Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva and I’m recording this podcast from a very inspired place. I just had our introductory call with Heather McGowan. She’s a Thrivers Live speaker and she was brought in to speak on the future of the workforce and Lauren from my team actually found her. When she first mentioned Heather, I was like, “Mm, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s necessary for Thrivers Live. Is that really critical?” But I trust Lauren’s judgment deeply, so I was like, “Okay, sure. We’ll do it.” This was my first time I got to chat with her. She is one of my, if not my most highly anticipated speaker.
And what’s interesting about that is she’s likely the least known, like we have some big name speakers coming into Thrivers Live this year. And in listening to Heather speak, I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is not information that just Thrivers needs to know. This is information that the world needs to know, like this is critical.”
So she speaks on a lot of different topics. She talks about the upcoming recession, how it’s going to affect the workforce, so she talks about a lot of different things. One of them being the upcoming recession and how it’s going to affect the workforce. She talks about how to be an effective leader. She talks about what employees are looking for today, what entrepreneurs need to be focused on today, what it looks like to navigate consumers today. She’s so on the pulse in a way I’ve never heard anybody speak before and I’m really excited to see her take Thrivers Live this year.
You can find out more at thriverslive.com, but there were a couple things she talked about that I said, “You know, I think I can dive into this a bit on the podcast.”
This is about one tenth of what she’s going to be talking about Thrivers Live, and I elaborated a bit on what she mentioned to me, but she talked quite a bit about the different generations and how they like to work.
And one of the things that comes up a lot, even jokingly in my organization is like, “Oh my gosh, well, Gen Xers, you know, we do things this way and these Gen Zs, we can’t quite understand them.” And I talk about it in my company from time to time, for sure, but even in my social life, it comes up all the time.
You’ve probably heard me mention before if you’ve listened to the show for a while that I’m the parent of an 18-year-old who’s now a high school graduate. It’s very surreal for me. So she’s an adult entering the workforce and she’s considered to be a Gen Z. I’m considered to be a millennial if you look at the traditional dates. But when I look at my working style, I follow a lot of the Gen X traits majorly. I’m somewhere between millennial and Gen X. And you’ll see, as I do this breakdown that a lot of us are one leg in one and one leg in the other.
But when I look at my daughter’s generation, I spend a lot of time actually asking her about what are you looking for in a job? How do you like to be managed? I’ll ask her those poignant questions and listen to her very honest feedback and one of the things I’ve known for sure is that Gen Z is not lazy. I know they’ve been labeled as such like, “Oh, they just don’t get it. They just want to be on vacation. They want to be at Coachella all the time.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. They just don’t want to work how Gen X did or even how millennials do.
And so what I wanted to do is dedicate a podcast to not just talking about the generations. You can find that information anywhere, but actually sharing tactical advice to navigating and managing different people from different generations, how to find common ground, and then also how to see each as individuals.
We’re going to talk about boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z today. We’ll talk a teeny tiny bit about Gen A as well, but talk about how to manage those in your building or in your space. This is also really good information, even if you’re like, “Well, I’m independent. This might not be for me.” Think about how this affects your clientele. This is how consumers think and act as well. So we’ll talk about each of the generations today, and hopefully I’ll give you some key takeaways that you can apply to your business.
Let’s start with the baby boomers. So baby boomers were born 1946 to 1964. So when you look up information on baby boomers, there’s almost always a parenthesis that says approaching retirement. So when we look at this generation, statistically, they’re going to be retiring out of the workforce within the next 10 years or so many have already retired. So when you look at this generation, their employment peaked in 1999. Statistically data driven, in 1999 there were more baby boomers in the workforce than in any other generation. Since 1999, it’s been on a decline. So for over 20 years. However, we notice that baby boomers in the workforce don’t want to necessarily adapt to the ways of Gen Z. It’s too big of a gap and I want to explain why.
So when we look at baby boomers, the reason why they see work and they see career and they see life the way that they do is that there was a lot of prosperity in their early working years, right? When we look at this generation, they’re taking their first jobs in the sixties and in the seventies, it is not the world that we live in now, right? Technology wasn’t where it was at. Very corporate America, very nine-to-five, clocking in, get your college degree, get a great stable job, stay there for 40 years. This is what they were modeled and what they were shown. So for them that’s very comfortable, right?
