Joshua Fredenburg, speaker for a leadership group called Vision XY, came to IU Southeast to talk with students about diversity in the workplace for The Student Leadership Conference on Diversity on Feb. 4.
Fredenburg is a national leadership speaker and author about Generation Y.
According to its website, Vision XY is a company committed to teaching life principles by speaking to young people.
The conference focused on leading diverse groups of individuals and showing how diversity is a term that isn’t well-known.
Diversity doesn’t necessarily focus on a person’s ethnic background or skin color. It deals with age, background, culture and how a person was raised.
“Everyone is an individual person, and you never know how that individual will affect your life,” Fredenburg said. “You need to talk to people of all cultures to get a good feeling of how diversity is. You need courage so you can trust these people and get to know them.”
The conference covered different ways to lead individuals from all stages of life.
Fredenburg said one of the hardest groups of people to lead can be a group of people from different generations.
This generation gap can be due, in part, to the older generation’s thoughts about younger people.
He said the younger generation, which he called “millennials,” are technology-savvy, whereas the baby boomers weren’t raised in an environment where technology was all around them.
As a result, some suffer because of their lack of knowledge of the material.
He said if a “millennial” is a superviser of a baby boomer in an office that requires sufficient knowledge of computers, and the supervisor tries to help the person struggling from these generations, the older person may become overwhelmed and walk away from the job.
Campus Life hosts a leadership conference like this every semester.
The topics vary from semester to semester, but, in the spring, they usually focus on diversity issues.
“This year, we wanted to focus on preparing students for the workforce and how that is relative to diversity issues,” Kathy Meyer, orientation and leadership coordinator of Campus Life, said. “For example, [the leadership session talked] about gender differences, generational differences and how these can be an important issue in the workplace.”
During the conference, Fredenburg split students up into groups to complete different exercises that dealt with the topics he covered.
The exercises consisted of various activities from writing down answers on what he had explained to creating a problem scenario between two age groups and how they create a solution for the problem.
Each exercise was given a certain number of points, and the group that had the most points got a prize at the end. The prizes included a T-shirt and one of Fredenburg’s books.
Fredenburg also stayed after the presentation to promote his latest book, answer questions and talk to anyone who wanted to know more about the topic.
“I thought that he brought up some very valid points, and I’m hoping that students picked up some very important lessons,” Meyer said.
The conference also covered how to lead a diverse group of people, whether they are old or young, have a different skin color or are a different gender.
Meyer said she learned something from the leadership conference and took a few lessons from it.
“I really liked the generational differences part because, a lot of times when students enter the workforce, they are faced with challenges in the age difference,” Meyer said.
By BRYAN JONES
Staff
jonesbry@umail.iu.edu