Shawnee Love   •  
March 2, 2011

Over the last few months, I have found myself recommending my clients tell one or more of their employees:

Careful what you wish for!

It seems many employees who are newer to the workforce (ahem Millennials or Generation Y) expect everything but don’t realize Newton’s law applies in business as well: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In layperson’s terms, you have to give to receive.

I hear about these young people badgering their bosses for management status and titles. It doesn’t stop there, they want the commensurate salary for a manager and even refuse to do the more mundane business tasks such as filing, cleaning toilets, and getting coffee that more experienced members of the team realize are just part of keeping a small business running. Then, when the shit hits the fan, those same “managers” expect to leave at 5 PM like all the other employees or get paid extra to stay.

I have one client whose “manager” doesn’t want to be responsible for the operations while on general duty and wants extra pay for being responsible when the owner goes away, not realizing that a fundamental capacity of management is…

you guessed it, being responsible.

I am not making this up. Responsibilities of a manager are outlined in law (BC example attached). The next time your employees ask you for more money while they are managing, you might want to mention the alternative:

making less money while they aren’t managing.

Obviously, you don’t want all your millennials to quit, but I am so sick of the entitlement mentality without having a clue about what responsibilities come with all that entitlement. Feel free to handhold and mollycoddle but for god sakes, don’t give in. It just makes it worse for the rest of us.