Centennials, the first truly digital-native generation, has started entering the workforce. This generation is characterized as sharp, argumentative, with short attention span, is easily demotivated, and puts personal priorities and commitments over what the employer needs. How are CIOs planning to lead this new generation for the benefit of all involved?

Contributor

• • Earl Newsome, Vice President and CIO, Praxair

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Transcripts

Sanjog Aul [00:00:30]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and the topic for today is Leading The New Digital Native Generation, and I have with me Earl Newsome, who’s the Vice President and CIO for Praxor. Hey Earl, how are you?

Earl Newsome [00:00:47]:

I am outstanding. How are you doing today?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:49]:

Very good sir, very good. Thanks for having me. We would love to get some inputs from you on this interesting topic because we are going to talk about centennials, and and this is the truly, the first truly digital native generation who did not know what an analog phone is all about or a non-touch phone is all about, right? So you can think about that, and then these people at the same time are being also seen as folks who are very sharp, but they will be argumentative, they have a short attention span, they in some cases get demotivated easily and also they, some people say, I don’t want to grossly generalize this, but they say that they put the personal priorities and commitments over what the organization which they work with wants. So if we are looking at IT, and I’m sure this generation is not just coming into IT but even otherwise, but since it’s, we’re talking in the IT context and CIOs are supposed to build the generation, next generation of workforce which will support the new business priorities, what would that look like with these centennials? What will you do to help develop them and also how do you get them to create most value for the organizations? So that said, Earl, the first question comes where it comes is because we had similar discussions. I remember me doing couple of shows on this topic about millennials, and they also were new, not exactly the same behavior, but there was some similarities, and we are, till today, talking about multigenerational workforce related challenges and opportunities, and it’s not fully done yet as per some of the leaders who I speak with, but would love to see where do you see what’s your view on the state of multigenerational workforce integration?

Earl Newsome [00:02:49]:

I think this is a really great topic, and I’m very thankful that you’ve given me the opportunity to kinda give you my thoughts on it. The first thought I have on this stuff is, you started talking about the way we start to identify and segment parts of the generations. And we recall the Centennial in this native digital native generation. I will tell you that I think these segments of population are not just generational. They’re probably more individual than they are generational, and so we’ll see some of the things that you’ve described to the Centennial as being things I see in baby boomers, things I see in the aging populations, etcetera. So I think the degree to which a particular segment of the population exhibits these things changes, and the degrees and what individuals attend to these needs changes, but I think we’ve had these with us a long time. Short attention span, argumentative. I think we all know people like that, but I think when you start thinking about the millennials in this multigenerational workforce, I think that’s the real thing, and I think multigenerational not only deals with the digital natives that are entering and working longer, but also the 55 and older crowd. And so when I think of multigenerational, I think we’ve got to really span the entire set of generations because people are living longer, working longer. We have to deal with the 65 to 85 crowd as well as we have to deal with those of the Z generation and those that are starting to enter the workforce now, in the digital native, and so from an IT perspective, I think we have to recognize the individual nature of these human beings, and so as digitalization is driving hyper personalization, and we think about employee and customer experiences and then focus on the CX side. I think now we need to be focused on the EX side. So employee experiences are gonna be much more important, and we need to hyper personalize leveraging digital technology those employee experiences to those people who are entering the workforce now or staying in the workforce longer. I mean, those who are staying in the workforce longer may need special care in terms of having monitors that are bigger or less mobility options, etcetera, and so they’re working longer. So we can leverage technology to provide them better work experience as well as those native digital natives who are expecting a pure digital experience, and so with digitalization, we can provide that hyper personalized experience, and I think the nature of work in 2025, we’ll call it that even in 2035, we’ll start updating ourselves that way, is this hyper personalized work environment where we give workers more choice by giving them more choice between the work, the task that they need to get done, how they do those tasks, and the time required to get those tasks done. If we give them choice and autonomy, that’s gonna be the new way of working, and that’s the new nature of the workforce, and then that’s how I’m even doing it now with some of our millennials, just trying to give them some autonomy over that time, task, and function required to get the objective done, and so we still need as managers to give objectives, but I think in terms of how you get those objectives done, the more autonomy that you give the newer workers, the more engaged they are, and so to me, that’s the new world of work, hyper personalization, more autonomy, and that’s how we engage the millennials, and this hyper personalization extends to the older workers, as well. They need the same amount of choice, and we need to apply the same principles of customer experience mapping. We need to apply the same thing to employee experience mapping, and then maximizing the employee experience during their work day, and this work life integration, and look for those moments of truth in their experience in which to inject a digital capability to give them that autonomy over time, task, and function to accomplish specific objectives. That’s what I think that’s gonna be the hallmark of what work’s gonna look like in 2035.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:26]:

