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.
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions: Do you agree that training teenagers at the store level is more of a challenge today than in the past? What do you think retailers must change in their training programs in order to make younger store employees successful?
Cynics have been saying that the “younger generation” is a bunch of boobs since the days of Socrates. Yes, some kids have been spoiled, but I don’t think that’s much more true today than it was when I was a teen. The kids are alright. Some older folks, in charge of the teens, may need some training and attitude adjustment themselves.
I must confess, I have recently stumbled across a lot of articles that take on some of the parenting techniques that have resulted in the current generation of teens — helicopter parenting and the like (a helicopter parent, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, hovers over their child and swoops in to intervene at the slightest issue). I’ve seen this type of parenting in action, and the kind of kid it creates, but I’m really dismayed if the issue is big enough that retailers need to come up with training programs to combat them.
If it is this big, this will put retail in a really tough place — I don’t think, as a general rule (there are exceptions), that retailers invest nearly enough in employee training as it is. If we’re going to have to take on not just training how to be a retail employee, but how to be an ethical worker in general, well, the only conclusion I can come to is that maybe we need to rethink the right profile of a store associate, because in most cases, they already need to be better informed, and better at delivering customer service, than ever before. That doesn’t sound like the right mix for a first job for someone who thinks “showing up” is achieving success.
Warren nailed this one. Today’s teens are far better at multitasking than their parents. Most of the teens I know have worked. Yes, Gen Y is different than Baby Boomers, just as Boomers are different from the generations before them. And just as new hires need to adapt to the culture and expectations of a company, companies need to adapt to the culture and expectations of the new generation.
Are teenagers harder to train? Absolutely.
There are, of course, highly motivated teens who are eager to learn and work hard. Unfortunately they are in the minority. Our current educational system has produced a generation of kids who have been taught that having a high sense of self-esteem is far more important than being able to add, subtract, read, and write. They enter the work force with the same expectation that, however indifferently or ineptly they act, they will be rewarded. They have little curiosity about what it takes to succeed.
The first step in addressing this begins in the hiring process. There needs to be formal testing to identify and weed out individuals that clearly aren’t interested in hard work. Next step is to actually have a formal training program. New associates should be hired on a probationary basis and successfully complete this program before they become associates. As obvious as this sounds, there are very few of these programs in place. Thirdly, all rewards, both financial and psychic, must be tied directly to specific tangible goals. Finally, it must be understood and continuously reinforced that, unless the associates demonstrate the specific skills required, they will not become associates.
This is a huge challenge facing all industries, not just retail. Many industries are setting up and funding education programs of their own to try and develop qualified, motivated individuals. This is something that more retailers should think about.
I agree with Bob’s comments. Young people today are spoiled easier by their parents than in previous generations. The same goes for their physical fitness too. There are too many young people with too many electonic gadgets doing too much individually. They are not taking advantage of developing social skills needed to survive in any work environment, much less the retail environment. Until the parents stop giving credit for “showing up” rather than performing, little will happen to change this.
Seems that training teenagers has always been a challenge. I’ll always be grateful for patient adults who provided training and coaching when I was a teenager in my first set of jobs, and I still find myself using practices I established back then.
I don’t think the issue is the changing teenager as much as the changing environment for experienced workers — more starved for time, stretched further than ever, dealing with a retail environment caught between ultra-competitiveness and very educated consumers, and fewer retail training programs than ever.
There’s much more magic for today’s teenagers in innovative technical whizartry than in retail’s rather uninspiring replenishment tasks.
The challenge is retail’s. Change the retail paradigm or sweat the teenage training program.
There are three options here.
1. Only hire teenagers who have been taught the value of work. For years I have been saying the most important question you ask in the interview process, no matter what the position applied for is, “Tell me about the very first thing you did to earn money.” If they have never had those learning experiences, they are going to need a lot more coaching.
2. Hire teenagers but make sure you set the rules up front and have well trained managers to work with them. You have the responsibility to teach them accountability and responsibility.
Or, 3. Be like most retailers hire a body, any body, and complain about what you get.
I totally agree with Bob on this one! We boomers have created a generation of kids who expect instant gratification with minimal effort.
You would think that having experienced that kind of service would make them aware of the need to provide that type of service to others. Well, they apparently don’t have a clue and in most cases don’t care.
We’ve created a monster that will be hard to tame and harder to train.
There’s definitely some truth to the idea that today’s youth has been shaped, in part, by “instant gratification.” With the influx of technology and the value placed on media and pop culture in American society today, kids are able to find and acquire things almost right when they want to.
But, there are pros and cons like with any situation. If we’re specifically talking about on-the-floor retail jobs, what about introducing digital technology into the mix to, one, enthuse young workers and, two, take advantage of their multi-tasking, technology-based skills?
There is such a need for mobile apps, social media, digital technology, etc., in the retail space. And I’d venture to say teens and twenty-somethings would be the most proficient people to hire to incorporate this new wave into business.
Look to the positive traits of this generation, and leverage their skill sets to revamp your operation.