Now because of that and because of that boom in the economy that existed with the baby boomers, which remember the reason why there was such a boom in the economy is because there were more humans working than ever before. The reason why they were called baby boomers is because these were children born after World War II when we saw this huge expansion in family size, right? I don’t know about any of you, but on my mom’s side, I have seven aunts and uncles. It’s same with my husband. He’s got these huge aunts and uncle bases, right? They’re all baby boomers. They were of that. Now, if somebody even has four kids, we’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe that.” But this was of a time where having a family of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, wasn’t wild. That’s just what people were doing, right? So it added this additional workforce to our economy that just was not there before. People didn’t have family sizes of that size.
So when you look at the eighties and nineties, they were very much shaped by these boomers. I don’t know about you, I worked for boomers in the salon big time, and so the way they tried to run the salon and the way they were coached to run the salon was by baby boomers and they were boomers and so it all made sense to them. And this can be the challenge when you are learning from somebody who did good business 20 years ago, is that that’s so great, except for that the world has moved forward.
Now it’s not to negate the experience. The experience is really good. We’re going to get into that in a second, but there’s been a lot of evolution since then, which can cause some friction and frustration right now.
This is what I thought was interesting and I didn’t know this until I got into this research, which you can research this, paychecks.com is where I found some information, CNN.com is where I found a lot of information. So one of the things that I noted was that this generation was called the Gloomiest Generation and it’s because of the way they rate their satisfaction of life and their levels of anxiety. They rate those two things higher than any other adult generation. So higher than Gen X, higher than Gen Z, Gen Y if you still call it that, although now it’s hybrid, right?
When you look at all of the generations, these baby boomers are the gloomiest. And I don’t know if it’s because they got caught up in the pace of life and they had challenges adapting to everything that changed. Or if they thought that by following those old school rules of work hard, pay your dues, stay at the same job for 40 years, that they’d have the same future as their parents, which they did not.
I try not to speak too openly about who this is, but there’s somebody in my life right now who’s of this generation who will never be able to retire. This person is going to have to work until the end of their days. There is no choice and they’re of this generation in their seventies still working and they will need to continue to do so because there is no other option. And I truly believe this person watched their parents retire well and live comfortably for 25 years retired and everything was fine and they didn’t think much more about it. They just figured it would work out, and unfortunately the world doesn’t work like that anymore. So these boomers got left behind, right?
So when you look at baby boomers in the salon or in any workforce and what they want, they prefer predictability and traditions. They don’t want to have to change. They really see things in a simplistic form and they feel like if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I really struggle to get baby boomers to want to get off of paper books, ‘cause they’re like, “No, I’ve done it this way for 30 years. It’s always worked for me. I don’t need anything else,” and I have to try and learn and respect and understand that. Do I know if I can get a baby boomer to go digital to make more money? A hundred percent. But I also can respect the fact that they’re traditionalists and they feel like they have something that they’re comfortable with and they have a really difficult time getting to a place of discomfort.
They are the hardest generation to push to uncomfortable. It makes them feel unsafe. It brings up unsafe feelings for them, so we have to be a little bit mindful of that.
Also your boomers are always going to prefer a face-to-face, a one-to-one meeting. Don’t try to hash it out on text. Don’t even try to hash it out on the phone. They want to sit down with you, maybe over a cup of coffee. They need to talk. You need to listen. There needs to be dialogue there.
They also like awards. My mother-in-law was a critical care nurse, a phenomenal critical care nurse until she retired. So she was for about 30 years and she would get these awards from the hospital she worked at and they were like crystal awards. One time she got a clock, like a wooden clock. She got rings that almost looked like high school class rings, and she thought it was like the best thing ever. And my husband and I were like, “Oh my gosh, they bought her a $40 award,” and here she is, she thinks she won the lottery. But that was of that generation where it was like, you’re seen, you’re heard. Imagine growing up in a family of eight, how you’d feel to just be seen and heard by your employer, do you get it? That makes sense. That generation wants the acknowledgement and the appreciation that you matter, that your work is impactful, right? That’s what they’re going to be looking for.
Now here’s something that’s important and I want you to make note of it: Boomers want to be recognized for skill, not result. We make the joke about “Oh, you know, I walked 10 miles in the snow to get to school.” That’s basically skill, not results. So we all get to school, right? We all went to school at some point. That’s the result. But it’s the effort, the experience, they did, they have done a lot. They didn’t get to build a clientele off social media, right? They didn’t get to build a clientele off websites. It was all word-of-mouth and any boomer who did that—like that sounds so much harder to me than how we build a clientele today. They just want to be appreciated and acknowledged and encouraged for that.
