035: Millennial Mania with Lee Caraher

Pete Mockaitis
Lee, thanks so much for appearing here on the “How to be awesome at your job” podcast.

Lee Caraher
Pete, it is awesome to be with you. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Well, I think we’re going to have so much fun here. First of all, I’m curious to know. You have a blind cat named AI, what’s the back-story there?

Lee Caraher
Actually, his name is Al.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I was foiled by the capital A, lowercase L.

Lee Caraher
Sorry, it’s an L. His name is Al. He’s named after … His name is actually Altoona, which my husband insists on spelling it like “tuna” the fish, but actually, he’s named after Altoona, Wisconsin where my parents lived for a very long time when we used to, every summer my family would go for the whole time. That’s who Al is and he’s blind, so my husband calls him Stevie Wonder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lee Caraher
Totally, politically incorrect.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I assume that means Al is very talented. That’s where I was going with that.

Lee Caraher
Yes, very talented.

Pete Mockaitis
He reminds me of another blind person who’s very talented.

Lee Caraher
He sings in his sleep. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. You are known as the millennial whisperer.

Lee Caraher
Yes, my friends call me that.

Pete Mockaitis
Which is good, so that wasn’t something that you and your branding communication “Wisdom” cooked up?

Lee Caraher
No, I intensely dislike that. I would rather be called the millennial champion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lee Caraher
But my friends actually started calling me “millennial whisperer” a few years ago because I failed epically at working with millennials and then I worked at it to figure out what the heck to do. Then my friends started calling me and saying, “What does this mean? What does that mean?” I would say, “This is what I think. Go ask them.” “Oh, you’re the millennial whisperer, Lee,” so then it sort of stuck. It just stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you teased up a little story and I can’t help, I can’t help but dig into it. Can you share with us how did things crash and burn? You started working with millennials and what were the challenges, the problems that you saw?

Lee Caraher
When I started my company in 2002, we only hired people with 10 years of experience which almost by definition are probably 31, 32 years old at the minimum. In 2008, when everything crashed around us, it’s good to look at your business model during an economic blip of any sort to make sure, because usually a business model that got you to a certain point where the economy, your economy, the big economy, the regional economy changes, will not be the one that you should take forward. We decided to hire young people, people who were right out of college, which I had done in my past but I had not done in this company, so we did and I was terrible at it. I had been known before for recruiting and retaining people but I started recruiting and hiring people 22, 23, 24 year olds and I hired 6 within a couple months of each other. Within 3 months, they were all gone. One of them could be their problem, but 6 of them had to be my problem. I’d never had 100% failure in recruiting, ever.

I started looking into in and I found there was such a thing called “millennial.” I had no idea and that this group of people has a different point of view than I had in how my company was operating since we only had people who were gen-exers or boomers, so we did some shifting around. Based on the research I did, the interviews I did, we did some shifting around and then my book came out of that, just trying to be helpful to the other people who were struggling with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating, so this tells me from your real-life lived experience says there’s something to it, that these so-called “millennials” really are “we” I guess, really are different than previous workers. In what ways is that actually true?

Lee Caraher
I think, first of all, millennials get such a bad wrap. Millennials this year are between 16 and 36 years old, so they’re born peer … I use “Pew Research” as my base on this, so born between 1980 and 2000 which is a huge range. It’s a huge range. They get a huge bad wrap and particularly the middle group, 22-28, 29 years old really get the worst wrap right now. It’s just statistically impossible that an entire generation is terrible.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah.

Lee Caraher
It’s just terrible how this has happened, but there are very many differences. I would say to you a few things. One, I split the group “millennials” into three groups. The first group is 29-36 this year and came into the workplace after 9/11, between 9/11 and the end of 2008. They came into the workplace. For instance, their point of view in general on security and privacy is very different from gen-exers or boomers because they came into the workplace right after 9/11 when things really got tighten down which became normal. Boomers and exers had to get used to it, millennials who were that old, it was just normal. You didn’t have to learn something new, it’s just what happened.

The next group is 22, 23 to 28, 29 and this group came into the workplace after the end of 2008, 2009 when the economy contracted dramatically. It’s also the largest group of millennials in terms of millions of people. There were still millennials in that age group who were looking for work commensurate with their education because there just wasn’t work. This group is the one that gets the biggest, I think the biggest wrap mostly because of what was happening for boomers and exers at the same time as millennials were basically emptying out of college with this, in tsunamis.

