The Elephant in the Room: Why Lazy, Entitled, Job-Hopper Is A Useless, Inaccurate Perception

What do these negative perceptions sound like? Consider the following phrases, questions, and comments I often come across in my interactions with corporate leaders, including HR:

? They are lazy, entitled job-hoppers.

? Why do we have to pander to millennials?

? They need to be babied and hand-held.

? They want to be handed everything without putting in the work.

? We’ve given them more than we had and they still aren’t satisfied.

? They think they can just walk into a room with the CEO and gain an audience.

? They don’t have a sense of decorum.

? The millennials are the same as everyone else. They want what everyone wants.

? One day, they will have to grow up and be driven by money and the same things that everyone always has been concerned with.

These are the prevailing perceptions, spoken or unspoken, every time a young person is invited to interview, every time a new hire starts, and every time a young colleague is promoted to a management position. As Eric Hoover wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Such descriptions are reminders that most renderings of millennials are done by older people, looking through the windows of their own experiences.” These perceptions are wrong and fundamentally damaging to employee engagement, workplace productivity, and positive culture-building.

It’s not enough to know the business impacts of these negative perceptions. To create a blank page for understanding millennials, we need to address the elephant in the room up front with two key arguments against today’s top prevailing negative perceptions: that millennials are lazy, entitled, job-hopping, need to be hand-held, and have issues with authority.