Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, 3rd Edition

NEW PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND UPDATED THIRD EDITION

I wrote this book with a clear mission: To help leaders and managers—mostly those who are older and more experienced—bring out the best in their newest new young workforce.

We have been hard at work on that mission since 1993, when I first began the research that led to my first book, Managing Generation X, about bringing out the best in those of my own generation when we were the new young workforce. Even as Gen Xers have aged, our work on that mission has continued, based on what is now decades of ongoing research tracking the attitudes and behavior of the ever-emerging ever-“newer” new young workforce.

We began tracking the first-wave Millennials (born 1978–1989) in the late 1990s, when the second-wave Millennials (born 1990–1996) were in diapers. And as the second-wave Millennials were coming of age in the late aughts, we were already trying to figure out where Generation Z begins (after 1996) and followed them into the workplace beginning in 2013 or so. As the pace of change accelerates and the generational cohorts get smaller, we've kept our finger on the pulse of each new emerging young workforce through many twists and turns.

Of course, there are some things about being young and new in the workplace that do remain much the same from generation to generation. Every new generation has its own unique formative history and comes into the workplace challenging—often inadvertently—the current status quo in new, unexpected ...