Then, the youngest group is 16 to 22, in school and they have the advantage and disadvantage of many things that the oldest group did not have. For instance, the iPad did not exist when the oldest millennial was in school and today iPad’s are in classrooms and almost on a one-to-one basis all over this country. The other thing that’s true is one-to-one computers was not a requirement for most schools, for the millennials and now is almost a requirement for almost all higher education situations. When you have this technology in front of you, in your classroom, a lot of things are afforded to you that change the way you learn.

For instance, kids … I don’t mean to call them kids, but 16, 17, 18 year olds, they’re doing homework in the classroom and they’re learning on videos at nights. Khan Academy has totally changed how people learn at the high school and college level actually. These differences show up in the workplace in many different kinds of ways. One example is, often when recent graduates come from college, often they have to be trained backwards in technology because they may have used Gmail-based for their entire lives and then they get into the workplace which may have a legacy system, more work is on outlook than is on Gmail and it’s not native for them.

In my company, we’re outlook-based. My company’s almost 14 years old. We have to train recent graduates backwards on outlook, and they feel like it’s backwards. It’s like, “Oh my God, this is so antiquated,” because how it works is different than how a Gmail system works. Just those kinds of things that boomers and exers would never have thought of.

Another thing that is often true is, so I could ask a person 22, 23, 24 year old, I would say, “Send me a draft of something,” and they will send me a Google link.

Pete Mockaitis
Really?

Lee Caraher
This will drive me crazy. They send me a link-

Pete Mockaitis
Even if it’s a GoogleDoc that they’ve made?

Lee Caraher
It’s a GoogleDoc, right. They send me a GoogleDoc and it’s full of all the comments and the corrections on the sides.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh-

Lee Caraher
This is normal, group-sourcing, crowd-sourcing information documents, this is how people are learning how to work with each other in school. Well, this is not necessarily how a lot of work works outside of school and it’s not that they’re wrong. They sent me a draft, their concept of a draft. My concept of a draft is actually a piece of paper printed out on my desk. All these classes of definition I think are what have created a negative impact, a negative impression from older people about millennials and I really, I really intensely dislike that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I guess what you’re describing, I think it is resonating a bit. Once I was at a, I was in an elementary school because we had a business associated with low-cost online Math tutoring and so we were kind of checking it out-

Lee Caraher
There you go-

Pete Mockaitis
We’re checking out the scene, ground level and one of the teachers said to these children, “Hey, what do you do if you need help or I’m busy helping another student,” and all the children said in unison, “Khan Academy.” That’s like, “Whoa.” That is just their default thing they do with their learning downtime is get up on Khan Academy.

Lee Caraher
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
That was an eye opener for me.

Lee Caraher
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re saying, “Yes, of course. Pete, that’s how it is everywhere.”

Lee Caraher
Well, I’ve met Sal Khan and he’s an amazing person, and his point of view here finally, how can you teach … He started teaching Math to his nephew, but it’s an amazing resource. It’s different in terms of how you would go … A lot of parents have a hard time with the fact that their kids are watching videos at night and doing their homework in the classroom like, “What? It’s upside down.” Well, yeah, but it’s working. We just have a different point of view on how things …

I can tell you, the millennials in my office, the younger millennials in my office, they’ll go look for a YouTube video before they ask how to do something. It might be faster if they just asked how to do something, but that’s their go-to, that’s their default.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s encouraging, or heartening or edifying, synonyms here, is that it’s not like they’re lazy, they’re entitled.

Lee Caraher
Absolutely not.

Pete Mockaitis
They think everybody gets a trophy, but it’s just like they have some different habits, associations, comfortable grooves associated with different technologies.