So I totally see the futuristic approach and frankly what the paint the picture that you painted looks very real the way we are going. Now bringing them these people today, of course, it’s good to show them vision for what 2035 is. On the ground, we are, as enterprises, not fully digital. Most of enterprises are not fully digital. So you are also carrying legacy debt, you got technology debt, you got system and process related debt. When you bring these people in, what is the promise? Are you going to tell them that, hey, you look in 2035, but today your work may not be the sexiest or the most most, digital, if you will, all the time? Because they would come with that utopic expectation. Are you going to disappoint them?

Earl Newsome [00:08:20]:

That’s great. That’s a great question. I think the world of work, while you’re right, we are talking about the vision and how it will change and they can actually help shape that vision. That’s part of the attraction. You tell them we’re not there yet, but we need you to help us get there. So I mean, that’s part of what they come to the workplace with is to help us navigate that journey, help people see the new world of work and embrace it. I think we also have to deal with, quite frankly, the forces that are against that and there’s some traditional forces whether it’s security, legal, HR, that have to modify their behaviors in order to really embrace this new world of work. That’s part of the journey to the future is changing some of those underlying foundational capabilities of businesses and modernizing them so they recognize this new world of work. This new direction of the world of work is that being okay. I think that’s an important aspect of this, and then I think on the ground, what you end up having to do is in circumstances where you can apply this new world of work today, you do so, and so what I call that is allow for freedom and innovation at the edge. So at the edge of our organizations, whether that’s in small departments that are operating at the edge, close to the customer, close to the plants, close to the operations, where we allow a little bit more autonomy typically in most businesses, that’s where we do it, and so I call it freedom at the edge, and by you come into our organization, I encourage you to demonstrate freedom at the edge of this autonomy over time, task, and function to accomplish your objectives, and leveraging digital capabilities to do that. You’re amazed what you can do. It’s almost as if you’re embracing shadow IT, which I think is the right thing for businesses to do, but embracing shadow IT within IT. So I call that freedom at the edge, and I’ve had some really great examples where freedom at the edge has led to some amazing discoveries, and deliverables and products and services that were created leveraging that freedom by millennials.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:32]:

So, you know, so let let’s look at the current IT and business landscape. So one is to say, okay, Centennial, because you’re coming, I’m going to start thinking differently, but then we also have to normalize against the other generations that coexist and also have to map it back to or rather balance it with what expectations that the workforce overall is having from us. Do you think a baby boomer who’s almost retired, I’m sure for the most part, Gen Xers are getting into that retirement age, and we are trying to press more novel ideas and more innovation, cross training, up training, and and their family systems are changing. So there are a lot of moving parts. So what would you say is the workforce’s expectation from us, let alone Centennial, because they are joining the mix, and they will just create a wrench in the system if you were to think about to be too different, but what is the current workforce asking from us?

