Super great post on Generation Y, and challenges for managing them in work.
At Everbread, the exec debate is often about adding experienced professional Project Managers (something that is hard to find, but we all believe is worth having) versus using leadership to engage our young development staff to “self-organize”. The jury is still out but so far we have only 5 Manager/Workers and 30+ builder/creators. From Bryan Menell today. biggest-from-to-in-a-generation
Management to Engagement
Most organizations are over-managed and under-led. Solid leadership engages people in their work, and the organization’s greater goal. Today an organization realizes more value from their employees by engaging them, rather than managing their tasks. At SXSW 2010 in a panel presented by Dachis Group, Kate Niederhoffer asked the audience to rate their level of engagement with their work. The scale ranged on one extreme from being a passive participant in their work lives to on the other end almost complete intermingling of their personal and work lives. To my surprise almost nobody rated themselves on the disengaged level of the scale, and fully half the audience identified themselves as almost indivisible from their work. Add to this the move away from top-down command and control structures to more flexible networks of workgroups, and the writing is on the wall that the org chart will soon be a thing of the past.”