Lee Caraher
Yeah. I think digital native is really the term and just so comfortable with technology, there will be a time when a baby comes out of the womb with an iPhone attached to the end of their arm. It’s going to happen, we’re going to be there. I don’t think millennials … I think they get a bad wrap. I don’t think they’re entitled, but I think they’ve been conditioned. When I say conditioned, I mean two things. One is the average grade point average in the last fifteen years, so when the oldest millennial was 15 years, so 21, has risen in this country over a full point in the last 15 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Lee Caraher
A 3.5, you can actually get a 5.0 on a 4.0 average now with extra credit and all that kind of stuff. Well, that is creating a false expectation for the value of that work and there is a lot of data on this topic and a lot of, at the university level, with the cost of college going up so much, sort of the value of the grade, there’s a lot of pressure from parents and students on teachers and graduate students who are doing grading to just, instead of the B-, give the B+. Instead of the B+, give the A- and over the last 15 years, the whole grade point average has risen a full point. When you get into the workplace, your B+ work, you’re used to getting an A for it and a lot of managers have to send it back.

“It’s not quite done yet, you’re almost done.” “What do you mean? It’s perfect,” and there’s a big dissonance that happens right out of school based on that grade point average. There’s all these things that exers and boomers say, “They should know. They’re supposed to know,” and the “should” and the “supposed to” as soon as you find yourself saying those words, you know you’re in trouble.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-Huh.

Lee Caraher
Because they don’t and it’s not their fault. In your email to me, you asked for some hard facts. Well, that is a fact. The grade point average has risen a full point in 15 years.

Pete Mockaitis
A quick clarifier on that, if I may. The grade point averages have risen. You’re saying this is due to grade inflation and I just got to do my diligence here. This is not because we’ve actually all just gotten smarter.

Lee Caraher
No.

Pete Mockaitis
The ACT or SAT standardized test scores have been about the same?

Lee Caraher
Has gone down.

Pete Mockaitis
Down? Oh.

Lee Caraher
Down.

Pete Mockaitis 
Mercy, that’s not good. You’re learning me here. You’re learning me good.

Lee Caraher
SAT has gone through two or three iterations in that time as well. No, so UCAL Berkley now publishes the curve on every grade you get in a transcript. The only reason you have to do that, the only reason you have to do that is you can only get 4.0. A 4.0 is the highest you can get at CAL Berkley, one of the premier institutions in this country. The only reason you would possibly want to do that is if your 4.0 had to be justified.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Lee Caraher
-And they were finding that some other kids were getting Xed out because they didn’t have 4.5’s. Well, they weren’t allowed to get a 4.5 because 4.0 was the top. Harvard and Stanford have done a lot of work in this area too, bringing it back down, bringing it more realistic. The average grade given at Harvard University, the most common grade, not the average grade, the most common grade given at Harvard University is an A-. Well, how is this statistically possible that everybody is above average even on a curve, is a curve. There’s just a lot of inflation that goes on that when you get into the workplace … It’s always been challenging being the first four years out of college.

Learning how to be in the real world where social promotion is not the norm is always been challenging because everyone starts at the same time and maybe you don’t elevate at the same time, but add onto it this great inflation which has created the impression that my work is better than it actually is has made it even harder and I believe has created this impression that the boomers and exers have about their millennial colleagues, about how entitled they are and how they think their work is so fabulous, well it’s because we told them it was. We gave them an A- instead of a B-. If a full point is a full point, think about that, B- to A-. That’s a huge difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good.

Lee Caraher
There’s a lot going on. Then I think what you said about everyone gets a trophy, the rise of nobody loses soccer is the biggest disservice I think in the human race. It’s wonderful for pre-school to second graders, but really the kids always know. My kids played soccer, nobody wins soccer and nobody loses soccer. They would always do the score, but the parents were the ones, “We don’t keep score.” The problem is you keep going and it keeps happening and there are a lot of awards and medals and stickers and stuff that people get just for showing up that for participation, participation awards that are meant to, I think are, parents really like. The kids don’t like them as much is my experience. Then, “I’m here on time.” You hear this a lot with, “Why don’t I get any credit for being on time?” Because you’re supposed to be on time. That’s not the millennials fault, that’s their parent’s fault.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s insane.

Lee Caraher
I have strong feelings about that. Can you tell?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Lee, I really appreciate it because I think you’ve just made it real for me because I hear a lot of noise about “the millennials” and I was like, “What does that even mean and am I one of them? What am I supposed … What is the implication of that?” I love it. You’ve just broken it down. I was like, “Okay, well check it out.” We have some different perspectives and experiences and habits and norms when it comes to the technology that we use. Got it. Also, there’s been a little bit of a messaging that’s all over the place that you’re amazing when in fact you’re maybe a one grade level below amazing. You’re good, you’re not amazing but you’ve been told you’re amazing and so you’re kind of surprised when you’re getting that feedback. What are some of the real differences? The more you’ve got hard facts, the more I love it.

