It’s official now: Young people are in the driver’s seat in corporate America. Job offers are plentiful, and hiring managers are scrambling. Stephanie Armour, reports in USA Today that he majority of hiring managers feel like they have to convince a candidate to take their job. And one-third of employees are already looking to leave after six months. This is true even in what we used to see at the most desirable fields, like banking.

The rules of what makes a good candidate are changing, and so are the rules of what makes a good manager. Good candidates provide high value on day one, a key since they are more likely than ever to leave early. And a good manager knows how to give employees what they need to be effective every day they are with the company.

It sounds like mayhem, right? In fact, we are watching the emergence of a more collaborative, hands-on, caring approach to management than ever before, and the result might be a workplace that is more productive and fulfilling for everyone.

The energy for this change comes from the convergence of the fact that millennials refuse to stay in jobs that don’t help them grow, and businesses are desperate to recruit and retain young employees . Even the big firms, such as Ernst & Young, pursue initiatives such as recruiting via Facebook, text messaging, and video blogs in an effort to be heard above the cacophony of voices courting young workers.

Enter Bruce Tulgan, author of It’s Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need, (and video blogger on Brazen Careerist). Tulgan is evangelizing a new kind of management — where people actually do it.

“We have an undermanagement epidemic,” says Tulgan. “Managers walk around saying, ‘I’m hands off, I’m letting you do your own thing.’ ” But what they really mean is, “I’m busy. I’m doing my own thing. I cannot hold your hand.”

But Tulgan says that today’s workers want flexibility and customized work environments. And, “there is no chance on earth that a manager who is not engaged can be flexible and generous.” For example, Tulgan says, “Managers who keep really close track of results don’t care when the work gets done.”

If the recommendation to check in with employees daily makes you cringe, you are probably not in your 20s. Millennials were raised to have adults training them, coaching them, and making sure the world went smoothly so they could learn and grow to their fullest potential.

So it’s no surprise that this is what young people want at work. Annemieke Rice is a great example of a millennial at the office: a highly motivated, tech-savvy, educated employee who wants a lot of face time. She is a student services coordinator at Northeastern University, and she is more than willing to work for the lower salary typical in higher education, just to have a boss who mentors her, challenges her, and opens new doors.

“One of the reasons I’m so motivated is because my boss really lets me know she appreciates me,” Rice says. “Like, she stops by and gives me special projects to do. And she’s always available to sit down with me and let me ask a lot of questions about the back story.” Rice also expects regular feedback and guidance so that she is always on a productive path within the organization. Previous generations saw a manager as someone who collected dues early on — a sort of ticket-taker for the ride up the corporate ladder. So a manager was someone to be avoided at all costs.

Rice, however, would never think of waiting until later to start learning the nuts and bolts. She wants to see her boss regularly because Rice views her boss as a teacher for the adult world. “I would rather my boss tell me now that I’m doing it wrong than I do it wrong for the next 20 years and don’t get to where I want to go.”

Managing someone like Rice is a lot of work. But young people today are consumers for everything — even when it comes to shopping for a boss. So if you want to hire top talent, understand that top talent wants to be managed by top talent. And you’re not top if you are not hands on.

And before you say you don’t have time to manage, understand that Tulgan has heard it before. “Managers who think they don’t have time to manage spend their time managing anyway, but it’s all crisis management that could be avoided if they were hands-on managers every day.”

Here is a list from Tulgan of five how-tos for managers:

1. Manage every day, not just on certain occasions, such as a project explodes.

2. Solve small problems every day so they don’t grow into big ones.

3. Have lots and lots of boring conversations instead of one, big conversation.

4. Reward people for what they accomplish; don’t treat people equally because accomplishments are not equal

5. Think of empowerment as helping someone to succeed instead of leaving them alone.

Tape the list to your keyboard if you’re a manager. Email it anonymously if you’re poorly supervised – and if nothing changes, shop for a new manager, of course.

By Bruce Tulgan – Instead of avoiding small problems and hoping they’ll go away, solve them as they come up. You’ll avoid disaster and you and your employees will get good at dealing with conflict.

[MEDIA=2]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

The topic of my column in the Boston Globe this week is management issues. If you want to talk with me about how you manage, or how you like to be managed, and you are not older than twenty-seven, I’d love to hear from you. Today. By 3pm eastern time.

Big caveat: You need to be in New England on Tuesday or Wednesday so that a Globe photographer can take your picture.

If you’re interested, please send an email to me with Boston Globe in the subject line. Please write three sentences about yourself, and include a phone number where I can call you.