The thing that we struggle with as leaders is that’s so nice, but that’s not what works today. So I talk about this quite a bit. When I first started in the salon, which was 2008, we still had some clients who would call up blindly—‘cause this is pre-social media, right? 2008, call up blindly and be like, “Hi, I’d like an appointment with the owner.” They didn’t know who the owner was. If the owner was a man or a woman or how they identified, or how much experience they had. It didn’t matter. Being the owner carried a certain weight. The world is not like that anymore. But to boomers, that’s what is comfortable. Like you work with a company long enough, you’ll become a VP, but that’s not the world we live in now. But to them, they have a hard time when I say, “I know you’ve been doing hair for 40 years, but you’re going to need to start at an entry level price point.” That is very challenging for them.
When you are coaching through a boomer, you have to understand that they see the world differently. What they thought was going to come of their careers different, and it’s just something to keep in mind.
Then we move forward to Gen X. This is 1965 to 1980. So this generation saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. They were the first generation to grow up after the civil rights movement, which I mean puts them living and growing up in a totally different world than the generation before them. This was the big one though. Gen Xers were raised in dual income households, more commonly than previous generations like before, like when you think of the 1950s housewife, that’s what it was, right? The husband went off to work and the wife stayed home and took care of the eight children. That’s what it looked like. Well, not for Gen X. It was very different.
So this was a generation where the term latchkey kids came about. So it’s funny, my aunts and uncles—I’m technically a millennial, but I think I carry a lot of Gen X traits, and my aunts and uncles would always joke that I was a latchkey kid and they didn’t mean it in a negative way. It’s just how they noted it because I came home from school alone from the time I was in third grade. From the time I was probably eight years old or something, I came home to an empty house and I was by myself for hours and hours and hours. That wasn’t normal until Gen X. That would’ve been very rare for kids to experience that. And so because of that, because of a lot of these experiences, Gen Xers had to become self-reliant and this is why Gen Xers are seen as very hard working. There was this level of accountability and self-reliance that wasn’t there before. It was like living in a really different time where mom and or dad wasn’t around all the time. Some families grew up where parents were working multiple jobs. You didn’t see that in like baby boomers, like there was somebody home as a consistent.
Now I’m talking in generalizations, right? There’s always exceptions to the rule. But as a generalization in Gen X, there were a lot more latchkey kids, kids who were kind of raising themselves. I definitely relate to that in a lot of different ways.
Now the other thing about Gen Xers is that they’re seen as being financially responsible and I think it’s because of that necessary level of self-reliance like, “I’ve gotta make this work.” And a lot of Gen Xers felt that pressure of that isolation, of like, “Man, I have to figure this life out myself because there’s no one here to tell me to do my homework or to cook me dinner.” Sometimes they had to figure it out so because of that, that responsibility became innate with them.
Versus other generations, we joke and we say like, “Oh, these millennials, these Gen Zs have everything handed to them.” Kind of, but they’re a product of their parenting. So we have to look at that piece too, but it’s just different. It’s a different level of, you know, cell phones. A kid gets home from school, they can call their parents on their cell. My parents didn’t have cell phones. I came home from school and I was just home and that was the end of it. There was nothing more ‘cause it was a different time right?
Now, the other thing that I think is interesting is Gen X is more educated than any generation previous because education was so accessible in a way that it wasn’t before, right? So because of that education, this is where we saw tech start to boom a little bit for these people, right? And things really started to change. So when we look at what these Gen Xers want, they do want to be respected for their experience, just like the boomers did.
And remember I said, there’s going to be crossover here? The thing with Gen Xers, and I think we all know this, they’re very happy to work very hard so long as they get their personal needs met. We have to feel like it’s leading up to something. Like, did you not see that I just worked overtime all last week and now you’re telling me I can’t have next Saturday off? Bye. That’s something that Gen Xers are not going to understand. Like I will go the extra mile for you. I’ll do the back flip, but then when I need something, you better remember me.
That’s that Gen X mindset whereas the boomers didn’t have that. The boomers are of the generation where it’s like work hard, pay your dues, do more than you need to and ultimately great things will come. That’s fake. It doesn’t work like that anymore. But there are generations, probably even some Gen Xers who really feel like if you do the reps, if you put in the time, ultimately everything’s going to work out great. The world doesn’t work like that anymore unfortunately, but there’s this whole generation that really feels that way.