Lee Caraher
I think that … Well, first let’s talk, let’s just define a millennial. Like I said, it’s 1980-2000. This is the largest generation, eighty million people. Boomers, which is 19 … Well, 64 is the youngest one, that’s me. This year, 52-70 years old, seventy-eight million boomers. Then the middle is gen-exers, about forty-six million gen-exers, so there really is a difference in the size of that middle generation, gen-exers. Gen-exers are full of single children who are Latchkey kids, who were raised by dual-income families and went home by themselves and let themselves … Those were very independent, a lot of single children. Millennials, there are more siblings in the millennial generation than there are in the gen-ex generation.

The other thing that’s interesting about millennials is that’s the most educated generation so far and it hasn’t even finished. They haven’t even finished and more, obviously by sheer number but by percentage, more millennials have at least a Bachelor’s of Arts degree or a Bachelor of Science degree, the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree than by percentage than either boomers or exers or traditionals, which is the 70+ group.

The other thing that is interesting about this group, it’s 29% of employed millennials live at home which is the highest percentage in over four decades and 36% of millennials live at home, but 29% of working millennials live at home. It’s also the least white, least Caucasian generation that we have in this country. Right now, there are fewer Caucasian millennials than there are all the other races combined, which will then in the whole country mean that in about 6 or 7 years will tip over so that 50% of the United States will be not Caucasian.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, interesting.

Lee Caraher
There’s a lot going on in all those numbers, but it leads to a lot of confusion and us versus them. Us versus them is nothing new. Intergenerational conflict, we talk about it as if it’s never happened before. How crazy is that? I start my book with a quote from Socrates, 400BC, before Christ. It’s a long time. I have a degree in medieval history, that’s a thousand years of inter-generational conflict right there. Inter-generational conflict is not new, it’s just we’re dealing with it and the other piece of that is, this is the first time in American history where we’ve had four different generations in the workplace at the same time. If you think about, it used to be that we were very hierarchical, the boomers were a wait-my-turn generation, so many of us … I’m a boomer, like I said. So many of us, we just knew if we just waited our time, our opportunity would come.

That is not how millennials want to live their lives. Technology has created a very flat world where you’re one click away, one Tweet away, one email away from anybody and any information and why shouldn’t that be true? Access shouldn’t be true in the workplace. What we have today is, I sit next to a millennial and behind him is an exer and behind her is another boomer, but next to her is another young millennial, where maybe 15 years ago, we would’ve been on different floors. We might’ve been in different offices. You wouldn’t have seen a millennial in an office. Now, boomers don’t even take offices. In huge swaths of this country, boomers don’t take offices. They’re out in the ‘pit’ as we used to call it. A lot of norms have changed so that we’re just much more up against it than we used to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Thank you.

Lee Caraher
Hopefully that helps.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I appreciate it. It makes it all the more real. It’s like you’re setting me straight which is nice because this has happened before. I’ve gotten sucked into an hour plus of online reading about generational stuff and I’m just thinking, “Yeah, I don’t know if I really buy if any of that is for real,” so I love how you bring in the research and the experience to kind of separate myth from fact. Now, let’s talk a little bit about some myths. What are some things people say about “those millennials” that strike you as just rubbish and that need to be rejected?

Lee Caraher
I think the entitled thing is totally BS. Like I said, they’re not … An entire generation can’t be entitled, statistically impossible. It’s how they grew up, it’s conditioning. I think the other myth that comes up a lot is, “Expect rewards and promotions just for showing up,” and I think that is more true. We can break that expectation really early on if we’re just direct. Another myth that comes up a lot in the millennials are, “Lazy, they don’t work hard,” and I think that’s total BS. I think that millennials work very differently than their older colleagues and we need to understand that.

