This book is the product of more than twenty years of ongoing research on young people in the workplace. At this point, all told, hundreds of thousands of individuals have contributed to our surveys, interviews, and focus groups since we first began our workplace research in 1993. First and foremost, I always thank everyone who has participated in this research over the years.

Thanks also to the very many business leaders who bring me in to learn from and help your managers facing real challenges every day in the real world. To the hundreds of thousands who have attended my keynote addresses and seminars: thanks for listening, for laughing, for sharing the wisdom of your experience, for pushing me with the really tough questions, for your kindness, and for teaching me. My greatest intellectual debt is to the managers who have participated in our seminars—I've learned so much from helping them wrestle with their very real management problems in the real world. Special thanks to those managers whose real stories appear in this book; I've mixed up the ancillary details to help keep the stories anonymous.

Welcome to Dr. Bennett Graff, our new chief of operations at RainmakerThinking. Thank you for your confidence in this enterprise and the excellent contributions you are making every day to our mission and our business. We are going to do great things together, Bennett.

To our very dear old friends and my interim management team, business partners Chris Glowacki and Kristin Campbell and their entire family to the furthest extent of consanguinity, but especially Lily, Albert, Herbie, and Stella: Thank you for your friendship and your family and your contributions to this enterprise. I am very grateful. We love you all, every one.

To Susan Ingraham, my longtime executive assistant (and one of the most reliable, considerate, even-tempered, and good-hearted people I have ever known): Thank you so much for everything you do, Susan. I honestly don't know what I would do without you. You have my undying gratitude and loyalty.

To Liz Richards, who has been serving at RainmakerThinking for less than a year at this writing (but has already proven herself among the very best of her very young generation): Thank you, Liz, for your everyday professionalism, critical thinking, and followership. We are very grateful.

Now, to the publisher and the editors:

To everyone at Wiley and Jossey-Bass: Thanks to every one of you who has put your faith and good thinking and hard work into the books we have done together, especially this one.

Karen Murphy, my editor on THE 27 CHALLENGES MANAGERS FACE, and my editor on this book until the late stages, has moved on in her career, but not before helping me conceive and re-conceive this book a number of times. Thanks to you, Karen, for all of your help along the way.

My brand new editor, the very talented and skilled Judy Howarth, has adopted me and this project in the late stages. She did so with kindness and conviction, and I have no doubt that her excellent work makes this book very much better. I am extremely grateful.

Then I always come to the great, great, great Susan Rabiner, to whom this book is dedicated. Susan is not only a world-class literary agent for me and also for my wife, Debby. Susan has become a true, dear, beloved friend and absolutely one of our very most favorite people in the world. When this book was going through draft after draft—when I was struggling to zero in on the issues that were truly at stake and the research that was truly most relevant—Susan demonstrated why she is considered one of the most brilliant minds in non-fiction publishing. Since we first met in the late 1990s, I have not written a book that Susan has not influenced profoundly. But this book is dedicated to Susan because her guidance and support in this effort was beyond even her usual heroics. It is not an overstatement to say that Susan Rabiner is simply the smartest and the best editorial mind in non-fiction publishing. She and her husband, the late genius Al Fortunato, wrote the book about writing and publishing non-fiction, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published. Susan is nearly 100 percent responsible for my success as a writer. How can I thank Susan enough?

My family and friends are the anchors of meaning in my life. First, thanks to my parents, Henry Tulgan and Norma Propp Tulgan, for raising me as well as you did. You are both among my very closest friends to this day, and I treasure the time we spend together. I neglected to visit my beloved parents for several months because I was so under the gun finishing this book in time. I would be ashamed for not visiting more except that the whole time, true to form, they insisted, “Don't come visit until you finish your book. We'll see you when you finish.” What I owe to my parents could fill much more than one book, but it definitely includes my work ethic!

Thanks also to the rest of my beloved family: My parents-in-law, Julie and Paul Applegate; my nieces and nephews (from oldest to youngest): Elisa, Joseph, Perry, Erin, Frances, and Eli; my sister, Ronna, and my brother, Jim; my sister in-law, Tanya, and my brothers in-law, Shan and Tom. I love every one of you very, very much.

I always add a special extra thanks to my niece, Frances, because I have always thought of her as if she were my own child.

Finally, I always reserve my last and most profound thanks for my wife, Debby Applegate. For many years now, Debby and I have worked side-by-side, writing. For me, to be writing in her company is an honor and an inspiration. Among her many impressive credentials, Debby won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher! While I have made my way through this manuscript, Debby has been hard at work on what is likely to be yet another of the great American biographies of this century. This one is about a now largely forgotten figure of the 1920s—Polly Adler. Just wait. You're going to be bowled over by it. It's hard to believe that, by the date this book is published, it will be thirty years since our first date in September of 1985. We've been together ever since. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—I have done since the day I met Debby that has not been profoundly influenced by her. Debby is my constant adviser, my toughest critic, my closest collaborator, the love of my life, my best friend, my smartest friend, my partner in all things, half of my soul, owner of my heart, and the person without whom I would cease to be.

