Smells like team spirit

Older generations always have a tendency to believe that those coming up behind them are different from them, if not actually inferior. But not since the 1960s "flower children" enraged their elders has a group of young people attracted such interest as those dubbed part of "Generation X". And now that this category is starting to make its mark in the workforce, that fascination is - if anything - intensifying.

The influence of the "baby boomers" who preceded them is said to be most apparent in all those television programmes and advertisements featuring former radicals settling down in the suburbs with their children and four- wheel-drive vehicles. Gen Xers, by contrast, are mostly associated with "grunge", "slacking" and a general antipathy to the go-getting that characterised the 1980s.

But it is increasingly being suggested that this is not true. Bruce Tulgan, an Xer himself, has in his book, Managing Generation X, set out to demonstrate that his counterparts are just as ambitious as the rest of us; it is just their approach that is different. Based on interviews with young corporate lawyers, hospital doctors and other high achievers, the book stresses that these people are in fact so keen to get on that they are often not prepared to wait in the way that their predecessors were.

Jay Conger, executive director of the University of Southern California's Leadership Institute, has come up with his own analysis of what makes this generation tick. Supporting Tulgan's contentions, he describes in the latest issue of Strategy & Business, the journal of the management consultancy Booz-Allen & Hamilton, how Coca-Cola joined the ranks of those who thought this was "a somewhat unmotivated, cyncial group of nihilists". In 1994, it introduced a drink called OK. The can was grey and the label read "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything" and "What's the point of OK soda? Well, what's the point of anything?" The product bombed and was soon withdrawn.

What the company realised then was that this group was very much in tune with the new rules of the workplace. "What we are seeing," says Conger, "is a different set of attitudes about the workplace. In a nutshell, they distrust hierarchy. They prefer more informal arrangements. They prefer to judge on merit rather than on status. They are far less loyal to their companies." And, as the first generation to be raised on participation and teamwork and to be confident about computers, they "like money, but they also say they want balance in their lives."

In fact, he adds, Generation X is less a complete break with the baby boomers than a continuation of the changes that their predecessors began. As a result, in their attitudes towards authority and towards organisations, these two groups are distinct from the innumerable generations that went before them.

And in order to get the best out of them, older generations will have to be far more perceptive. "If you can provide the younger people with challenging projects, respect their needs for independence and create workplace communities for them, they will reward you with something quite rare - dedication," Conger says.