August 31st, 2010 | 1 comment | Unfiltered

I’d like to thank Andrew McAfee for an inspiring post on Generation Y (and/or Millennials, whatever) in the workplace. The guy is a principal research scientist at MIT and this little article was in the Harvard Business Review blog – he’s kind of a big deal.

That being said – while I can appreciate his ability to call our generation out on two qualities (or, maybe flaws, rather?), I disagree for the most part. Yes, there are a bunch of people in our generation that are “that guy” that McAfee describes, but I am hard-pressed to sit here silently as he generalizes about an entire generation. And to McAfee’s credit, he did write a post about how our sharing habits can help organizations, which is also worth a read.

The first flaw McAfee points out is that we’re all oversharing, all the time: “one of the knocks against Generation Y is that they’ve been encouraged to believe that everything they say and think is interesting, and should be aired and shared.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and argue that we aren’t the only ones. I don’t disagree that we overshare. We do. But it’s not just Gen-Y, it’s Generation-Internet. This is just one of the ways social media is changing human behavior. Oversharing is not limited to anyone born after 1980 (or whatever year you’ve chosen to represent Gen-Y and Millennials for this article, as it seems to be changing from person to person, but I digress). It’s not just limited to Facebook and Twitter updates, we’re oversharing on location-based services like Foursquare as well. We’re taking pictures of everything we eat, some of us to show how fortunate we are to be eating at awesome hot spots around the world, some of us to show off our culinary creations. As one commenter mentioned, their aunt overshares on Facebook every day. I know colleagues and friends, past and present, younger and significantly older, that do this via Twitter, Facebook, their blog, whatever. It’s not limited to just Gen-Y/Millennials.

The second thing we’re faulted for is believing that everyone in the workplace is equal. I’d like to point back to our SXSW panel on Gen-Y in the Workplace, and recall that by and large, a good portion of our generation is interested in working “with” people, versus “for” them. It’s a new mentality, a new approach to the way we spend the decades of our life spent in the workplace. Take that how you will, some people don’t believe in boundaries, some people don’t believe in titles, but, in some companies, that is becoming more and more accepted as Gen-Y starts to infiltrate these organizations. At the end of the day we want to work with smart people – whether that smart person is an intern, a member of senior management, what have you.

Personally, I’m fortunate enough to work with an organization that provides me with the opportunity to share brain waves with smart people from the top down. Yes, there is a level of organization and hierarchy within these four walls, but I hear on a consistent basis from several members of senior management that we (junior staff) shouldn’t be afraid to utilize the resources (people senior to us) that are available to us. Of course we shouldn’t go prancing into their office and demand that they carve time out right then and there to listen to us, but we shouldn’t be shaking in our boots at the thought of sending them a quick note asking for some time when they have some available, either. At the end of the day, we’re all people. We all have experiences to share. Kum-bah-yah and all that.

It’s been awhile since we did one of these – if you’re Gen-Y, do you respect the hierarchy at your organization? Better yet, does that hierarchy exist or are you working in an organization that is becoming “flat” as opposed to the vertical ways of yesteryear? Are you a member of Generation-Internet, oversharing at every possible moment? Are there flaws that Millennials bring to the workplace that McAfee didn’t cover?

And, for more on Millennials and all that jazz, check out PEW’s massive report: Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change. 149 pages of Digital Native/Millennial/Gen-Y goodness.