Excerpt of a YouTube video in which Simon Sinek discusses perceived entitlement among younger generations entering the workforce. He argues that increased connectivity and early access to information and skills (technology, personal branding, social media) give newer workers apparent self-confidence that can be interpreted as entitlement, while also noting their lack of life and workplace experience.
We always accuse the older generations of being stuck in the mud and, you know, not willing to change. And we always accuse the young generations who want to break everything and that they think they know more. That's old.
What's new is the entitlement thing that seems to be relatively new. There's some interesting reasons for it. One, it's a very connected generation, obviously because of the Internet, and they actually have more awareness of what's going on in the world and have access to unlimited amounts of information, obviously. But if you think when we started our careers we were, I think, objectively speaking, idiots, you know, like, we came into the workforce actually knowing nothing, right? And so we had no choice but to defer to those who had more experience so that we could learn to advance our careers, because we actually knew nothing and we knew we knew nothing. This young generation that's coming in are starting work on day one with a knowledge of how technology works, how personal branding works, how social media works, and they're actually bringing a skill set that sometimes those at work don't have. And so I think what it does is it produces sometimes a warped sense of value. When I show up on day one for work, which is I don't think you realize what you're getting here.
And sometimes blinds them to the fact that though those things are true, I also need you to learn all these things and you have no life experience yet. And so I think that the way we interpret that is entitlement. Young people are bringing the sense of apparent self confidence to the workforce, learning very quickly that work doesn't work the same way as school, which doesn't work the same way as your parents taking care of everything for you, which doesn't work the same way, we may not need those skills today. We need other skills that what you find is that it can be quite traumatic and you'll find that a lot of the self confidence that they.
Show is actually false. And it's actually a very insecure generation that struggles with coping mechanisms. And we're seeing that in rises of anxiety, depression, and unfortunately suicides as well. And lacking those human skills that we talked about before, so necessary for people to feel confident in work. So I think all that is required, quite frankly, is empathy. And though it would be nice to demand that they have empathy for us, that we actually have gone through a little bit and have seen a few things in the world, that's less likely to happen. And we're supposed to be the older, more experienced ones. So I think we have to lead we have to show empathy. That doesn't mean agree. That doesn't mean that we can't hold them accountable. But we have to learn to try and understand the life that they have grown up in, which is different than the life we grew up in, and that affects their worldview and their behavior.
