Supervising Net Gen

Forget top-down management. To harness the potential of young employees, you'll need to collaborate and give them lots of feedback

By Don Tapscott

Editor's note: This is the sixth in an eight-part series (BusinessWeek.com, 11/30/08) of Viewpoints by author Don Tapscott, who draws on the $4 million research project that inspired his new book, Grown Up Digital, to explain how digital technology has affected the children of the baby boomers, a group he calls the Net Generation.

Earlier this year, I sat with Best Buy (BBY) CEO Brad Anderson in a typical meeting with a roomful of managers. He did something that fellow CEOs might find unusual. He let a 23-year-old employee, Adam Mulder, speak passionately and at some length about changes he thought would improve sales of media products for the consumer electronics retailer. Throughout Mulder's speech, Anderson took notes and asked thoughtful questions.

It was a small but telling example of how you have to manage young employees these days. Forget the old system of top-down supervising. If you want to hire and keep young people, you have to collaborate with them. What's more, it's worth it, because these kids have the quick, collaborative reflexes to help companies stay in business, as Best Buy has done.

"The Net Geners we hire have enormous knowledge, unprecedented information, and facility with tools that in some areas is superior to their seniors," Anderson explains. "They've got a difference that produces unique insights. The future of this enterprise is dependent much more on him than on me."

Youth Culture Comes to Work

Most of Best Buy's retail employees are between ages 16 and 24. These kinds of employees have changed the job of management for Anderson. It's not about supervising employees anymore. It's about creating a context that lets young people like Adam Mulder be successful. Besides, to Brad Anderson there is another practical reason to listen: "If I were to shut him down, he'd tell someone and soon everyone would know that I don't listen," Anderson says. "He can shut me down as the CEO. Having power means something very different than it used to."

Anderson is listening carefully to these young people, and more CEOs should follow his example. It's because the culture of youth, the young people who've grown up digital, may well become the new culture of work and the high-performance organization.

Look at what's happened to work. It's become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time-pressured, more reliant on technological competence, and more mobile. It's less dependent on geography. A growing number of firms are decentralizing their decision-making. Instead, people are communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, rather than following old-fashioned lines of authority. They're embracing new technologies that give employees the power to communicate easily and openly with people inside and outside the firm. In doing so, they are creating a new corporate meritocracy. It's sweeping away the old hierarchical structures and connecting teams of individuals to a wealth of external networks.

Interactive Employee Relationships

The Net Generation, young people in their 20s who have grown up digital, is perfectly positioned for this kind of work. Having grown up digital, they expect to collaborate, wherever they are. They insist on speed. They're innovative by nature. They think work—the work itself—should be fun and challenging.