BrainTrust Query: Teenagers Have Changed - What it Takes for Them to Succeed in Retail
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail Doc blog.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, "What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?", Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, finds a lot of "teenage weirdness" happening as puberty kicks in earlier and earlier, and teenagers take on adult roles later and later.
She said, "In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence." These skills were learned with the guidance of adult supervision.
She added, "When the motivational juice of puberty arrived, you'd be ready to go after the real rewards, in the world outside, with new intensity and exuberance, but you'd also have learned the skill and control to do it effectively and reasonably safely."
Today, even the basic skills kids would have learned while supervised by an adult regarding cooking, care-giving, and accompanying jobs like baby-sitting and having a paper route have disappeared.
Consider her statement that for "most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27."
We have many smart young people, but research is showing they haven't had the right experiences to shape their brains for success as adults. Now more than ever, that's being left for the first retailers hiring them for those first job experiences.
Today's teenagers have been raised by a generation of parents providing instant gratification for their every want and need. Their connection to life experience in the outside world isn't there. They don't know 'mediocre' from 'excellent' because this generation has been raised to believe that as long as they do the work, they should get an A.
Retailers hiring them need to show those teenagers the difference between 'mediocre' and 'excellent' and what it takes to excel. We need to hire kids who are trainable and then reward their ability with supervision that goes beyond simple task management.
If we call on them to multi-task, we need to train them to be excellent multi-taskers. Your training program will only be successful if you begin with the basic skills they missed before moving on to the more advanced skills and — just as importantly — before they are left on their own.
As long as retailers can give challenging real-life experiences with a degree of protection that comes from engaged supervisors, we can give these young people a path to success, not just a part-time job.