"On the face of it, it seems quite obvious that experience team members already know a lot of stuff and completes the tasks with minimum supervision, whereas freshers require a lot of guidance and need to be spoon-fed in each and every aspect; overall, giving a glimpse that it is easy to manage experienced employees. But, when you look deep into any corporate setup, it is quite opposite. Even though freshers have knowledge about the latest technologies, they do not have work experience and take time to understand the nuances of different projects, the company’s work culture, thereby requiring a lot of training. Except for a few new employees, the majority of them would take their own time to adapt to the new work leading to the repetition of work, causing strain to their seniors. But, all this while they themselves understand their shortcomings and listen to the instructions of their senior. Barring some exceptions, the majority of this cadre follows the instructions from their seniors, be it right or wrong, simply leaving only one burden on seniors - giving more instructions, sometimes even repeatedly.
Moreover, everything is new to them and so they are more open to learning new things, making the senior’s life easy in training them. On the other front, handling experienced ones leads to a different scenario. While they have knowledge and experience in various aspects, they still would have had scope for learning new things, owing to the market demand, rapidly changing technologies, new roles, and whatnot. So, in spite of having knowledge and experience, they still need to be following instructions from their seniors in some of the other work, which could pose a problem.
Some of the major reasons of problems between senior-junior:
A) The past relation was strained; either the senior is not considered competent by the junior, or the junior has been committing mistakes repeatedly
B) Experience brings rigidity towards learning; some of them becoming over-confident too. C) Completely different mindsets
D) Limited promotions, team members competition leading to delayed promotions, dissatisfied salary hikes of the juniors; further fueled by biasedness and office politics.
E) Other management related issues - ultimately affecting the team members relations.
As the time spent between the senior and junior increases in a company, the impact of the above factors increases. Moreover, the incompetencies of the senior would aggravate this situation multifold. As the relation is marred by more and more negativity, the understanding between them deteriorates. Slowly, they lose the ability to teach new things due to the resistance in active listening and having constructive dialogues between them.
While the freshers require more guidance, experienced employees need to be handled quite differently, which need efficient managerial skills with patience.
As a senior, make sure you are first effective and then dealing all your team members clarifying their goals, achievements, and to-do-lists in a transparent manner;
Rest, you have to be patient to clear the air, whenever there is any misconception;
Now, a junior needs to understand the company’s politics, giving the benefit of the doubt; or at least clarify in case of issues. In such a case, as a team, anything can be made possible!