Recently I have been talking about the needs of the next generation of leaders in comparison with those of earlier generations. On the whole I think that those who feel the next generation lacks the commitment to the cause exhibited by theirs can respect the desire for a better work-life balance.

There is a characteristic of the next generation that might be a thornier problem for arts organizations–their parents. The term helicopter parents was originally applied to parents who “hovered” over their children when they went to college. The parents would bug professors about their children’s grades, dorm staff about room mates and in some extreme situations, would actually complete assignments for them.

As the students graduated, the parents began showing up at the work place, at interviews and going so far as to fill out applications and negotiate salaries for their children.

Now I don’t quite know if this is necessarily going to be anything new for performing arts organizations who have always had stage parents hovering around. However, a decision needs to be made on the organization’s policy on parental involvement. As the Forbes article I linked to above notes, some companies are embracing parents. Others feel it is not appropriate for parents to be involving themselves in decisions being made at work and have generated formal responses to the issue.

Fortunately, my mother restricts her complaints about how many hours I am putting in at work to me.

While I have known about helicopter parents for quite awhile now, I haven’t run across any cases anywhere I worked. (Well, one intern’s parents followed him cross country to check out his work site but didn’t contact us past that point except to make a donation.) What impelled me to cover the subject was a video the Next Generation Consulting blog linked to in the entry on mentoring I cited last week. The video is about an hour or so long on the subject of mentoring at accounting firms.

As the speaker, Rita Keller, discussed the issue of parental involvement, she noted that employers needed to be prepared to have the new employees making a lot of personal calls or texting throughout the day. Now if the parents are prodding their kids to get to bed and wake up on time, this can be beneficial to a company. The area she mentions that I believe would be the biggest concern for employers is lack of initiative and decision making skills. Because these young people have consulted with their parents and friends on so many issues in their lives multiple times a day, they tend to crave/require specific guidance or advice and lack the ability to act independently.

The results of helicopter parenting and the general technological environment the next generation of workers have grown up in is the subject of a really good article from HR Magazine that addresses the issue and how to structure the work environment to best channel younger workers’ energies. There are some benefits these folks bring like familiarity with technology and a facility of working with groups and multi-tasking. But there are also some disadvantages too like indiscretion, unrealistic expectations and impatience.