You have to understand that if somebody is going the extra mile, you need to acknowledge that. You can’t take that person for granted. And this is why salon owners lose what we call big dogs or heavy hitters because they’re not acknowledged. You take them for granted. “Oh Alyssa, she’s great. She’s been here for 12 years. She hasn’t caused me any problems. I see her as a leader in the salon.” She’s set to have a foot out the door if you’re not acknowledging all that she does. And it’s more than just saying, “You’re my top dog.” That’s not going to work.
So when we look at these Gen Xers and what they want, they want to have their natural strengths identified and nurtured. They’re not set in their ways, but they feel like they were self-reliant. They know how to survive. “See my gifts, see my talents, find a way for me to be able to express them all at my highest.” This is why you see a lot of educators and mentors of the Gen X generation, because they have that want and that need and that desire to give back in that kind of way, and they feel like they’ve got the experience to do it.
Now the thing with Gen X is this is the first generation that did not want to be put in a box and this will carry through for millennials and Gen Z. And this is why I talk about I don’t love salons that have level systems. It’s not my favorite thing because I don’t think anybody wants to be a level three human. It’s not even the way most traditional businesses run. Give me another example of another business where you can be a level four. What is that like at the dentist office? There’s a receptionist. There’s a hygienist. There’s the dentist, right? There’s orthodontist. But nobody’s like a level one human. There’s you have a job title and you can say, “Well, the job title is stylist.” Yeah, but people don’t want to be shoved into a box. And it’s like, “Oh my gosh, okay, well, you’re not a Sapphire-level stylist unless you’re getting six referrals and two of these and you’re working this many hours…” Nobody wants that anymore. That’s very much of the boomer generation, and when we look forward to Gen X and millennial and Gen Z, they’re just looking for something that’s a little bit different.
People want to be seen as people. Individual human beings and so in creating systems where you don’t have to fit into a box, you’re going to be attracting the Gen X, millennials and Gen Zs, all combined.
Now with Gen X, their greatest motivator is financial at the end of the day. They want to build a really big, beautiful life. A big part of that is because like I said, I’m a generational hybrid, millennial/Gen X. We watched a lot of our parents not be able to successfully retire and so we’ve learned that lesson. Also we grew up in those households where there were two people working. We saw what struggle looked like. A lot of us watched our parents lose a ton of money in the dot-com burst, right? Gen Z and millennials probably don’t remember that so much. I remember that vividly, vividly, vividly, and then we watched a lot of life since. So we want to make a lot of money because we’ve seen what it looks like to go without, right? So finances are generally our driver.
Then we get to millennials, different drivers and this is why you see the shift. Millennials are 1981 to 1996. This is the bulk of our workforce right now. We are more millennials working than anybody else. When we think about millennials, they’re the 9-11 era. September 11th happened my senior year in high school. I remember everything about that day, everything about that day. And this was radical for us. We had never seen our own country under attack and never felt so vulnerable to that degree for our generations, right? It was shocking. And then we were coming of age and going into adulthood in 2008 when the recession was hitting for a lot of us. So it’s like, oh my gosh. So we’ve seen our friends go off to war. Then as those of us who are progressing into our careers or getting there, the bottom falls out. So we’ve experienced a lot. We were also there for the birth of the internet and technology.
I joke with my daughter, I was telling her about how we didn’t have cell phones, and she was like, “Well, what do you do if you’re out and about, and you have to make a call?” I was like, “Well, we go to a pay phone,” and she was like, “Oh my gosh, you share dirty pay phones with other people?” That was horrifying to her because it’s so out of her norm. I was looking at a graphic image of even the evolution of phones, and I want you just to think for a minute, as I say this: When you were even a teenager, when somebody said “phone”, what did that look like? Because for me, when I had—it was a corded phone, but when I had a corded phone in my bedroom, it was like I had won the lottery. I was like, “Oh my gosh, my parents love me. I got a corded phone in my room.” And then when we got a cordless phone in our living room, it was like, whoa, we’ve made it. That was like a huge deal. We had a rotary phone in our garage and this is me. So when you look at boomers and stuff like that, it’s a totally different versus I show my daughter my old Nokia block cell phone, which was my first cell phone, and she thinks I’m a dinosaur, right? She got an iPhone as her first phone. She hasn’t had a landline in her entire childhood she can remember. She can’t even remember when we had a home phone. So when you think about the experience of these people and what their idea of normal is, it starts to become very clear.