Earl Newsome [00:11:44]:

I mean, I think that’s a great question, but I also I’ve been thought about this question and been asked before, but when we look the current workforce and we balance that to the largest part of the workforce, which is the millennial and the new interest into the workforce, which is going to be even greater, you begin to see that the power shift has already happened. It’s almost as if what does the establishment, just taking politically, from what is the establishment need from those that are now entering the political landscape and what their demands are and their voices are being loudly heard, and so I think the same thing is happening in the workforce is the millennials and that emerging workforce and the centennial voices will be exceptionally loud, and so what does the existing workforce need from that is I think they need to listen, and so we as baby boomers etcetera and maybe Gen Xers need to listen to that larger segment of the emerging workforce because their voice is gonna be loud, and they are the ones shaping the future of work, and so we have to listen to them. I think with the aging population, and this is where I believe in this notion of hyper personalization and personalizing employee experiences across the multigenerational landscape, that’s the gonna be responsibility of management to ensure that our legacy workforce is also taken care of and having positive work experiences, and so those characteristics which identify where which people identify as successful as Gen Xers or as baby boomers and what motivates them, Those are the things and the experiences that we’re going to offer to those employees to provide them whether it’s more job responsibility, whether it’s the opportunity to refresh or retool themselves, whether it is taking IT professionals and giving them some more business content and creating more business professionals out of our legacy IT people because they bring a lot of value to that, and it is certainly them in business roles, where they can expand their capabilities and their responsibilities and their impact on the businesses that they serve. I mean, those are great opportunities to personalize the experience for our baby boomers and Gen Xers, and so I think if we again take this notion of digitalization, which allows us to hyper personalize the consumer experience, why can’t we apply those same principles to the employee experience for the multigenerational aspects of their experience and then let digitalization really move that. So again that may mean more flexibility for the older workers. It may mean the ability to work more remotely from your summer home or your winter home. It could be in some different place and why don’t we enable that, etcetera. So I think, there’s ways for us to look at the employee experiences and look at these various personas, not these various employees from the various generational aspects and then create experiences that match those generational aspects and then maximize them in our marketplace, and so what we do, as leaders, it’s our responsibility to ensure that every employee is maximizing their experience, which therefore leads to higher engagement, which we all know leads to better productivity and business outcomes.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:29]:

So Earl, when when you mentioned about this new, generation coming in and the whole organization trying to accommodate them and in that process we want to shift things. Do you think if we are going to put focus on whosoever is new, are we unknowingly cannibalizing on the otherwise effectiveness of the existing segments of the workforce?

Earl Newsome [00:15:56]:

Well, I don’t think so. I think we have to pay attention. We have to listen to those voices because this is the new workforce, but when we personalize these work experiences for all of the workforce, then I think we’re optimizing for the entire population. Again, this hyper personalization, the concept which we do for consumerized products, we can equally do for the employee experience, and so, I think this is a big call for corporations, to think about the hyper personalized experience for employees irrespective of generation and then mapping those desired experiences to those outcomes. I think that’s how you do it, and so hate to say this, but I think you have to treat individuals as individuals, and then, if you treat them as individuals, then I think you’ll get the maximum output from them for your business, and I’m reminded of Daniel Pink’s Drive, in this notion about how do I really maximize creativity and innovation and productivity from individuals. I do that by giving this autonomy over time types and function, and so, when we give our employees that autonomy, and the appropriate levels of that autonomy based upon their generational individual needs, I think we can maximize that, and we won’t suboptimize, and maybe more to your point, we won’t suboptimize the contribution of other groups, and so, through this personalization and hyper personalization on the employee front, we actually will optimize the contribution of all groups and not suboptimize any of them.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:48]:

So when we are looking at the centennials and you are, trying to develop them, and I’m not saying you’re bending over backwards, but then you you want to get them to become the best they can be. You have a very, you know, good motive behind that. At the same time, as a business, you want to get value from them. So are we almost like as parents spoiling the children by giving them whatever so that they never complain, but at the same time we are are we also disciplining them or or looking at ways for them to play their role what they are supposed to, but let’s before we get into it, let’s take a quick break, listeners, we’ll be right back and discuss, and this is for centennials, who we are trying to develop and also help them create the most value in return for the organization. Please stay tuned.