I’ll give an example of that. I was walking a hall with a client who. a little older than myself, walked by this person and this person had three or four screens up: a phone, an iPad and two computer screens, had Facebook up, Twitter, his email and his phone was in his hand. “Oh my God, look at that guy. He’s just totally not doing anything,” and I look over and what I see is he’s talking to one of my people in my own back of my office on Facebook because they had said something in the Facebook message chat because it was Facebook native, was dealing with something on Twitter that was feedback to the company, had been texted by a reporter so was texting back the reporter and had his email up. I’m like, “What are you talking about? He’s on four things at the same time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Lee Caraher
“No, he’s got his Facebook up.” “No, he’s working in Facebook.” The number one, sort of the mode of communication is very foreign to other people and the other piece of that is, boomers and exers for the last twenty years have had the business narrative of work/life balance as if you start one and when you end it, you start the next. Millennials, given this technology and the 24/7 nature of technology are much more fluid, going in and out of life and work all day long and they expect it to go back and forth, back and forth, which is really how we all today need to work.

That expectation of, “Well, I’m going to get that done later,” it doesn’t mean that they’re not going to get their work done, it just may not be at the time that you want it done, so having some expectations around when you get work done, you can solve all those problems really quickly with communication.

Lee Caraher
Another myth is that they’re casual and disrespectful or rude and I think what is definitely true is that something like only 20% of the numbers of people who took cotillion classes or manners classes take them today. When I grew up and I had to go learn how to cut butter by cutting bananas and putting it on my bread plate, well most people do not take those classes anymore. In a world where, particularly in big metropolitan areas where people come from all over the country and all over the world with different social norms, it is not unusual to hear somebody who’s, “Oh, that person’s so rude. They’re wearing their baseball cap in the restaurant.” Well, no one ever told them not to. It’s not like they’re … I think the … A good example here is, I used to interview people. When I was recruiting them, I would take them out to lunch or dinner, someone would do that, just to get to know each other and I did not hire two people because they could not eat-

Pete Mockaitis
Like properly-

Lee Caraher
I was dumb. Yeah, properly. How stupid was I? So stupid. I can teach someone to eat. It’s not that hard. If you don’t know, you don’t know, but I could teach someone to eat. I can’t teach someone to have initiative and be curious, but I could teach someone to eat. I’m still kicking myself in the shins that I didn’t hire those two people, and this was years ago.

I’m on the board of a college in my area and now I’m giving etiquette classes to these college seniors and they don’t know. They don’t know not to hang their knife and fork off their plate. It’s not because they’re ignorant in the bad sense, it’s because they aren’t aware. If we could just say, “They aren’t aware,” instead of, “They’re ignorant,” we get rid of that whole thing. Every time we say “should” or “supposed to,” you get yourself in trouble. I think that the last myths that I really find a lot is that millennials don’t want to pay their dues and they want freedom, flexibility, and work/life balance day one. I think that’s two-fold. One, I think the millennials have no problem paying their dues. They want to know what the dues are and they want to understand what the dues get you. The context is really important. It’s not rocket science to figure out of course, they want work/life balance because their parents have been talking about it for 20 years and so of course they should have it. Their parents have been working really hard for it.

I find that working women who are older have the hardest time with this one because really, working women who are 55 or older are the ones who put this on the map, work/life balance. I’m not very popular when I say this, but I say, “You’ve got to get over it.” The point of being a pioneer is to make it better for the people behind you. The difference is they are sitting right with us. There’s no time between us, so I think that’s a split myth.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice reframe there. It’s-

Lee Caraher
Both of the negative ones are wrong. Anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy, so understanding, established, we get what’s true, what’s myth, where’s there hard data, so then where’s that leave us in terms of some prescriptive advice, some do’s or don’ts. What are some of the top things that millennials should to, you might say to “fix” what is wrong or perceived to be wrong as well as build off some strengths to really dazzle?

Lee Caraher
I think a couple of things. One, millennials will show up in the workplace and you will see inefficiency everywhere that you can fix. You will. Day one, you’re going to see something you can fix. My recommendation to you is try not to fix it day one because you’re going to get a lot of people pushing back on you, so do it their way first and then say … Then after you’ve done it their way once, at least once so you understand the interdependencies of everything, then you can go and say, “You know, I think I may have found a way to streamline this. Can I show it to you? What do you think,” because if you just go in and say, “Oh, that’s stupid. I could’ve done that. We can cut off an hour here,” because you probably can, all you’re going to do is get everyone else’s backs up because, “What? You just showed up and now you’re going to tell us we’re wrong?” That’s just disrespectful and I don’t think people mean it as disrespectful, but that is how it’s taken.