So millennials like to work with purpose. They don’t like to just work. So Gen Xers and boomers are down to just work, I want my good paycheck. I want my awards. I want to be seen as a whole human. They’re good for that. Millennials, not so much. They need to be working towards a greater purpose, which is why in Thriving Leadership, and Scaling, and all that kind of stuff. I talk about vision, mission values, because this is what these generations are looking for. I’m not trying to make you do extra work. It’s critical to hire the new generations, right? Prioritizing family and friends, prioritizing life is too important. Remember this generation watched September 11 happen, lived through 2008. They know life is short and unpredictable, so they’re not going to waste it.
This was interesting to me, but I believe that it’s true. Millennials judge their bosses, owners, and leaders by the quality of their work. And this is why the whole “do as I say, not as I do” phenomenon died.
I talked to so many salon owners who were like, “Well, our salon social media looks bad because my stylists don’t take pictures,” and I turn and I’m like, “And you do you take pictures?” “Well, no, but I’m at a different stage in my career.” No, you are not. If you want your stylist to do amazing things, you need to figure it out because these millennials judge their leaders by the quality of their own work. So if you’re not doing it, they’re certainly not going to. And so we get annoyed by that and we’re like, “Well, that’s so annoying that I have to work super hard.” Well, you chose to be the owner. I don’t know if you thought it was going to be a cake walk or what you thought it was going to look like—that’s an old-timey phrase. I’ve learned that, cake walk—I actually did a cake walk in my childhood. Different story for another day. But when you say it’s annoying that I feel under a microscope by my team, that’s fine. You can feel it’s annoying. Too bad. This is how millennials live their life.
Here’s the flip. They want to be judged by their results, not their effort. So remember I was talking about boomers and I even think Gen X wants to be acknowledged for their effort. Well, I tried really hard. I put in a lot of hours, I’ve been doing this for a long time. So that should count for something. So millennials don’t see the world that way. They’re like “Uhhuh. That’s nice. And then what happened?” They want the results to count for something. For millennials, if they can get the job done in half the time, why do you care? The result was good. Why does anything else matter? That’s how they see the world and to be candid, that’s how I see the world too. I don’t really care how hard you worked. I care what the result was. And that’s where my millennial mindset comes in. It doesn’t impress me much that you put in a lot of hours. If the result is bad, it’s actually kind of unfortunate that you put so much effort in and you couldn’t even get a good result. Like what the heck? So that’s how millennials see the world.
When you’re managing millennials, you want to be blunt and ask a lot of questions, let them talk. You don’t need to be the show front and center, versus boomers and Gen X want that dialogue back and forth. They want that partnership. Millennials want to be heard. They also don’t need you to beat around the bush or speak in weird metaphors like cake walk like I just did. They need you to just be upfront and honest. They also really enjoy career development programs, which is exactly why I included that in Thriving Leadership. Again, I didn’t include that just to give you more work. I gave that to you because that’s what they want. What they don’t want is to become a level two human. They want a career path, period. It’s different. Not shoved in a box. A career development program, period. Two totally different things.
Millennials also appreciate monetary gifts. So they don’t want the award, right? The crystal award that my mother-in-law loved, millennials, not so much. Show me the money, but it should feel like a gift and then opportunities to give back. They like to be a part of something bigger than themselves and they like the opportunity to participate and do so, which leads us to our last generation we’re going to talk about today, Gen Z, which is ‘97 to 2012. It’s the incoming workforce.
When we think about what Gen Z experienced, they were born during Operation Iraqi Freedom. A lot of them were, or right before 9-11. They’re what they call digital natives so they don’t remember a world before technology. Like when my daughter roasted me about the payphones, you can say she’s being snarky. She just can’t picture it. She’s never experienced it. She’s never had to do that. So for her, it’s wild to think we’re sharing public phones and lining up and saving quarters to pay for it, right? She can’t even picture it.
Social injustice awareness is just natural for them. I even think about what my daughter was taught in kindergarten and how she was taught that in some families, there’s two moms and some families, there’s just one dad and there’s nobody else, and some kids are raised by their grandparents and biracial couples are normal. Like the way she was raised is so different then the way that I was.
This generation is very aware of social injustice and they’re choosing to see the world through a different lens than older generations did completely. They also just experienced a pandemic, which for the last two and a half years turned their whole world upside down. They will never be the same.
