Mark Murphy surveyed over 32,000 people across generations and found millennials rate their own writing and communication skills lower than any other age group. They're also least comfortable discussing pay with managers. The data contradicts the stereotype of narcissistic millennials.
So we've all heard the media reports that millennials, those people 18 to 30 years old, are a bunch of deluded narcissists and just destroying our workplaces.
And the media says that they're lazy, that they're entitled. A recent article in Time magazine takes a sharp poke at the millennial generation. That's the generation born between the 1980s and early 2000s. The COVID calls them the "me, me, me generation" and describes them as lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.
But we at Leadership IQ have some new data that may debunk this a little bit. As one of our ongoing studies, we've been over the past few months surveying over 32,000 people from all age groups. And as part of this study, we asked people to evaluate, for example, their communication skills, their writing skills, their presentation skills. And here's what we found. When we asked people of all generations to evaluate their writing skills relative to their peers, What we found was that millennials actually rated their writing skills relative to their peers lower than any other generation. Now, if you were a raging narcissist, you'd say, "On a 7-point scale, I'm a 7 out of 7. I'm absolutely fantastic." But when you look at the numbers, what you see is the millennials don't do that at all. When we asked people to rate their communication skills, again, we found the same thing— sharply lower scores for the millennials relative to any other generation. Again, if you were a raging narcissist, you'd rate yourself a 7 out of 7. Instead, we're talking about scores in the 4s, hardly the mark of a deluded narcissist. We've also been told in the media that millennials are very comfortable walking in and just telling HR and their bosses that, "I need a raise 'cause I'm so darn special. Come give me everything." And when we asked people, "How comfortable are you talking about your long-term compensation goals with your leader?" Again, millennials come out as the least comfortable talking about money with their bosses. So far from this group of deluded narcissists that are saying, "My skills are better than absolutely everybody and I should have more money because of it," what we find is in the workplace, a great many millennials are saying, "No, my communication skills aren't actually all that great. My presentation skills, my writing skills, and you know what? I'm not all that comfortable." talking with my boss. I'm much less comfortable than any other generation in talking to my boss about how much money I should be making. Now, does that mean that the conflicts that we often have between boomers and millennials in the workplace, between a late 40, mid-50-year-old boss and a 20-something-year-old employee, is just magically gonna go away based on this data? Of course not. Those issues still exist. So if you want to take a look and learn a little bit more about this, I invite you to attend our upcoming webinar called The Science of Managing Millennials, where we're going to take a data-driven approach. We're going to get past all the media hype and we're actually going to dig in. What makes millennials tick? Where is that parent-child conflict actually coming from? How do we break away from that? We're going to look at how do companies like a Google, for example, manage to give millennials a great sense of purpose while still achieving world-class productivity. So if you're interested in digging more into the data and getting some real tools and techniques, join us on The Science of Managing Millennials.
