When people are suffering, some will seek to regain a sense of control by blaming others for their misfortunes. The French blamed the monarchy; the Spanish Catholics blamed the non-Catholics; Gen X blamed the corporations; Gen Y blames the Boomers.

Indeed, according to Madeleine Bunting from the Guardian, Boomers enjoyed free school meals, free education, relatively uninterrupted long-term employment, and government-supported state pensions. Generation Y, on the other hand, has had to pay for its education, racking up an average student debt of £25,000. Graduate unemployment is a whopping 14%, with many scrabbling for exploitative unpaid internships, and there are over three quarters of a million 18-24 year-old NEETs. Job security is yesterday’s myth and state pensions will shortly be meeting the same ends. This mollycoddled generation, as it turns out, has been given a pretty rough deal.

Of course Baby Boomers – being the ones in power – have had a hand in this, not least their focus on personal freedom resulting in regrettable actions, such as deregulation of the banks. But this Boomer-bashing by Generation Y feels excessive, going beyond objective criticism into emotive scapegoating. For example, Ed Howker and Shiv Malik’s book, Jilted Generation, is described as ‘a tirade of fury’, which blames the Boomers for their children’s plight. This points to a generation mourning the loss of the great life promised by its Boomer parents. The shock having worn off, Gen Y is well entrenched into the anger stage in the grief process[1].

Anger is a high energy emotion and in work this may manifest as increased tensions between the two generations, with Gen Y resenting both Boomers which retire (yet another pension to pay for), and Boomers which stay on (I can kiss that promotion good-bye). Gen Y employees may become more argumentative and resistant to orders from Boomers managers, or may employ passive aggressive methods, such as agreeing to do work and then not doing it. Morale is already at an all-time low within companies, and such behavior will only cause further damage, which is not good news at such a fragile time for businesses.

According to Kubler-Ross, who first observed the five-stage grief process (shock, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), the best way to manage and move on from anger is to comfort the suffering and let the anger flow, essentially providing an outlet, so allowing the anger to burn itself out. Indeed, I’ve noticed a marked increase in Facebook status complaints about work, which echoes Business Week’s Asher Adelman’s comments that workers need online complaint forums as an outlet for their dissatisfaction at work. This doesn’t mean that Boomer leaders should let pissed off graduates be disrespectful. It means providing such online forums and off-line workshops, wherein Gen Y can both share their concerns and potential resolutions around cross-generational conflicts; offering mentors and coaches to whom Gen Y can express their upset and be comforted; and encouraging Gen Y to take up more sports activities, so they can literally burn off their anger.

Turning a negative emotion into positive action will help Generation Y move on from anger towards acceptance, rebuild relations with the Boomer managers, and even help the business become stronger, as morale improves and productivity increases.

[1] The stages of loss are: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. 

Apparently ‘science is the new art’ amongst Generation Y, yet there is a distinct shortage of science grads…Maybe we’re all talk? Or is that ‘dork’?

Which generation is more creative? Gen Y Gaga, or Boomer Bowie?

(Image by Markus Nielsen)

As a Generation Y, I’m actually quite surprised at the lack of creativity amongst my peers. You could argue that, hey, we’re under 30, with many of us just leaving university; what could we have possibly achieved as yet?

Let’s look at the other generations, shall we? Einstein came up with his theory of relativity when he was 26; Darwin had developed his theory of evolution before he was 30; Martin Luther King Jr became a civil rights activist, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he was 26; Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 20; Tim Berners-Lee proposed his concept of hypertext (which led to the invention of the internet) when he was 25; The ‘Google Guys’, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their company when they were 28 and 25, respectively. The list goes on.

Ok, so Generation Y has Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of online community mammoth, Facebook, but that’s it, really. So, what’s going on?

In 1958, Professor E. Paul Torrance designed a series of tasks to test for creativity in children. He also discovered that, like IQ, ‘CQ’ has been rising steadily in children since then. Until the 1990s, where it started to decline and is declining still. This worrying fall in creativity has been blamed on the over-structuring of activities and the prevention of allowing children to fail at school, thus inhibiting opportunities for kids to experiment and learn things for themselves. This over-nurturing of our young is smothering their creative potential, and is terrible news for businesses, which rely on innovation to grow.

Will Generation Y be the first generation (of potentially many) to have few world-changing innovators? Unless parents, schools and government trust their children to work things out for themselves and encourage creative thought, then we may well be building a world where people are too risk-averse to innovate.