If you just do it their way first and then go and fix, then try to show them how to improve, either by streamlining it or by shortcutting it, whatever, after you’ve done it and after you’ve been there at least a couple weeks, and I really, I sound so dumb, but this is happening all over the country. I get this question all the time. Someone was in my office on hour three saying how dumb our process was.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh.

Lee Caraher
Just do it their way first. The other piece is, one of the first questions that a lot of millennials ask is, “Who’s going to be my mentor?” I’m a huge proponent of this and mutual mentorship. If you’re going to have a mentor in your company or your manager, the first thing I would like millennials to do is ask the person what do they read every day because you probably read, you get your news from different sources than they do. If you can just read their news sources just for a month, you will have a much different appreciation for how they learn and what their frame of reference is. If you can exchange your reading list, give it to them, “Here’s what I’m reading every day,” that’s even better because then they’re having a sense of what you read every day.

Going in and asking for their frame of reference, you … If you have a boomer boss who you think might be a little bitter, they’re already going to have a bad … If you think they’re already going to have a bad point of view on millennials then you can get rid of it by just saying, “What can I learn from you? Looking forward to being with you. Looking forward to learning from you,” and doing something their way first and learning from them, then going back and saying, “Hey Lee, I had some thoughts on this. I wonder if I can walk you through on how we might improve this process,” so that you’ve learned their way and you’ve learned some from them first.

Those two things alone will get you off on such a better path than … and sort of break through the, even if, break through a myth, a negative impression that you might be walking into. The other piece of that too is that 72% of millennials don’t call themselves millennials.It’s so negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah-

Lee Caraher
So negative that millennials don’t like it. In the end, the word millennial just tells you when you were born. It just tells you, you were born between 1980 and 2000, but it’s so laid with negative impression and negative connotation that even the generation themselves … You never hear a gen-ex or a boomer disavowing their generation title, but millennials do it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s reassuring because I don’t think I am one of those.

Lee Caraher
Well, technically you are, but it doesn’t need to be negative. It doesn’t need to be negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so this is great stuff. Could you maybe share a story or example to bring some of this to life here? I think those are some great practices in terms of swapping the reading lists and more. Can you show me how you’ve seen perhaps a transformation of understanding unfold during the course of your working and writing and speaking.

Lee Caraher
Sure. I can tell you for ourselves when we had failed so miserably, I went and I interviewed as many millennials as I could find, but what the hell did we do wrong? Basically, they laughed in my face, “Oh my God, you did what?” These are things I’ve for my whole career that have been successful. That’s where we came up with the “should” and “supposed to’s” and one thing that we did that changed everything … Well, two. I’ll give you two things. One was the first thing that we did was we provide now context for everything at the beginning of a project.

Pete Mockaitis 
Context.

Lee Caraher
Context, so what is this project? Who is working on this project? What roles does everybody have on the project and who’s dependent on whoever else? When the team gets done with the project, where does that go and what impact will it have on the whole company? We go all the way … It sounds like, “Duh, wouldn’t you do that anyway,” but most people do not stop to start in a full-context, they just assume people understand. We started doing, “Here’s the project, here’s everybody on the project,” all those things I just discussed so that everybody knows that everybody matters and particularly for lower-level employees.

When I mean that, I mean early-entry employees who may be frustrated with the fact that they’re low man on the totem pole and think, “This work is stupid. Why does it even work?” I’m here to tell you, there’s no job in this country that is hired that doesn’t have to get done. If you’re hired, the job has to get done. Your job matters no matter how stupid you think it is and what you understand, who’s relying on you to get your job done, that just improves performance dramatically, number one.

Number two, understanding how we all interact together and how you could might help, millennials I find are a huge helping generation. A lot of people say they’re the “me” generation. My experience is the “we” generation and how you give feedback to a millennial in terms of if they fall down on the job, if they don’t do a good job, the fastest way I know to make that never happen again is to say, “Hey Pete, you really didn’t do a great job and you know, the impact was that you really let the team down and the rest of the team had to pull your weight,” and I will never have to say that to you again, Pete, because the team is so important.

Millennials are very team-oriented. They are very leadership-oriented. Leadership is very fluid to them. They can lead from any place in the boat, they don’t have to be the coxen to lead. It’s bone-crushing when they realize they’ve let the team down.

