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Transcriber: SOFIA BEDETTA
Reviewer: Mujtaba bakhet
Do you remember applying
for your first job?
Man, I was so nervous I needed to
go up to this guy named Ken.
He was about 40 years older than me,
and he had, let's call it,
an intimidating resting face.
I... So I was 15 years old
going to high school.
My favorite sport on the
planet is gymnastics,
and a couple of my friends on
the team would stay after classes
to teach sports to kids
and gymnastics to these students
after high school.
And Ken ran a company that would partner
with Park District and help facilitate
teaching these classes. And I thought,
how cool to be able to work there.
And so I asked one of my friends after
class, how can I get a job here?
And he said, you need to go up to Ken,
introduce yourself and ask him for a job.
Okay. I come to the gymnastics gym.
I see Ken’s there.
Heart starts throbbing.
I walk up, stick out my hand,
introduce myself. Hi, Ken.
It's a pleasure to meet you. And we
start talking. Turns out, Ken.
Very genuinely nice human being.
But as we were talking, we discovered
or I discovered that I couldn't work
for him until I turned 16.
So he said, call me back when you're 16
and we can talk about it. Months go by.
I haven't seen Ken, haven't talked to him,
and it's my 16th birthday.
Family’s starting to come around.
They’re coming to the house to celebrate.
I leave to the room, go into the study,
take out my phone,
find his contact information, and
heart starts throbbing again.
I dial, phone starts ringing
and Ken picks up.
Said Ken, I don't know if you remember me.
My name is Mitch.
We talked months ago, you told me
to call back when I turn 16
and today is my 16th birthday.
I'd love the opportunity to work for you
and teach gymnastics to these kids.
He was so impressed that I called
them on my actual 16th birthday,
that he gave me the job
right then and there.
And so celebrating my birthday,
celebrating being employed legally
the first day I could.
And what occurred to me later on
was this success
was the success that derived from adapting
to a different generation.
See, the way that I applied
for that job was much more normative to
what Ken experienced in his generation.
There was no fancy application.
There was no phone.
I was pulling out on social media,
finding the job, applying.
I introduced myself, shook his hand,
followed up on the phone when
I told him I'd follow up,
and that led to a job offer.
Years later, after graduating college,
I moved to work for a consulting company,
and it occurs to me pretty quickly
that there are people in
the workplace that were thinking
very differently than I was.
See, it turned out I was the first
and I was the oldest of
the youngest generation entering
the workforce.
I was the first of the Gen
Z entering the workforce.
And I thought, man, as going into a
consulting company, what a value add,
because I saw all these different
generations showing up
and all of them were thinking in
approaching work differently than I was.
Some had a tremendous work ethic.
Some were focused on mission
impact in organizations.
There were some that were
working hard to live,
and there was others that
loved what they did.
So they lived so they could work more.
But you know what was interesting across
all these different generations,
all these different value systems,
the one thing they had in common,
they all thought their
way was the best way.
And so I remember I was going
to approach this,
this client and their entire department
was being run on paper.
Everything was printed out,
everything was filed.
And I saw what an amazing opportunity.
Create value.
Here I am, Gen Z, I got an amazing
proposal for you.
We’re going to automate.
We're going to streamline. We're
going to get it in the cloud.
And they looked at me, looked up
looked back and said:
why would we do that?
And I was taken aback. Here I am with what
I thought is this innovative idea,
but it's being responded to as if I'm
being not innovative, but irresponsible.
And there was almost this resistance,
not a conflict,
but we began to have difficulty.
Because what I thought would
help the organization,
they thought I was putting
the organization at risk,
where I thought they were being
stagnant to change.
They thought I was being reckless.
And this difference in perspective
began to occur.
And I realized, and I started seeing this
wasn't the only gap in the workplace.
Different generations kept
on having different gaps
because they had different value systems.
And so in order to begin to bridge that.
Began to study and learn this,
I realized we can't just look
at the value systems.
We need to look one layer beneath at what
behavior patterns translate into those.
And actually go even beneath that to look
at what occurred during their formative
years. See if we can look at what occurs
during their formative years,
what they grew up with in the workplace.
That shows us the behavior
patterns that occur,
that shows us the value that
they bring to the table.
And so from my scenario growing up,
I grew up immersed in technology,
internet, always there, social media
pretty much always there, phone there
probably earlier than it should have been.
And so because it was always there,
automation tech was secure.
It was always known. And so therefore
I thought it was a great idea
and it carried minimal risk.
Whereas I looked at the other individual
in a different generation.
They grew up before the
internet even existed.
At the time, I honestly didn't realize
there were people in our workforce that
had graduated at high school before
the internet was made.
It was made in 1983. I
was born after that.
And so they experienced paper growing up.
The security, the stability.
Something you can touch,
something you can see,
something that you can rely
on because it's there.
They saw tech happen, but they
saw the issues with tech.
They saw new protocols, new automation
occur, and then the lost data,
the hindrances. And so because of that,
we both have tremendous value.
But we couldn't adapt and first understand
unless we looked at what were
the what was occurring at the
behavior patterns and
the formative years behind that.
And so we were able to come up
with a solution to automate,
to streamline by having
the paper backup file.
See, when we look at organizations,
we talk about legacy often
taking this business,
this mission that we have and growing it
and building it greater
than we ever could.
Something that will outlive us,
something that will grow greater
than we could ever take it.
But do we ask ourselves who's going
to take it after we let it go?
Who's going to grow it after
we step out of leadership?
See, we're not going to be able
to grow our legacies,
keeping the mantra that our
generation does it best.
We need to begin to seek to adapt, to
seek to build bridges, not enable,
but take steps forward to
help others come in.
And with that, we can start to harness
everything every generation has to offer
the resiliency of one generation,
the work ethic of another.
The focus on social impact of one.
The innovation of another.
As we look at what occurs during
their formative years,
understand how that leads to behavior.
Understand how that translates to values.
We as leaders can begin to build bridges
of what was in appear to be chasms
across generations,
and with those bridges
create a pathway for the experience
and knowledge to go down,
and for an innovation and new technology
and new ideas to be brought up
so that we can truly empower our rising
leaders to build on and carry
the legacy that we're building today.
Thank you.
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