnated.
Though I never tried to be anyone’s buddy, the pressure to blur the lines between boss and buddy was real. I was actually famous for setting hard boundaries with my time and personal life, likely due to the fact that I was in a different stage of life than most of my peers at that age. I was one of only a handful of married people on my team and only the second parent. I was also already supporting my mother. In terms of competing personal and professional responsibilities, I was experiencing the millennial sandwich effect before it became a thing. Boundaries were my survival mechanism.
At the time work life balance wasn’t really on our radar as young millennial managers, but we felt the impact of burnout in our high turnover and the low satisfaction scores that we constantly worried over. Instead we came up with a phrase which we pushed, PPA or personal and professional alignment. It was our cute way of saying, you’re responsible for your well being, not us. How could we be? With so many of us modeling the same grind we’d seen from others we just assumed that to our job was to grind it out until we couldn’t anymore.
I think we were surprised when most of started to hit that wall sooner than we expected. Mine came by my second daughter. With a growing family and increasing responsibilities I knew something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be my personal life priorities. Burnout wasn’t an individual failure, it was baked into how we worked. Clearly this is a problem that we still haven’t figured out, and it’s only getting more pressing with millennials now making up the majority of managers. Mix in the increasing population of Gen-Z workers and their own expectations entering the workforce and you’ve got a potential powder keg. So what’s an organization to do?
I believe we’re due for a reset around how we work. It’s clear that the way we’re working hasn’t been working for a while. This isn’t just a millennial issue. Every generation has been squeezed by a broken model of work. But it doesn’t have to stay this way.
What if we designed workplaces that actually worked, starting with better manager training? If I’d known then what I know now about creating the right conditions for my team to thrive, everyone would’ve been better off (including me!)
Demographics don’t have to predict dysfunction. Chaos at work isn’t inevitable. We can rewrite the script, if we start by investing in the people who lead. Training better managers just might be the key to changing the narrative about how work has to work.
Book time with ManagerEQ to see how investing in managers can save your organization time, money, and energy.
