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My So-Called FiLife: Bruce Tulgan

Today’s post comes from Bruce Tulgan, an author, consultant and expert on careers, management and inter-generational relations in the workplace. He’s also a genuine, certified FiLife Guru. Like other FiLife Gurus, Bruce will be contributing articles to the site, answering questions on career and other topics and helping in innumerable other ways. But we’ll let him introduce himself further.

After law school and the bar exam, I went to work at a Wall Street law firm in the fall of 1992. I was struck by the fact that, with few exceptions, the more senior lawyers in the firm didn’t have a clue how to manage people my age, those known as Generation Xers (those born 1965-1977).

Don’t get me wrong, they are among the finest lawyers anywhere, and I have great personal affection for many of them. They just didn’t know how to bring out the best in the twenty-somethings who worked for them.

Severely misunderstood by those in charge, I and my peers at the law firm suffered in unhealthy management relationships. Of course, these relationships were the most common topic of discussion over lunch.

We laughed about one senior lawyer who was in the habit of summoning young associates to his office with a three word phone call:

“Get in here!”

One friend of mine was so angry about the way she was treated that she kept a journal in her top desk drawer noting the insulting remarks directed at her each day. She left for another job before too long.

Some partners expected us to assume extraordinary responsibilities with little or no training, while others kept us on a leash so tight there was no way for us to actually do our work. I spent three days in Dallas working on a corporate deal with a senior partner who was so unable to disentangle himself from my duties that we were actually tripping over each other in the conference room were we worked.

When I was getting ready for bed in the hotel at night, I remember thinking to myself that he was going to come in and tell me how to brush my teeth.

I began to wonder about the relationship between all of this discontent and the widespread claims being made about my generation in the media. Is it true what they were saying back then about Gen X? Were Xers in too much of a hurry for success? Not willing to pay our dues? Were we really the slackers we were made out to be in popular culture?

So I started investigating the work attitudes of Generation X. Soon after my first book, Managing Generation X, was published, there were more news stories about the book than the number of books that had been sold!

Companies started inviting me to speak at their conferences, train their managers, observe their operations, interview their leaders and conduct focus groups with their employees. At first, I was focused exclusively on generational issues. I’d go into a company, interview their young employees and then hold a seminar with the leaders and managers to share what the young employees had to say.

Over the years, it became increasingly obvious that something much larger was happening.

The traditional, long-term, hierarchical employer-employee bond was morphing into a short-term transactional relationship. In the last several years, workers of all ages have been making it clear that without credible long-term promises from employers, they are no longer content to labor quietly and obediently in a sink-or-swim environment. The less faith they have in “the system” to take care of them in the long term, the more they expect from their immediate supervisors in the short term.

Still, we all need to face up to to the fact that somebody’s still got to be in charge. Those people hold employees accountable. Employees do not have the “power” to do things their own way in the workplace. They’re not free to ignore tasks they don’t like. They’re not free to do as they please. Rather, employees are only free to make their own decisions within defined guidelines and parameters that are determined by others according to the strict logic of the enterprise at hand.

That said, responsibility without sufficient direction and support is not empowerment. It’s downright negligent.

In our training seminars, when I start talking about these hard realities of the real workplace, employees and managers alike start nodding their heads and listening carefully. When I tell them that I don’t have any easy answers because easy answers work only in fantasyland, more people start nodding.

Then I promise them that I do have lots of very hard solutions that will take lots of guts, skill, time and discipline to implement. That’s when they know that I really have something to offer them. All I do in my seminars is teach frustrated employees and managers to copy what the most effective people are actually doing every day.

That’s what I’m going to try to do in my role on FiLife. I hope it’s helpful.

Be strong…

– Bruce Tulgan