Social Media Roundup: Your Challenges Are Bigger Than Millennials

In the blame game, playing the generation card is easy. Millennials have been accused of having tech-addled attention spans and a sense of self-importance, but when looking for the real source of problems, the answer often lies within. That and more in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Look inward

https://twitter.com/socialfish/status/522401777165934592

Jamie Notter  (opens in a new tab), a partner at Culture That Works LLC, thinks all the fretting over millennials is bogus. There are bigger issues at work, he argues.

“Start focusing on how the entire economy and society is shifting, yet organizations are staying the same. That’s the real problem. The entrance of the millennials may be highlighting the problem, but they themselves are not the problem,” Notter writes in a blog post for SocialFish  (opens in a new tab).

Instead of shifting the blame externally, he advises organizations to look inward and examine their outdated processes.

“Everyone in every industry complains that the pace of change has gone through the roof. Yet we’re still using management techniques that were invented in the 1930s,” Notter writes. “Our structures, our ‘leadership development’ activities, our approach to organizational culture, and the way we collaborate internally are out of date, and we’re not changing fast enough.”

Notter’s post echoes our own thoughts on the emerging generation, who are often (wrongly) lumped into a stereotype. To adapt an old saying, if you can’t beat them, accommodate and evolve with them. (ht @SocialFish  (opens in a new tab))

The Good News About Negative Feedback

New from Spark: we already talked about good WOM, but what about bad WOM? http://t.co/YoEJQ20OHU  (opens in a new tab) (h/t @sernovitz  (opens in a new tab)) #assnchat  (opens in a new tab)

— Elizabeth Engel (@ewengel) October 15, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Once your association makes a name for itself and is presented to a larger audience, one thing is inevitable: You’ll get negative feedback. With attention comes criticism, and all the good word-of-mouth you earn will be accompanied by dissent.

But as Spark Consulting CEO Elizabeth Weaver Engel reminds us in a blog post  (opens in a new tab), “That doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly follow every single suggestion that comes in…but it does mean you should think about whether there is a nugget of truth.” (ht @ewengel  (opens in a new tab))

(martiapunts/ThinkStock)