Millenials' Attitude of Entitlement

I hear people talking all the time about how they think millenials seem to have a feeling of entitlement.  I was thinking about this on the way to work a few days ago and thought I should write something about it. First, let me tell you up front that I’m not a millennial.  In fact, I’m old enough that I have kids who are millenials.  I’m considered a baby boomer, whatever that really means.  Keep that in mind if you decide to keep reading.

I was talking to a co-worker several weeks ago and one of the new engineers came by my cube and joined our conversation.  He’s about 30 years old and this is his first exposure to working for a large company.  We were talking about an ongoing project and some of the work we needed to get done and he seemed to get more and more agitated as we discussed our game plan and he began to understand his part in getting the work done.  During the conversation he mentioned several times that he thought his assigned tasks were beneath his level of education and experience, eventually declaring that he wasn’t going to do them because there was no incentive for him to do so.  After he walked away, my co-worker and I looked at each other as if to say “What the fuck was that about?”   

The incident got me started thinking about why he acted that way and I realized that it’s not his fault.  It’s my generation’s fault.  When we were raising our kids, we taught them to expect instant gratification every time they did something.  We told them they could be anything they wanted to be which, although it sounds good, just simply isn’t true.  On top of that, we gave them technology that makes everything happen almost instantly.  When our kids want to contact a friend or co-worker, they don’t call on the phone or walk over to someone’s desk.  They send a text message, email, Facebook message, tweet, Instagram, or whatever else happens to be the social media sensation that week.  They rarely talk to actual living, breathing people and because of that they don’t develop social skills or the ability to wait for rewards. The people we call entitled today were our children a few years ago. We taught them how to behave, so if we don't like it, then it's really our fault.

I said something in that last paragraph that may make some of you angry. It's the thing about being anything you want to be. We all heard it from our parents too, but the reality of the matter is that you can't just "be" whatever you want to be by simply making a choice. People are different and each of us is born with a different set of abilities, different temperaments, and different physical characteristics. For example, I couldn't just wake up one day and decide to be a pro football player. I'm too small and I don't know enough about game strategy to be good at it. I could learn the strategy, but I can't just decide to put on 100 lbs of muscle and grow six inches taller, so I've come to the realization that my parents may have been wrong when they told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I'm not mad about it, but I know I told my kids the same thing and they might be pissed off today that they're not astronauts because of something I told them a long time ago.

Anyway, back to the millenials. I think they are just as frustrated as us over the whole thing and that's what comes off as a feeling of entitlement. I work with people who are both older and younger than me. The older ones have mostly the same attitude toward work that I have and the younger ones seem to work more urgently and want to see the results of their efforts sooner rather than waiting for the results to appear over time. Not all of the things we do every day will produce immediate results. When you think about it, though, we all want the same things. We all want to make an impact, feel valued, and live comfortably.

I think it is our job to set reasonable expectations and provide reasonable rewards for millenials. Over time they will come to realize that some things take some time to produce rewards. It's not a one way street, either. Their urgency will raise the bar for us, too. Eventually we'll met them in the middle. Until then, I'd advise my generation to show a little patience and be open to changing our own habits to make things better. That's how beneficial change happens. Embrace it.