Like I said, I just went through my daughter’s high school graduation and you hear the speeches and how the pandemic deeply scarred—I’m going to use the word “scarred”—scarred these teenagers. It is unbelievable. It’s changed them for the rest of their lives and so we can’t minimize that. For a lot of us as adults, it changed us. There’s no doubt, it changed consumer behavior. It changed business but we remember life before that so we’re like, “All right, well, we’ll get back to norm.” They don’t know normalcy, right? They’ve never been a working adult in normalcy, so for them, this is all very new.
And then also very highly progressive thinkers. They’re quick to change, quick to adapt, and they’re thinking forward. They want maximum flexibility because to them, nothing is certain. They’ve been living in this world of uncertainty and that’s why they fight for freedom.
Because when you look at the extreme other example of the boomers, where it was like predictability, you’ll be certain to retire. Everything will be fine. They’ve learned that that’s not true. They know that like, oh, nothing’s guaranteed so they see work differently. Why would they commit to a full-time job? That seems like a waste of life for them. You can feel any type of way about that, but that’s how they feel about it. They don’t want to be managed at all. No management, and this is where people get confused. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to be led. They don’t want to be managed.
I actually don’t want to be managed. That’s why I’m a business owner. I’ve never done well being managed. I can be led really effectively. Don’t try and manage me. We just won’t get along. I’ll have to go.
These Gen Zs don’t want to be managed at all. They want to work for a mission, just like the millennials. Do they prioritize collaboration and understanding? This is why the people call ’em the Y generation. Meaning W H Y. They ask a lot of questions because they don’t want to “do as I say, not as I do”. That’s not going to work for them. If you can’t explain the why, they’re not going to do it, so you better know the why. That’s what it comes down to.
Same with clients. If you’re serving Gen Z clients, you can’t just sell ’em on a dream. They need to understand the process, the long-term goals, what this is going to look like. They need more details. It’s just a totally different way of looking at life. Mentoring and coaching is big. So this is interesting: Millennials—and I think Gen Xers were very much like, “I got it. I’ll figure it out.” Now, millennials, we saw the boom of assisting programs. That’s when that really hit off, we’re seeing a shift there. So when Gen Zs say, “I want mentoring and coaching,” they don’t mean a year-long and 18-month long assisting program. That sounds like they’re wasting their life to them. What they want is a six week intensive.
I mean—I’m serious. I was asking my daughter recently, I was like, “Listen, what does coaching look like? What are you going to be looking like?” She’s getting her cosmetology license. “What are you going to be looking for when you go out into the workforce?” And she was like, “I want someone to actually take their time to in-depth teach me fast.” And she’s not the only one I’ve heard say that. I’ve heard a lot of new-into-the-industry stylists saying that they don’t want to—to them…I’m going to use the word waste. I’m using air quotes. They don’t want to waste 18 months learning. They’re like, “This is information I could learn in six weeks. Why am I spending 18 months on it?” They just see things differently. But the expectation is to be mentored and coached.
So if you’re a salon owner and you’re like, “I don’t have time for that,” yikes. It’s going to be very difficult for you to hire. So just know that like that is going to be a barrier to you hiring great staff is this coaching and mentorship expectation.
The other thing they expect is financial bonuses, which is different. So our millennials wanted monetary gifts, but that’s more like, “You are amazing. Here’s 500 bucks for the quarter,” okay? Or like “You hit your profit goals. Here’s 500 bucks for the quarter.”
Gen Z, very different. They want it to be like every single month, if this happens, you get a bonus. They want to feel in control of their finances all the time. That more formalized training and—sorry about it—their expectation is for higher salaries, which is hard for us. And I think that we can incentivize them to work more, but because they’re not lazy and we label them as being lazy, they’re actually super driven. They just don’t fit into our old school boxes, right?
So when we look at these people, they’re just not willing to do, like I jokingly say, when I joined the workforce, I was willing to lick the floors if it meant I could learn how to do good hair. Like as an assistant, I was willing to do anything. You just won’t find that any longer. It’s a different generation who wants to get in, get the skills they need, not be managed but be led instead, and to have the opportunity to make as much money as they want to as quickly as possible with financial freedom.
As I talk about all of these different generations, I want you to think about how you can pull these pieces together and how you can create systems that meet the mark for all of them. If you need little help, Heather McGown’s going to be at Thrivers Live this year. You’re going to head to thriverslive.com to learn more and as always, Thriving Leadership and all of my programs are available at thrivingstylist.com.
Now, as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