It doesn’t work so well with exers. Exers don’t like … More independent, but millennials, that really snapped over for me when I was like, I said to somebody, “You’re really not living up to your potential and you have such great potential,” and this woman, “I don’t really care what you think, Lee.” Really? I was like, “Wow. I’ve never had someone work for me who didn’t care what I thought. Wow.”

I think she was an extreme example and I said, “But you let everybody down. Look at this, they’re all working their butts off because you let them down.” She burst into tears.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man.

Lee Caraher
She went from, “I don’t care what you think, Lee,” to bursting into tears when I flipped the context of what I was talking about, my opinion about her work to the impact of her work on everybody else. If you had told me early in my career that I wasn’t living up to my potential, I would have burst into tears. I think those are generational generalizations that I have seen … I don’t know how to quantify that, but I can tell you that I challenge everybody to try that and see if it doesn’t work for them.

Pete Mockaitis 
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you.

Lee Caraher
We start with those two things, and I tell you, we track our time in my company and so when we start doing those two things, making sure we were giving feedback so that people understood that their impact on everybody else and then contextualizing everything, “Here’s why we’re doing it, here’s who’s who,” and all that kind of stuff, we found that we were wasting at least, per person, one or two hours less per week because there weren’t as many questions, there wasn’t much grinding going on like, “What am I doing this for?” Although it takes time at the beginning of a project, do this. It saves time in the end.

Pete Mockaitis 
Now, how did you measure the wasted time?

Lee Caraher
We track our time. We have to track time that is, we bill our clients and then un-billable time. Un-billable time went down once we made this a practice.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Lovely. Okay. Well, any other things you want to make sure you articulate before we shift gears into the “Fast Favs”?

Lee Caraher
Sure. I think, you know I’m really optimistic about the world because of millennials. This generation is going to crack a lot of nuts that we’ve been toiling on or avoiding or kicking down, kicking the can down the field and if we can just appreciate that they have a lot to offer, I think boomers who are often bitter about the fact that they’re still working, will be much more able to accept and allow them to thrive..

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. Could you start us off by sharing a favorite, something that you find inspiring?

Lee Caraher
I find … I’m a big quote person, my Twitter feed is full of quotes. Right now, I guess I have so many going on. “Focus is my friend,” is my favorite quote right this second.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed.

Lee Caraher
Keeps me going.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Lee Caraher
My favorite book, I have many favorite books, frankly. I read a lot. I think leaders read a lot. One of the seminal books is “Primal Leadership” which is just fantastic in terms of understanding your style of leadership and when to deploy it in different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. How about a favorite tool, whether that’s hardware, software, a gadget that helps you be productive?

Lee Caraher
I really like the app “Focus at Will” which has science … Music you choose based on science to help you focus on one thing at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s nice. How about a favorite habit or personal practice of yours that’s boosted your effectiveness?

Lee Caraher
Move every day. Move every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Just like walking or any kind of-

Lee Caraher
Walking, or I have a movable desk that goes up and down. I’m sort of moving. I find that if I’m sitting too much, my brain goes to mush, but when I’m moving around, my brain is active and I can be much more productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. How about a favorite nugget, something that you share and that gets re-Tweeted or Kindle Book highlighted or folks really nodding and resonating with what you’re communicating?

Lee Caraher
The “we” generation thing really gets a lot of traction.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s because it rhymes.

Lee Caraher
When you let the team down, that really resonates strong with most everybody I talk to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. How about the best way to find you if folks want to learn more? Would you point them to your website or Twitter, or where should they go?

Lee Caraher
Sure. The best thing to do is go to my website which is www.leecaraher.com or on Twitter, I’m at @leecaraher and I share a lot of the stuff and other good stuff, good leadership stuff there all the time, a little prolific.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. Thank you. How about a favorite challenger or parting call-to-action you’d like to leave folks with who are seeking to become more awesome at their jobs?

Lee Caraher
I think the biggest challenge is to not be negative. Just don’t take the negative energy, take the positive out of the negative situation. If we can do that, be the duck, let it roll off your back and then move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Well, Lee, thanks so much. This has been a real treat and I wish you tons of luck in all your pursuits here.

Lee Caraher
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been great to talk with you.