Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
I have a challenge for my fellow baby boomers: Quit maligning the millennial generation. It seems to be a favorite pastime but it’s both unattractive and short-sighted.
It happened again on a panel I attended recently at Faegre Baker Daniels law firm in Minneapolis, where Steve Hockett, CEO of Great Clips, offered this variation of the petard:
“Yeah, the world’s changing. Some of these millennials drive me nuts. Just work harder. But generational change is here as well as ethnicity change.”
Here is a Minnesota-based chain of 4,300 franchise haircut salons, which depends heavily on hundreds and hundreds of stylists who must be drawn from—wait for it—the millennial generation. It’s not smart to hold such a condescending attitude, much less express it. But I hear this type of thing over and over again. At the same time, I hear those same executives lamenting the labor shortage, and how horribly difficult it is to attract and retain staff members.
These two things have got to be related.
Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Minnesota-based Anytime Fitness, the 24-hour gym with more than 4,000 units, offered a lovely counterpoint and one that aligns very closely with how I feel, as a big fan of younger people on my staff and elsewhere. Runyon, though, expresses the idea much more elegantly than I could.
“I love the millennials and Gen Z, they make up our club staff. They’re going to be better leaders than us; they have to be. They have more interest in stakeholder value creation than shareholder value creation,” he said.
But the real prize should go to Tam Kennedy, who owns eight Taco John’s stores in Minnesota and Iowa, and actually tears up when she talks about the care and training she puts into her front-line staff — most of whom are unskilled teenagers.
“Tacos won’t make themselves, and I’ve seen the hamburger-making robot and I get all of that,” she said on a panel about managing through conflict. “Our higher purpose would be to put people to work, so we’ve got to get past this thing that I hear a lot, that there’s a work ethic thing.”
She strives to ask each person about what they could learn from her, whether they work at Taco John’s for a short time or a long time.
“I start by asking young people as young as 15 years old, what do you want to be when you grow up? Certainly, they say they want to be paid to put things on YouTube,” she said with a laugh. “I say that’s awesome, who’s going to be your accountant? I say, ‘let me help you with how to handle money, so somebody won’t steal your money from you.’
“I’ve always found with our young workforce, we teach the three things they need to do anything: how to manage money, how to manage people and how to manage inventory.”
I think her attitude is right on point. You get out of your workforce what you put in.
If you’re still not convinced it’s time to drop the millennial-bashing act, how about this: An audience member at the event cited Nielsen data released in July indicating that Gen-Z, those born between 1997 and 2015, who are coming of age at this moment, are now 26 percent of the population and the largest single segment.
Time to quit bashing and start teaching, and even perhaps learning.
