Page 88 - Retaining Top Employees

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76 Retaining Top Employees

Prepare Yourself!
The expectation of Gen-Xers that their managers should
mentor and coach them has caused a crisis of confidence in
managers in recent years.The enormous growth in training in mentor-
ing and coaching skills is a direct response to this demand. Many man-
agers feel threatened by what seems to them to be a change in the
rules of the game.
To prepare for an increase in Gen X employees,first prepare your-
self!
Develop your mentoring and coaching skills. Don’t wait until the
demand is there and the skills are needed immediately: nothing makes
learning a new skill more difficult than doing it under such pressure.
We’ll examine the role of the manager in retaining top employees
in Chapters 9 and 10 and the role of mentoring and coaching in
Chapter 11.

above—a belief that personal and career growth should be a
given, not an earned bonus, and a desire for their views and
opinions to be heard and taken into account. Gen-Xers look to
their manager for both—and top performers, in particular, will
not be satisfied with less.
Conversely, Gen-Xers do not react well to being micro-man-
aged by their bosses. Unlike Boomers, who will expect a degree
of oversight from their managers, Gen-Xers respond poorly to
the supervisory aspect of managing. They expect their man-
agers to trust them to do the job and then judge them by the
results, rather than to herd them toward a desired outcome.
(This is not to say that such an attitude is always reasonable or
correct, but merely to point out that Gen-Xers can experience
difficulty with the authoritative aspects of management while
responding well to mentoring and coaching.)
Work Relationship with Peers
With the increase of Gen-Xers in the workplace, appreciation
has grown for the potential of peer relationships—peer mentor-
ing, peer coaching, peer review groups, peer quality control.
Boomers have a pyramidal, top-down, command-and-con-
trol mindset. Gen-Xers think laterally and, when faced with a