A simple thought for this week: if you’re a young worker coming into an organization with policies — whether they involve start time, sick days, internet use, music playing, dress code, whatever — that you don’t agree with, don’t just demand that exceptions be made for you because that’s the way you like to work. Instead, start by doing work, and doing it incredibly well. Show off those abilities that make Gen Y a force to be reckoned with. Make yourself uniquely valuable. The best way to get exceptions to longstanding policies to be exceptional.

Because employers are wary and only getting warier. John Barwis of the Holland Sentinel in Michigan in a in a familiar-sounding column called “Generation Y meets real life” writes:

Our Generation Y professionals regularly met in groups to share and track each other’s salary and performance-bonus information. Many expressed the feeling that everyone should receive the same bonus, and that it was impossible or even unethical to differentiate performance. Where did they learn to expect reward for effort rather than results?

I believe as much as the most militant member of Generation Y that old work paradigms need to die off to accommodate this new generation at work, but when you get away from that macro level and down to the micro level, it does become all about results.

Does this require sacrifice on the part of young workers? Sure. In some organizations, it could require many years of sacrifice. (And in some organizations, due to institutionalized bureaucracy and lame duck management, differentiating yourself could prove impossible — or dangerous. But let’s not go there now.) But, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t need to be that difficult.

Even with the economic downturn, employers across the globe are hurting and will continue to hurt in their search for qualified people. That initial period right after you get your foot in the door is CRITICAL, because if your boss or manager starts to see you as expressly and keenly qualified for your job (and, hey, it doesn’t hurt to make it clear that you’re qualified for OTHER, more important jobs within the organization, too) suddenly you’ve made yourself very valuable. You’ve become a rare commodity: a talented knowledge worker in an era where fewer exist.

Don’t screw it up. Remember that, until you define yourself in your organization, there’s very little difference between you and the five candidates they interviewed but DIDN’T hire. So don’t go in and start making even reasonable demands in week one. Because while you know your skill level and know that you, say, can get just as much work done listening to your iPod or working four ten-hour days as opposed to five eight-hour days, your boss doesn’t.

Start slow. Remember the order of operations. Prove to your employer that he or she doesn’t want to lose you, then start defining (with your employer) the work environment you’d like to have to ensure a positive, long-lasting employment. In short: be exceptional, then start asking for exceptions.

Photo by Wayne’s World 7. Licensed under Creative Commons

The aforementioned post by Ryan Healy sparked off a whole bunch of comments, as posts on Brazen Careerist tend to do. One, in particular, by a poster calling himself ‘jrandom42′ sparked some thinking.

The comment:

Bluntly put, nobody gets a free pass on anything, until they can prove to me that they can deliver results that positively affect my goals and bottom line.

In other words, show me you why deserve these exceptions from what everyone else has to adhere to, and then we’ll talk. And it’s still not guaranteed you’re going to get any of them.

I think this is a dangerous attitude that’s been cropping up a lot as this Generation Y hysteria works its way through businesses. It’s almost as if there are three stages of reaction to Generation Y in the workplace.

It tends to go:

1. Shock & Outrage – “When I was your age, I was damn lucky to get the job I had! I worked sixty hours a week breaking chunks of coal with nothing but my forehead. And at the end of the week, when my boss came by, I said THANK YOU.”
2. Dismissal – “Ha ha, whatever you say, kid. You just wait until you get a little older and see what’s out there in the REAL WORLD. Then you’ll be singing a different tune!”
3. Begrudging Acceptance – “Okay, sure, whatever. If you want to be a lazy jerk unlike EVERYONE ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF WORK than I GUESS you can have some slack. Provided you prove yourself to be a model employee under our current structure first. I’ll do you a FAVOUR.”

I think getting to stage three is enough for a lot of Gen Ys. Even though it comes with some passive aggression, at least your boss or manager is giving you the freedom you need. And, sure, it kind of sucked to have to slog through energy- and morale-sapping months to “prove yourself” but, if you’re creative and talented, you got through it. And then you were able to develop a situation that gave you at least some of the work-life balance and structure you were looking for in the first place.

But this isn’t how it should be.

Generation Y is not asking for special treatment. We’re not asking that you give us freedoms that other employees don’t have. Absolutely, things need to be broken down based on the type of responsibility of each job — if you’ve been hired to answer phones or paint cars, you probably can’t work from home — but that doesn’t mean things can’t be flexible, equitable and universal. Everyone who works for you should be afforded the same arrangement, within reason.

Quite frankly, this is the only way it can work. If you start letting your 23-year-old employee go home early because that’s the way he works best, your 10-year-veteran sales person who likes to stay a half hour after work hours just to show the bosses how dedicated he is (this is absolutely GROSS behaviour, by the way) is probably going to get upset.

Which tends to be where it gets complicated.

Look, I’d never argue that management is simple. With multiple generations in the workplace, it’s only going to get more complicated. But going the easy route, where you set blanket policies and only give flexibility when your younger employees demand it, is not a viable solution. To truly make the intergenerational office work, Generation Y needs to accelerate change for EVERYONE in the office, not just themselves.

Photo ‘Office Hours’ by shawnblog. Licensed under Creative Commons

So you’re Gen Y and you want to advance in your job quickly. That’s fairly typical. We’re known for our bullheadedness, after all. But one of the drawbacks of ‘moving up’ the corporate latter is that you inevitably end up spending more of your time managing the people underneath you and less of your time writing, designing, and doing other creative tasks.

There’s a twisted kind of logic at play here. As you accumulate more responsibility within an organization, other people get hired underneath you to take on some of the work you were previously doing. Often this is the creative stuff: the report you were writing, the new branding you were working on, the idea you had for a blog on the web site. Get that stuff off my plate, the rationale says, and then I’ll have more time for… managing the people doing that stuff.

This can be bad for you professionally — especially if what made you stand out in the first place was your ability to handle creative tasks — but, more importantly, it’s often bad for you personally. Nothing is more satisfying for a creative person in the workplace than actually sitting down and creating something. Developing ideas and making them real. Seeing that whole process all the way through. It all has tremendous value when it comes to making you feel like what you do actually matters.

So as you move up the ladder, don’t give away all your creative tasks. Often, you’re forced by a time crunch to step away from that sort of work for a while, but do not make that a permanent thing. Whenever you get a chance, step back into the creative realm and remind yourself what it feels like. Your own professional morale just might depend on it.

Photo by laffy4k. Licensed Under Creative Commons