Navigating Leadership Challenges with Young Workforce: Building Essential Human Skills (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: You are in a very difficult and uncomfortable position, because I think leadership is more difficult now than it has ever been, because you're dealing with human anxiety, you're dealing with human uncertainty, you're dealing with human ambition and human egos, and again, especially young people who think they know what they want and don't, who have certainty and are very outspoken and do not mind going around their boss's boss to come to you, you are going to be dealing with a 19-year-old saying, why am I not given this? And you're like, where do you work? They have no fear of doing that. They also have no fear of quitting. And so we've seen this pattern where, remember, as a young generation, they're actually less equipped to deal with stress than previous generations. And so anxiety is high, and they're very confrontation avoidant. So for example, we've seen this, where they feel like they deserve a raise, and they don't know how to ask for a raise. And so instead of asking for a raise, they'll just quit. And then sometimes with an email that says, you don't value me, you don't pay me enough, you're like, we just had to ask with the answer, we love you, you know? So they're not afraid of quitting, but they are afraid of asking for things. Where if they do ask for things, it sometimes comes across very aggressive or accidentally black and white. Like, I've been here eight months, and I would like a 50% raise. And I'm not exaggerating. I mean, you've, you know, and the problem is that they're ill-equipped. What they're doing is they're putting you in a yes or no position. So even if you say, here's the plan to get you that over the course of the next eight months, they take it as a no. Because I asked for something black and white. And so one of the things I think there's a huge opportunity for our company is to help people to build in training that helps them with their human skills. I hate the term soft skills. Please, let's never use that term again. You know, we talk about hard skills and soft skills. Those things are opposite. Hard and soft are opposites. They're hard skills, the skills you need to do your job, and human skills, the skills you need to be a better human being. And we want you to excel at both. And we're going to train you to do both. And some of the human skills that are underappreciated and under-trained in this day and age are how to have difficult conversations, how to have an effective confrontation, how to give and receive feedback. And I think we have to train those things so that if we equip them with the skills, instead of saying, I've been here for eight months, I want a raise, to say, I've been here for eight months, I really love it here. My goal is to stay here. I have financial ambitions. Can you help me get on a path to get to this number? Now we can have a conversation, because it's now a continuum rather than a black and white question. But the point is, I don't fault them. They lack the skills. And so I think there's a huge opportunity for an organization like yours to teach these young people coping mechanisms, stress relief, the biggest one being how to ask for help. That is the single biggest thing that is lacking at every generation, which is, I am struggling. Can you help me? Whether it's personal or professional, that is absolutely lacking. And so we do unhealthy things to help compensate, social media and other things.