Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Just reading....

....some of the online coverage about Ivan Henjak's sacking as coach of the Brisbane Broncos NRL football team.

I found this quote interesting:

"Henjak may have been tactically excellent but the players felt he lacked empathy. Coaching the Generation Y culture requires great sensitivity because many of them are acutely sensitive and take criticism badly."

Hmm. What is going on when the fact that people are bad at taking criticism is used to sack a coach? I thought that was his job, to provide criticism to help them improve.

It just made the players sound like a bunch of whingers. Suck it up, people. Sometimes criticism is what's required. (although maybe I should admit here that my tendency errs towards being very sensitive and upset when I am criticized).

The Gen Y angle was interesting. I don't know that this behaviour is limited to Gen Y since as I have pointed out, I am a little like this myself. My experience with Gen Y types in workplaces is that if anything, some of them can be less sensitive when it comes to things like turning up on time, pitching in to help out when others are busy and volunteering for projects. They like having lots of leave and finishing early though. Sometimes it seems to me as if they view work as just somewhere they can turn up when they're not on their overseas jaunt/hike up some snow capped mountain range/surfing trip.

Perhaps though, like the comment in the article, this is a gross overgeneralisation about the behaviour of this particular generation.


1 comment:

Meredith said...

I haven't done a whole lot of reading or thinking about the Gen Y thing but I wonder if most of the characteristics that describe them are actually just characteristics of young people generally. Were Gen X-ers and Babyboomers like this in their teens and twenties? Will it all go away for Gen Y-ers when they are all ten years older and the responsibilities of life really take hold? Or have Gen Y-ers been SO thoroughly labelled that these characteristics will stick in a self-fulfilling prophecy? That would be an awful shame because they don't get described too favourably.