A quasi-parental relationship may be one of the keys to successful management of kids, say many experts. Rick Beaudreau, a bartender at Spit, says a balance of closeness to and distance from employees is a key reason for Lyons's success. "He's almost like one of the guys, but he's not one of the guys," Beaudreau says. Lyons suggests two ways of making the paternal relationship with employees work. First, explain how to do a job even if the employee insists he knows how. "Young people say, 'Yes, I know that,' when they really don't know,"Lyons says.
Second, always explain why something is important even when it seems obvious. "It doesn't work with kids just to say, 'Do this because I say so,' " Lyons says. "If I just say to a floorman [an employee who ensures that order is maintained in a section of the nightclub], 'That's your station; stay there,' he'll stay until he sees a pretty girl nearby." But, Lyons goes on, if he explains to the employee that he (Lyons) could get sued by a customer who steps on a glass that the floorman wasn't there to pick up, "then he will do his job."
As in parenting, a key problem is remembering the limitations of kids while still demanding that they act as responsible human beings. Managers can easily err by giving kids too much special treatment. Particularly in organizations where the young or unskilled worker is the exception in a professional work force, managers often feel guilty because the kid hasn't "had the advantages" of the other employees and may manage accordingly. The results can be disastrous.
One consultant gives the example of a well-established financial services company almost brought to its knees by the actions of a 19-year-old mail clerk. Mail delivery was terrible almost from the day he arrived, and the boy was constantly loud and abusive, especially to female employees. "He was very rarely told to shut up," recalls the consultant. "A small portion of the company thought he was funny, and he sort of performed for them."
Cassette tape recorders, calculators, and other small objects disappeared, but managers concluded that people outside of the company were responsible for the thefts. Practical jokes annoyed the staff constantly; trash was dumped on desks, and pencil shavings were left in coffee cups. Some employees, convinced that the mail clerk was behind everything, attempted to force the issue. He was brought to the president's office and urged to improve his behavior. The warning had no impact. Finally a practical joke caused a valued female staff member to become hysterical. "I just can't stand it here any longer," she cried. "I actually don't feel safe in my own office." Shc announced that she was leaving the company.
The general reaction at first was, "Try to calm her down. See if we can talk her out of it," recalls the consultant. At first no one said, "We've got to fire the mail boy." But the chairman, who had joined the company just a few months earlier, saw the issue clearly. "This is insane," he said. "We're about to lose one of our most valuable employees because of the guy in the mail room. We've got to fire him." He fired the clerk. Practical jokes and petty thievery came to an abrupt halt.
"The managers in this company still felt that they had 'failed' this guy -- that they had somehow not been able to reach him," says the consultant. "But it's clear that the problem wasn't failing to appeal to the kid's sense of values, which he clearly didn't possess, but failing to set and enforce limits, to say what was and wasn't acceptable behavior. "
Says Dr. Herman Staples, a past president of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, "A job has to have structure. It shouldn't necessarily be structured more for a young person than for other employees in a similar position, but you have to expect a young person to test it more. Not getting in on time is the most common way. And with money, whatever you give them, they'll want more. It's the same kind of conflict a kid has with his parents about his allowance."
Giving kids too much special treatment, at the expense of enforcing a certain level of discipline, is what Herbert Kleinegger feels sank his efforts to employ young people. Kleinegger took psychology and management courses a few years before he launched Jobert C.N.C. Machining Inc., in Pearl River, N.Y. "I had a vision," Kleinegger says about his decision to start his own business. "I thought I could train people for the industry. I would hire young employees, and in five years they would run the company for me and I would retire. I made speeches about working with the young."
Today, Kleinegger is deeply disillusioned. Of the 66 youths he has hired over the last four years, all but 4 are gone. In retrospect, he admits that when he hired kids he was so preoccupied with "giving them a chance" that he didn't exert the kind of discipline he might have exerted on older workers. In doing so, he wound up hurting both his business and the kids more than if he had readily fired them for such offenses as drug use and lateness. As Patrick Lyons puts it, "All too often people have problems with kids because they treat them as exactly that: kids."
While young employees need to be disciplined to meet their employer's expectations, they also need to feel that their boss cares about them. "A lot of adolescents really want a good relationship with an employer," says Mardell Grothe, a psychological consultant to the training program of the National Machining and Tooling Association. "But they want it to be democratic, collegial, the 'we're going to sit down and talk things over' kind of relationship. We've been in a lot of machine shops where the young people want to play radios. It drives the old-line bosses crazy, and they start thinking up all kinds of reasons why you can't play radios. They say it's unsafe or that it distracts you from your work. Now, there's no evidence I've seen that says it's unsafe to play radios while you work. The kids know that instinctively, and they resent the excuses. We tell the bosses that if they want to decide that radios aren't allowed, they can say so. But it's important to listen first. Otherwise you send a message that you don't care, and the kids will rebel."
Caring about young employees and being willing to define clearly both the job and the expectations inherent in it are crucial to managing kids, most psychologists seem to agree. But it is not always easy to accomplish this without being rigid or insensitive to the distinctions that do exist between younger and older employees. "A lot of entrepreneurs confuse control with structure," notes consultant Crothe. "Structure is good. It means laying out very clearly what you want and when you want it done and letting the persons react. Control is trying to dictate how it should be done from moment to moment. A good structure tells a person what you want done but allows that person some latitude in how he does it."
