Category Archives: Human Resources

Macro-succession crisis grows fangs

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I’ve written here on two or three occasions about the looming macro-succession crisis threatening American business. Well, my colleague Whytawk over at Scholars & Rogues has a great post this morning on the dynamics shaping our emerging recession, and in it he put some teeth in the retiring Boomer piece of the macro-succession puzzle. If I’m a staffing leader at a company that relies on its ability to attract and retain talented people I just got extremely nervous.

At the same time the US has not reformed either of Social Security or Medicare and fully 76 million people out of the total 150 million of the US employment base are due to retire over the next 10 years as the Baby Boomers hit 65. [emphasis added]

Yow. Continue reading →

New report notices that Boomers are retiring; offers band-aid for sucking chest wound…

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Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the looming macro-succession crisis, and it’s felt like I’m the only one who sees the issue coming. This morning, though, a MediaPost item addressing a piece of the issue came across the desk, and while it’s only partially aware of the whole problem and the solution it points to is a half-measure at best, it’s at least nice to see a little validation on the subject.

Thursday July 12, 2007
Retiring Boomers Important in Hand-off to Younger Employees

A recent survey of 28,000 employers in 25 countries, by Manpower, revealed that only 21 percent have implemented retention strategies to keep their senior employees participating in the workforce. Continue reading →

How the macro-succession crisis is going to hit the entrepreneurial sector

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I’ve written recently about some generational issues facing companies – most notably the “macro-succession crisis” that I suspect very few corporations have even thought about in meaningful detail. In that post I examine how the coming Baby Boomer retirement explosion is going to engender all kinds of crisis, especially in larger legacy corporations that are so top-heavy with Boomer leaders that their Gen X successors are ill-prepared for the transition that must begin taking place in the next five years.

But if you’re a different kind of company – say an entrepreneurial outfit started and run by front-edge Xers (people now in their early to mid-40s) – you’re in good shape, right? You aren’t facing a retirement wave. You aren’t facing the need for a painful adjustment from Boomer-style leadership to the far different style of Xer execs. And this means there’s going to be no leadership vacuum at the top sucking everybody higher in the organization and creating trainwrecks at the Xer-to-Millennial lower management level, either. Life is good.

Except that you’re wrong – the macro-succession crisis is coming for you, too. Continue reading →

Addressing the “praise deficit”: young workers putting a strain on organizations and organizations are responding inappropriately

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One of the things Black Dog specializes in is how generational dynamics affect organizational behavior and effectiveness. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, companies across the US are flying headlong toward a massive macro-succession pile-up, and the collective personality of the Millennial Generation (born from ~1980-2000) is going to play a major part in mid-management breakdowns in the next few years.

If you’d like a glimpse of the stress the Millennials are already exerting on organizations, you’ll want to read a new analysis from the Wall Street Journal‘s CareerJournal.com site. In it, Jeffrey Zaslow chronicles how businesses are addressing the Mills’ excessive need for praise: Continue reading →

The looming macro-succession crisis

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I was reading a Seattle Times story earlier today on how men in their 30s are earning less than their fathers did. An interesting story top to bottom, but the concluding section drew me back around to something that I really haven’t talked about enough lately – the looming generational macro-succession nightmare facing corporate America.

Diehard careerist baby boomers also might partly explain the inability of 30-something men to move up the income ladder as quickly as their fathers. From the moment Generation Xers entered the workplace, boomers have been the “ceiling” blocking their way up the income ladder, said Peter Rose, a partner with marketing-research company Yankelovich in Los Angeles.”The boomers stand out in defining themselves in terms of their work and have shown a disinclination to get out of the way,” he said.

It’s hard to blame the Boomers for not getting the heck out of the way, although I’ve certainly been one of those Xers stacked up beneath that in-no-hurry-to-leave Boomer leadership dynamic. But there’s a basic numbers crunch that’s about to hit, and it’s going to throw a lot of companies into leadership transition crisis. Consider: Continue reading →

The 23 year-old waiter, part 2

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Some people who have listened to my yarping about brand issues for awhile eventually feel they have to challenge me: “You’re talking about operations, org dev, HR – you’re not talking about brand at all.”

True or false? Well, both. It just seems that when I dissect a case where a brand has gone wrong, I find that the underlying factors frequently lie well outside the purview of whoever in an organization is formally charged with branding activities. And when I see a brand that’s hitting on all cylinders, it doesn’t take long to understand how the nominal face of the branding activities are best understood as expressions of deeper organizational commitments to doing all kinds of other things right.

The upshot is that I tend to use the term “brand” in a lot broader context than some of my colleagues do. So, back to my days as a waiter and bartender… Continue reading →