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Sanjog Aul [00:20:51]:

Welcome back. So, Earl, as I mentioned that we, as parents, would like to give the world to our kids, and that we feel are responsible. So similarly, when we are saying, okay, these are the next generation of the future, so we should offer them whatever flexibility, and we should change to help them feel at home, if you will, right, if that’s what I would I wanna call it as a family, but then there is also a reality, a business reality, where they need to deliver versus having us dance to their tunes. Not saying that they are, but that could be a way of looking at it. So what’s your response to, or to the deliberate intentional balance creation that, yes, we should take care of them and, yes, we should develop them, But there should also be a way for us to balance the equation where we’re saying, is organization benefiting from your contribution?

Earl Newsome [00:21:54]:

Right. I think that’s an important thing, and I do want to address this notion of do we cobble, our pay heed while we listen to their voice, do we have to follow that direction? I think we ought to be Centennial and millennial inspired, not necessarily driven, because you’re right, we have the responsibilities of our older population who are probably more likely to be owners of our companies and stockholders and managing and running businesses who are our customers of the businesses that we offer. We have to support and deliver against those needs as well. So I even say the whole things about customers. We need to be customer inspired, not customer driven, and so, the customer may not always be right, and so I think when you think about millennials and you think about the centennials, they are the new workforce. They have their desires, but they may not always be right, and so we need to be inspired by them, not driven. So that means we have to have our own responsibilities, and we know that, even as you mentioned from the family situation raising our kids, we growing up, we knew the older we got, the smarter our parents became. I think the same thing will happen with the Centennial and the workforce is that the older they get, and we see that right now with the older millennials. They do realize that the Gen Xs did and the baby boomers did know what they were talking about. So I think we’re seeing that in the maturation of some of these millennials who are running companies who realize that you do have to pay attention to stakes, the stockholder. You still have to pay attention to the marketplace, and some of those fundamentals ring true, and so I think as we look at the workforce, these fundamentals ring true, and we need to teach the folks the fundamentals, and I always talk about a particular principle which I call taking care of soldiers, which means that you don’t take care of a soldier by coddling them. You take care of a soldier by making sure that they’re equipped well, they’re trained well, and they’re practiced well. I think we owe that to our employees, that we make sure that every employee that enters workforce, Centennial included, that they’re trained well, they understand what it takes to run and maintain and deliver value to our customers and our business that we train them well and we practice them on doing that in a safe entire zone, and we give them all the right equipment to get that done. Now that equipment may change over time as we become more and more digital, but the training and practicing on how to do things the right way and delivering value to our customers is fairly consistent. So, I think that’s what we owe them. So I think we should be inspired, not driven, and we owe teaching the new entrance into workforce the fundamentals of good solid business practice.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:02]:

So one is to be able to say, okay, you know, let’s kind of have them also step up and play the game the way it is supposed to be played and create value. So when we just let’s kind of paint a picture about the different generations that exist. So you got baby boomers on their way out, Gen Xers for the most part, senior to mid management, and then millennials getting into management, and centennials replacing the younger millennials. Each of them, as generations bring a certain way that they think they act, the way they prioritize, the way they make friends or create that team dynamic, and also the way they perceive work life balance. HR policies, how people work with each other. The policies and our so called playbook on how to run an organization is not created, at least I’ve never seen a customized playbook by generation, and if you don’t customize, that means you’re not doing the best you could for that given type of workforce, not grossly generalizing, but maybe a category based personalization. So are we giving lip service to this multigenerational customization and not doing something in practice or is there another thing which I’m not aware of?

