The Credit Crisis and the Confidence of Gen Y

As I write, it is constantly being stated that there is a crisis of confidence in our markets.  The global financial system is in tatters, our currency is dropping like the proverbial fly, and consumer confidence is progressively sliding.

So much of our society, and indeed our daily lives, depends on confidence.  We have justifiable confidence that our vehicles will take us safely to work and justifiable confidence that our assets are safely protected by our insurance policies if we arrive home and find our homes ransacked.  Until now, we’ve had confidence that our jobs will be safe into the future and, if not, that we can find a new position quickly if push really comes to shove.

We’ve got to possess this confidence if we are to continue moving onwards and upwards, whatever the situation.

Yet, we live in a world where many have yet to face the crisis of self-confidence that inevitably arises when the foundations of our lives are radically unsettled.

Generation Ys (born between 1977 and 1995), now aged 13 to 31, have not yet faced global economic turmoil of the kind confronting us now.  Gen Ys have yet to experienced widespread job loss and the subsequent impacts of long-term unemployment, nor have they been threatened with the loss of their cash or their homes.  In addition, they have been raised in an era in which the creation of self-esteem has been as vital an element of the educational curriculum as has reading and writing.

This may not be a bad thing.  If high levels of self-esteem turn out to buffer Gen Ys against the negative shocks of career or lifestyle changes, it will be viewed as a powerful response to the anti-esteem philosophies that dominated the lives of their generational predecessors.

If, on the other hand, self-esteem turns out to be a very different cognitive dimension than resilience, its very brittleness will be quickly exposed as we enter a more challenging era.

In recent years, I have been amazed at the self-confidence and faith in the future of my MBA students.  I have long been amazed, and also puzzled, by the self-confidence of the Gen Ys as they have exited the boardrooms of Donald Trump’s or Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice, whether in the USA or the UK.  Time and time again, young executives first humiliated and then eliminated have expressed an incredibly high level of confidence in themselves as they sit in the taxi and ride home.  Rarely is any regret expressed for mistakes made on the show.  The most often-expressed sentiment verbalised is, to summarise, that Mr Trump (or Mr Sugar) would have hired me but for (excuse listed here) ……. OR I was still the best candidate, Mr Trump (or Sugar, or my colleagues) just didn’t recognise it.

Until now, I’ve thought these folks totally delusional.  An alternative view, and one which may or may not play out in practice, is that the escalation of one’s own commitment to oneself may provide the armour from which the vagaries of the future may simply rebound as harmless arrows.

Which is it?  I think that too much self-confidence is a significant liability.  We can, unless careful, escalate our degree of commitment to ourselves and our worldviews to such an extent that it is only a matter of time before such hubris pops our bubbles.  Indeed, Donald Trump’s failure and near bankruptcy in the early 1990s owed as much to his extreme narcissism and success-fuelled perceptions of self-infallibility as it did to the global economic slowdown of the time.  Trump’s reflection on this period is that we would all do well to stay focused, maintain our momentum, and keep grounded in the changes demanded by our changing environments.

This is good advice.  I remember feeling on top of the world in 1990, about the same time at which Mr Trump hit the deck.  I was newly married, had a new home, and a great job.  Within moments, I was made redundant and faced the loss of our new home as interest rates of 18% made mortgage payments virtually impossible. 

We survived through three responses.  The first, from me, was to take part-time work wherever I could find it, whether mowing lawns or teaching part-time at the local college, alongside my wife’s employment as a teacher.  The second was that we cut our cloth to suit our budget, scrimping and saving where we could to keep the coins in our our pockets. 

The third arose when close friends, seeing our struggle, lent us sufficient funds to help us over our financial hurdles.  It was this generosity, more than anything, that now leaves me with the faith that Gen Ys will see their way through current and future crises.  They are more relationship-driven than any other generation.  They are tribal, relying on their friendships with other Gen Ys as fixed points of life while the marriages of their parents came and went and as the pace of life and of technological and cultural change accelerated.

Relationships are really a key success factor in surviving crises, alongside having sufficient self-confidence to own our personal circumstances and then responding to our situations in positive and healthy ways. 

Gen Ys are thus ready for anything that life throws their way, today or tomorrow.  More power to them.