Climbing to the top of corporate America requires near complete abnegation of one’s personal life, not in a sacrificial way, but in a child-like way. In most cases, when there are children, there is a wife at home taking care of the executive’s life in the same way she takes care of the children’s lives.

This is not a judgment on whether people should have kids. It’s fine to choose not to have kids. This is a judgment on whether people with kids should be CEOs of large companies.

I have already laid out the argument that Fortune 500 CEOs, like Howard Stringer, who work 100-hour weeks and have kids at home, are neglecting their kids. Not neglecting them like, that’s too bad. But neglecting them like, it’s totally irresponsible to have kids if you don’t want to spend any time with them.

I have also laid out the argument that men who have these top jobs can get there because they have a wife at home, running their personal life. Women get stuck in their ascent up the corporate ladder on the day their first child is born. Because women end up taking care of the kids. Women do not choose to compartmentalize kids and work the way men at the top of the ladder do.

Eve Tahmincioglu recently published a book based on interviews with CEOs: From the Sandbox to the Corner Office. She says that usually, “the wife is handling the marriage and the family. She is the one who keeps it all together.” Most of the female CEOs that Tahmincioglu interviewed did not have kids, and Tahmincioglu says they attributed their success to their lack of children because the demands of a CEO are not compatible with taking care of kids.

Meanwhile, let’s take the job hopper. The job hopper does not stay at the same company forever. So while the climber gets his identity from a corporation, the job hopper takes full responsibility for forging his own identity. The job hopper focuses on the time in between jobs to gain increased flexibility. He can make himself available to take care of a sick relative, to fly overseas to adopt a baby, and to travel when a spouse is relocated. A job hopper can take on loads of responsibility to create family stability because a job hopper is flexible.

Additionally, a job hopper can find passion in work more easily, because job hopping keeps ideas fresh and learning curves high. So whereas many ladder climbers work more than sixty hours a week to get that workplace adrenaline rush. Job hoppers can get the rush by starting something new. No need to give up family in order to get a rush from work.

This means that a job hopper can have fulfilling work and take a hefty load of responsibility for adult life. There will be time to buy birthday presents for nieces. There will be time to plan surprise parties instead of delegating it to an assistant or a spouse. There will be time to worry about household issues and marital issues and all the things someone who works 100 hours a week has no time to be responsible for.

The corporate climber, meanwhile, is isolated from the complications of real life. For example, business is full of measurable goals, acknowledgements for success, teambuilding, constant ranking, and societal pats on the back with big paychecks.

Home life has none of this. We still do not know what really makes a good parent. There are no measurable goals for getting through a day with the in-laws so there is no reward system for it either. There is no way to measure who is a good family member. There is no definition of successful spouse. Home life is murky and difficult. Work life is structured and predictable.

People who create careers that allow them to assume large levels of authority in their personal life are living as responsible adults. People who concentrate on work and delegate maintenance of all other aspects of their personal life are not truly living as adults.

Adult life is difficult, challenging and full of ways to actively give our hearts to others. The world will be a better place when careers do not shield people from taking responsibility, but instead, facilitate it.

By Bruce Tulgan — Forget the idea of being a hands-off manager. That doesn’t help anyone. In the early 90s it became popular for managers to not manage. Today’s mangers need to reverse the trend.

[MEDIA=3]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

By Bruce Tulgan — Sometimes people who make insane demands are actually giving you the clues to getting better work out of your team.

[MEDIA=4]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

By Bruce Tulgan — We know that writing stuff down helps us remember. But we don’t do it all the times that we should. Here are the ideas that will cause you to write down more, and writing down more will help you do a better job.

[MEDIA=5]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

Bruce Tulgan tells the four reasons you have to fire a low performer, and the best way to get low performers to leave on their own.

[MEDIA=6]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked.

So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.

1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order.
This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices – to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience.

Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself – are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage.

2. Don’t ask your designer to train your dog.
Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designer’s job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer.

Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer can’t fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Don’t bother with being inventive. It’s not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content.

People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. I’ll learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. There’s a lot of return on my time investment. I’m not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I don’t even know if I’ll like. And don’t tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. It’s not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs

4. Keep your design opinions to yourself.
There’s a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then don’t hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you don’t trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then don’t hire her. If you think the designer doesn’t get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs.

In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who can’t design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, here’s an article on how to hire a better one.

5. Talk about your expertise, not the designer’s.
Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples:

Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue.
Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment.

Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top.
Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I don’t think they’ll see the email me button where it is.

6. Know your own limitations.
With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff you’re best at, but there’s always room to learn. My learning area is the photos. For now, I opt for high quality, but free stock photos from sites like Burst.

One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather.

I’m annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but it’s been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.