Earl Newsome [00:26:27]:

That’s a great question, and I sort of mentioned that in the earlier part of our conversation that we have to bring everybody along, and when we think about what the IT group can do, we can bring digital services, we can bring those kinds of capabilities, but it does take a fundamental shift in legal, security, and HR to fully embrace the multigenerational needs of an aging population and an emerging, youthful population as you mentioned with their different priorities, etcetera. So we have to pay attention to the fundamentals, and in our inspiration of thinking about Centennial policies, we’ve got to really look at our HR because they share more typically. So in the sharing economy, in this notion of the migrant worker and they’re talking about job hopping becoming more of a reality than it had been in the past etcetera. So when we recruit, now the expectation is to have more experiences than less. I think these are the things that are gonna have to be part of our inspiration as we look to new policies, new ways of grading, new ways of determining who’s likely to be more variation, and then less, and so that means we have to adapt our policies. We have to adapt our procedures. We have to adapt our management style to embrace that, and I think that that’s just going to be part of what it’s going to take to keep them engaged, and so I think you hit on the hardest part of this whole journey is how do we adapt these policies and procedures to accommodate in some of our legacy companies, to be more digital native sensitive and inspired. We don’t need to throw them out, but we need to let them be inspired and create maybe this new form of multigenerational policies, and that we have multigenerational policies which are respected among the various generations. We don’t have multigenerational values. The values of the organization needs to be consistent. The culture of the organization needs to be consistent, but I think some of the policies can vary based upon generational needs, and so, like, we think about policies that can be localized by country, or localized by geography or localized by industry. Now we need to localize them by generation, and I think that’s a great idea.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:22]:

So given on the ground so let’s take your organization, for example. In your department, just within your department, that you had to come up with a playbook of generational cross generational camaraderie and policies. What would be your request to your HR and your management so that you get the most value for these people and also you come across as someone who truly cares for people?

Earl Newsome [00:29:55]:

Again, I think that’s a great question. In the way that my request to our HR population would be that we have to work on creating this and we’ve done this in the past job rotation programs and those kinds of things. So as we bring the new generation in, we’ve got to formalize our job rotation programs kind of around, you know, they need to be driven by the corporations. We need to formalize the ability for self training and self teaching and mobilization so that they can mobilize and work independently. I think we need to formalize our policy around and create environments and I like what some of the French organizations are doing, going from workplace to workspace, and this is a great concept called the workspace where if you think about in your own personal home, you have a room where you go read, you have a room where you go listen to music, you have a room where you eat, you have these places, these spaces in your home which should typically make you more productive doing a particular task. I think we have to be flexible in our work environment, and companies should create these workspaces that are designed to allow individual choice for people to go and maximize their productivity, and I think we need to have policies and procedures, and environments that are optimized for employee choice, to choose the space where they choose to go work, and so, I think that’s an important capability to add. I think from what we’ve done, as from a department, absent of something going on from an HR, legal or security standpoint, I think individual managers have to encourage, again, what I call this innovation of freedom at the edge where we get individual productivity, and freedom from some of our new entrants into the workforce to go and see a particular problem or opportunity and solve it locally. We’ve done that and, actually, globally, and the specific example was in one of our organizations in South America. We have some great talent that has gone out and done some interesting things about improving the ability to use digital technologies to improve order entry for a particular segment of our business. It’s fantastic. It was done by a millennial, a young millennial who took the initiative on their own to go in and pursue this particular digital opportunity, and then was able to translate some value for the local organization and ultimately was seen and shared more globally, and so I think when you encourage this innovation of freedom at the edge of your organization and you enable that to happen, that shows people that you care, that shows them that you care about how they think and how they operate, you can give them an objective, and I think that’s also part of our responsibility of not just of being inspired by them, but also giving them objectives which are useful for the business to achieve and then giving them the independence to go achieve that on their own, and so, it’s just a great example of that, and I think if we can formalize those kinds of things and reward people for those individual contributions on this hyper personalized level, I think we’ll get more engagement from those centennials and young millennials who, as you mentioned, are moving into middle management, and if we teach them those kinds of capabilities, then the new workforce will be even more empowered to do what’s right for our customers, what’s right for our employees, and what’s right for our product and services.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:07]:

So on the ground, since we have been dealing with a similar centennial type situation or like a new workforce coming in like millennial, a little different but not a whole lot. So if you were to go back on your previous experiences dealing with them and the type of requests they made and the type of concessions or accommodations you did and how you got them to feel that you care, and how did you get them to deliver the value that you were seeking? So what world for you which you think you can leverage even for this new generation?

