JOHN HAWKINS

Mentors must show new employees how they can succeed in their careers and live meaningful lives.

Your future employees will bring distinct perspectives on life and work to your company. Most believe that their companies are not loyal to them and therefore do not deserve a commitment of loyalty from them. Company loyalty to them is a nonentity.

Few students learn much about living out commitments.

Your future college graduate entry-level employees are in many ways the future of your company. The culture in which they have grown up has left its “work-life imbalance” marks on these young men and women. They know nothing good about organizational loyalty. Many have had to structure their lives for themselves. Dual-income families, day care, single-parent homes and divorce are descriptive of the families and upbringings from which many have come. Some feel that their friends are their family. Few students with whom I work learned much from their families about living out commitments.

They also grew up watching their parents lose their jobs due to downsizing, mergers, and computerization. Few of their parents took time to maintain strong commitments to civic organizations or religious bodies. Their jobs were their single commitments. Companies either took advantage of their parents or took their parents away from their families. These observations do not give them great motivation to be a “company man” or “company woman.”

Managers can either resign themselves to the belief that they live in a post-loyalty era or they can build trustworthiness in their leadership that earns loyalty. Their future employees will wait for them to go first in proving loyalty. It will be the managers' decision to either curse the darkness that comes from disloyalty or light a candle of personal and organizational trustworthiness.

This generation is in search of credible mentors—mentors who will complete what their parents left undone. For some, their parents were just not around much. For others, their parents failed to prepare them for future challenges. This generation needs experienced mentors who will help them understand how to face life challenges—not mentors who have sold their souls to the company and are trying to get the next generation to do the same.

Mentors should be aware of their protégées' need for guidance as they make their entrance into the corporate culture.

This generation suffers from entrepreneurial wanderlust. Bill Gates and Michael Dell are their icon leaders. Many students look at entry-level jobs as incubators for breeding networks and capital. Once they hatch these two things, they see little reason to hang around. They are dot.com wannabes looking for the next niche to fill.

The recent fall of some of the early dot.com meteors has given pause to their entrepreneurial ambitions. Perhaps the secure environment of investment banking or consulting companies might be a nice place to park for a while. Their managers, however, must live with the haunting reality that they might leave at any moment. These twentysomethings merely repress the entrepreneurial urge until the right situation comes along or until company policy becomes unbearable. Then they are “out of there.”

Corporate leadership must determine how to compete with the allure of dot.coms and other startup businesses. With those employees that leave to follow their entrepreneurial wanderlust, managers should maintain positive relationships with them while they are gone. The perceived warmth and security of your corporation may bring them back to you wiser and more appreciative.

Your future employees are to a large degree your future. Better get ready. EE

John Hawkins is the President of Leadership Edge, Inc. in Durham, N.C. Contact 919-493-6607 or e-mail at jhawkins@lead-edge.com.

Excellence in Action: Decide what you will do to attract and retain bright young employees.