Today's newest new young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspectives, new energy. Yet, too many of them are held back—and driving the grownups crazy— because of their weak soft skills.

Managers tell us every day in our research some version of what one middle-aged manager in a pharmaceutical company told me: “When I was young and inexperienced, I may have been naïve or immature, but I knew enough to wear a tie, make eye contact, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘yes, sir’ and ‘yes, ma'am,’ and when to shut up and keep my head down and do the grunt work without having to be told over and over again.”

Indeed, the incidence and insistence of managers complaining about the soft skills of their new young workers has risen steadily year after year since we began tracking it in the mid-1990s, when Generation Xers were the “New Dogs” on the scene. Specifically, what issues do managers complain about most? Here's what managers most often say:

• “They are unprofessional.”
• “They have no self-awareness.”
• “They don't take personal responsibility or hold themselves accountable.
• “They need an attitude adjustment.”
• “Their work habits are terrible.”
• “Their people skills are terrible.”
• “They don't know how to think, learn, and communicate without checking a device.”
• “They don't think critically.”
• “They don't know how to problem solve, make decisions, and plan.”
• “They have problems deferring to authority.”
• “They don't appreciate context and see where they fit in.”
• “They have no sense of self-sacrifice for the greater good.”
• “What ever happened to citizenship, service, and teamwork?”

There is a growing gap between the expectations of employers and the reality of how today's new young talent is showing up in the workplace. Today's young stars may well show up with the latest and greatest skills and methods. Indeed, many of them seem to have developed almost “superpowers” in their chosen areas of interest and focus. They are often masters of the newfangled. What they are missing—way too often and more and more—is the old-fashioned basics, what many refer to as “the soft skills.”

What do young people have to say about the widely perceived widening soft-skills gap? Mostly, they say, “That's so true about my friends and me!” or else “Seriously?!” and then, either way, “So what?!”

To that, I usually respond, “Well, it drives the grown-ups crazy and it's holding you back. If you were to radically improve on these soft skills, it would give you a huge strategic advantage in your career.” The good news is that this is almost always enough explanation to capture their attention and interest in improving.

What do business leaders and managers say when I tell them how they can lead their new young talent through the growing soft-skills gap? Often the first response is something like this response from a long-time partner in a large accounting/consulting firm: “This should NOT be our problem to solve! Shouldn't they have already learned all these old-fashioned basics from their parents? Or in kindergarten? Or at least in high school or college? Or graduate school for that matter? Certainly by the time they come to work as an associate at this firm, they should know how to get themselves to work on time and behave properly. Am I supposed to teach them how to cross the street, too?”

That comment brings to mind an aggressive public service campaign sponsored mainly by Yale University, here in New Haven, Connecticut, where we live. The City and the University have sponsored signs all over town, as well as other public education resources, spelling out the basics of safe pedestrian behavior. This was in part a response to the ubiquitous traffic hazard of Yale students jaywalking while staring down at their hand-held devices. In other words, some of the smartest kids in the world today—the cream of the crop, the future doctors, scientists, accountants, engineers, professors, and leaders in every industry—needed an aggressive public education program in order to learn how to cross the street. As one official told me: “They have all the latest tools and tricks, but I guess they are somewhat lacking in a lot of the old tricks. What's really interesting is that the program works. They are actually getting much better at crossing the street.”

Here's what I tell my clients: If you employ young people nowadays, then the soft-skills gap is your problem. That's the bad news. So here's some good news: You can bridge the soft-skills gap, and doing so will give you a huge strategic advantage when it comes to hiring the best young talent, bringing them on board and up-to-speed faster, better performance management, improved relationships, and greater retention rates among the best young talent.

For years, I've used the military as my “ace in the hole” when making the business case that organizations can and should invest in bridging the soft-skills gap. I would typically point to the Marines’ Boot Camp, for example, and say, “The Marines can take an ordinary young person and turn him or her into a United States Marine in just thirteen weeks, and together these young Marines make up the most effective fighting force in the history of the world.” Of course, most organizations don't have the resources (or the inclination) to run the equivalent of their own boot camp. (Some do, by the way, and it works like a charm. But those organizations are few and far between.)

The really good news is that you don't have to put your young employees through the equivalent of a boot camp in order to have a huge impact on their soft skills. In fact, we've collected hundreds of case studies, best practices, and teaching methods from organizations and individual managers who have systematically helped their new young employees radically improve their soft skills. There are many, many ways you can help them build up one soft skill at a time and thereby make them much more effective and successful employees, co-workers, and future leaders.