Earl Newsome [00:34:44]:

Yeah. I think that’s where I go into this notion about taking care of soldiers, taking care of employees. I think the biggest thing that I think you can do is really three things. First of all, this is sort of taking care of the employee. Do that in the millennial, do that in the Centennial, give them the tools that they need to get the job done, train them on the use of those tools, and then allow them a safe place to go practice the use of those tools, so that they can learn about how that gets done and how the value gets delivered, and, you know, we call this notion of smart failures and I call them learnings, and I think we gotta give our employees, especially the Centennials, an opportunity and they’re used to this project based learning as education has changed the way that they’ve been taught, this project based learning model. I think we take what the colleges are producing and start to leverage this project based model. I think we can do the same thing in corporations, embracing the new generation and give them project based learning, and that’s the way that we tool, equip, train, and practice them to get them really productive in the workforce. That’s number one. Number two is I think as leaders, we have to be strategically, tactically, and technically confident. I would encourage all of us to think about strategic competence and that means knowing which direction to go, so helping set the direction. Again, that’s our objective, to set the direction for what we want these millennials to do and for them to contribute to the workforce, then Centennial as well. I think after that, we have to be tactically confident in which we set forth the steps that they need to go through to get this done while giving them autonomy, but we can give them a way to think through a framework, if you will, of how to think through how to solve a particular problem, and then lastly, I think this is the most important thing is this is this technical competence, which just means don’t be afraid of centennials. Roll up your sleeves and work with them, and that means I’m just a glad sponsor of some FIRST Robotics teams, and you go there and you meet these growing centennials, who are building some amazing things, and starting to be prepared in the workforce. Some of them on these FIRST Robotics teams are building organizations that have vice presidents and general managers of sales on them, etcetera, and they’re building corporate structures even in high school, to participate in some of these exercises, and so you roll up your sleeves and you go work with them, and you’ll be amazed not only what you can teach them, but what they can teach you, and I think if we do that, we can fully embrace them, and get them ready for the workforce and then ready us for the next generation.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:01]:

So here, when you actually went ahead and worked, the strategies that you tried to accommodate, how much of that do you think are transferable to the Centennial Challenge from what you did for millennials?

Earl Newsome [00:38:16]:

I think it’s pretty much 100% transferable. Again, I think you personalize it for that particular generation, but I would say you do the same things. You gotta make sure that you set forth the, you train practicing well. You get involved from a leadership perspective since the strategic and tactical and technical directions, and then lastly, I think Centennials want to be seen as a valuable contribution. So you gotta give them valuable things to do, and so I would say that’s actually the third thing is to ensure that you give them valuable work. In the army, we called it be all that you can be, and we do more in the morning than most people do all day. I think that applies to soldiers and it applies to employees. So everybody wants to be all that they can be, and that’s the way we get the most of the workforce, and then we gotta give them more to do than most people do all day. So they wanna be challenged, and so, you know, I think it’s a personal kind of thing for me, but I think it’s also an opportunity for management to always try to make sure your workforce is productively engaged.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:28]:

Now, looking at your, the outcome that you are being asked to deliver, and even that is shifting, how much of an impact will it have in terms of your ability to deliver when the different generations that are coming in, especially this new generation, while on the surface they are digitally native so they should understand things properly, but they may have their own quirks which you will take time to handle or learn how to handle. How does that prepare you? How well prepared do you feel with the infusion of these multigenerational things plus the changes in the expectations from the business?

