SBA

Management Changes

A Generational Timebomb 

Most senior managers are aged. It goes with the territory, senior management / business leadership positions in large enterprises are rarely occupied by people under 45. Irrespective of talent it takes time to accumulate the experience necessary to repeatably make sound decisions, walk in the other mans shoes etc.  Over the past few centuries of industrial development this has been of minor significance, the pace of development and change is something that the more matured have been able to keep up with, but the rules of the game are changing.

Our current generations of leaders, managers and staff have grown up to a greater or lesser extent in the Microprocessor Age, and this varying exposure is to become increasingly significant over the next decade or so. 

A senior manager, typically aged in his or her mid-forties onward, left school without having touched a computer, For my part, when I left school in 1978, computing was not part of the educational curriculum, the school did not have a computer, however the Science Department did have an arrangement whereby interested students could send punched cards off to the University of Kent for processing on the mainframe there. I first handled an early personal computer in 1980. Two years later I landed my first job in computing, working for a computer supplier. While the primary focus of the business was industrial automation using custom-built microprocessor based systems, we were also sales agents for Acorn Computers, selling the Acorn Atom and BBC Model B microcomputers. At the same time Sinclair was starting to achieve success with its ZX81 computer, to be followed by the more powerful Spectrum.

So I, born in 1959, grew up without computers. Yet someone 5 years younger would possibly have encountered computers at school, probably a BBC Model B or similar. If they were of a technical bent they might even have had a computer at home in their late teens. When we come to consider people born 10 years later than me, in 1969, leaving school in 1987, they would have almost certainly been required to use computers occasionally at school as part of their science studies, and the technically literate amongst them would have been likely to have possessed a home computer for the major part of their teens. Students 20 years younger than me will have had extensive school exposure to computers, and a strong likelihood that there was a computer at home even if they were not aspiring technocrats. The youngsters leaving school today have been weaned on computers, having continuous access from an early age, they are expected to complete their homework on computers, use the Internet as an information resource, communicate with friends and family via e-mail, instant messaging and social networks - todays young employees have grown up never knowing a world where computing was not commonplace.

So what? I am a technocrat, a very early adopter. My peers, my co-directors and senior managers in Sales, HR, Finance etc. are not. They have, to a greater or lesser extent, adopted computing during their working careers; it has been forced upon them by our continual struggle for business improvement and competitive edge. Working with computers is not "natural" to them: they are less comfortable with e-mail and video-conferencing, they prefer to meet and discuss face to face. They do not think of process with computing built in - they design business process and then ask - how can we automate this with IT? They are at odds with distributed organisations, they prefer a scenario where everyone works together in the same offices under direct supervision.

The managers of tomorrow will not be the same. Adept with e-mail and Social Networking, they will be comfortable in the management of distributed organisations, with many of their staff working from home or in small "hub" office facilities, they will naturally adopt the "Virtual Corporation" model of working that is currently in its infancy. When envisioning new business process they will imagine it executed through the facilities of IT from the start, they will generate business process solutions which integrally utilise IT instead of trying to bolt it on as an afterthought. We can see these trends clearly emerging now. I am uncomfortable on Facebook - I can use it but I have no empathy, I don't "get" how to express myself within it, I rarely log in. My daughter, already a senior manager in a public sector organisation, is on it every day - almost religiously - touching friends who she may not have seen for years but with whom she is maintaining contact and ongoing relationships. The technology generation gap is starting to show, even to me.

It's going to become more and more obvious over the next decade. We will be appointing managers whose ways of interacting with people, whose working modus operandii, whose concepts of process are entirely different to ours. As business owners and directors it is going to be a challenge - we are going to have to accept, like it or not, that they will work better, produce more, be more effective if they are allowed to do things "their way", however alien it may be to us. Management is going to change, it has started, the pace of change is going to increase, and we must ride with it, adopt it and exploit it in order to flourish during a transition, a business transformation, that is going to take around 15 years to work through.

The challenges won't all be organisational either; while we will have to accept these as they develop, our organisations will still be communicating with, dealing with, customers - some older with little IT literacy and the expectation that the world is face-to-face, and at the same time some younger whose model is more Facebook-to-Facebook. The younger generations of management that we will employ in the coming years won't necessarily understand how to communicate with their older customers, they will have to be guided, mentored and overseen to ensure that they address both sides of the technology divide. Only when those of us in our forties and fifties are pushing up the daises will the technological generation gap be closed again.