Earl Newsome [00:40:13]:

Well, I think they’re matched. There’s a critical thing and I call this a six word story. It’s their ambition, your ambition should match. And so when you think about what’s happening with business, the ambition of business and the digital ambition of business is growing. Every enterprise, every industry is starting to express their digital ambition, and I think that digital ambition is going to move more into the exploration side and less in from the kind of optimization side. So we go from optimization to exploration of our business models, of our products and services, and I think the gradual shift to this exploration so we can generate growth is part of the business outcomes that are going to be a hallmark of 2019 and beyond, and I think if that’s what’s happening with the outcomes and the expectations of businesses for us to do more exploration around improvements in visualization in our products and services, and employees, then there’s a perfect match with their aspiration to help us do that. So when you match the Centennials’ aspiration of providing those kind of digitalized hyper personalized sets of services, products and experiences to the business outcomes which are being driven by the same ambition. When those match, that’s where we see magic, and so, I see the outcomes that are being driven today being tightly aligned with those of the Centennials, and so with that, I think you’re going to get hyper productivity, but at the same time, in order for us to really take advantage of that, we have to be hyper inclusive. So I think about diversity, I think about inclusion, but those two things are necessary. The diversity of the workforce, the diversity of the generations is a necessity in our organization so that we could really understand what our customers need, but we need to include that diversity in order to gain the value of it, and ultimately, we need to collaborate with that diversity in order to create the value that’s required by our customers, and so to me, it’s diversity plus inclusion plus collaboration equals the creation of value. Then that creation of value ultimately will translate into better business outcomes for everyone. So I think that’s the formula.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:04]:

What do you think is the kind of leadership mindset shift you will need to embrace and other leaders will have to embrace so that whatever you did with millennials, that’s fine, and things are not getting any easier or straightforward. They are going to come in different forms and passions, and plus on top of it, you’ve got these multiple generational shifts that are happening. What would you do in yourself, a shift in yourself which will allow you to come across and also in true sense be the leader you need to be so that you lead the charge and be the Pied Piper taking these multiple generations in the direction the organization needs to take them to?

Earl Newsome [00:43:52]:

That’s a great question. When I give this challenge out to executives and especially executives in IT organizations, I give them really three challenges. Number one, I think we need to embrace our peculiarity. By that, I mean IT folks and IT organizations are considered the geeks, whether it was a pocket protector or the high water pants or doing skateboards in Silicon Valley to show that we’re creative. We are considered the geeks of what’s in the business unit. So let’s embrace that peculiarity and go out there and embrace the Centennials first. So one challenge is, let’s embrace the Centennials first. Bring them in in that diverse, inclusive, collaborative model. I said to my technology professionals let’s go be the first and best collaborators with the Centennial. So I challenge all my technology professionals to go be the first to embrace our geekness, and use that as they would expect us to be the first to go embrace Centennials because we are the geeks in the organization. The second thing is I think we need to help drive out any bias in the process. Bias in algorithms, and this is a digital challenge. We gotta drive out bias in the algorithms and bias in the data, and so we’ve gotta make sure that we aren’t using stale or non inclusive data to help drive these very important business decisions. We as the IT people and the technology professionals can really help the organizations drive out that bias in either the algorithms or the data that they’re using within those algorithms to produce business results, and so let’s take on that challenge, and I think the third thing that we need to do is raise our own personal digital IQ, and we do that through the old reverse mentoring program. Find a Centennial, find a high schooler, and spend some time understanding how they think, how they operate, train yourself. Again, I think it’s a mentoring, mentee kind of opportunity for you to raise your own digital IQ to understand that is possible, understand what they’re thinking, what their drives are, but also help train them on the fundamentals which are important. So I think those are the three things and those are the things that I would do and am doing, and I think those are essential for preparing us for the future workforce.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:53]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much, Earl, for sharing your insights on how organizations can invite centennials in, help them develop, and in that process also help them deliver the most value to the organization. It was a great insightful conversation. Thanks so much.

Earl Newsome [00:47:10]:

Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:11]:

And listeners, please like us on Facebook, search for CTN, CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, and we have a LinkedIn community, and we have podcasts on almost every possible syndication platform. So please subscribe and give us your feedback. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.