Developing the path for Gen Y to successfully?lead

We are in an era that is primarily comprised of four generations of workers. Let’s set the landscape and understand these four generations.

Over the next 5-10 years, Gen Y will preside as leaders. How can we shape our existing corporate culture to cultivate the environment for these future Gen Y leaders to foster?

Let’s first answer three imperative questions.

Who is Gen Y?

Gen Y is well educated and of diverse backgrounds. They are technology savvy, adaptable, and team-oriented. They get bored easily, and challenge the status quo bluntly.

What does Gen Y think of Boomers?

Many Gen Y view Boomers as people who are resistant to change, technology challenged, near retirement, hard-working, and loyal.

What does Gen Y want?

Gen Y has a high need for achievement and affiliation. They are:

1. Tuned into setting (SMART) goals,
2. Strive for continuous learning and autonomy,
3. Seek change, variety, instant feedback and self-calibrate, and
4. Enjoy a challenging and meaning work.

This generation, which aims for rapid results, prefers to interact or be with others, enjoy socializing, and being member of a team.

Now that we know more about these future leaders, let’s look at ways to reshape the archaic corporate culture.

1. “Adopt a global mind-set. Evaluate your global leadership mix; encourage early career global assignments. Ensure that promotions to executive positions reflect the global make-up of your customer and revenue base.
2. Build a reputation as being socially responsible. Issue a corporate social responsibility (CSR) report as an addendum to the shareholders’ annual report. Ensure that your organization’s commitment to CSR is clear, quantitative and inspiring.
3. Become uber-connected. Develop advanced corporate communications using a range of social media, blogs, wikis, and communities of practice and online corporate social networks to connect employees, enable mass collaboration and improve your company’s capabilities to innovate in the global marketplace.
4. Personalize the employee experience. Develop a systematic and automatic capability to deliver a unique, tailored experience by offering a wide range of choices so that employees can self-select benefits and services to match their unique needs. Work with the IT function to allow employees to select their own desktop equipment and tools within a range of parameters.
5. Enable customer focused innovation. Expand the thinking of your employees to consider how to tap into the ideas of others. Encourage open innovation across all functions.
6. Champion openness and transparency. Develop a bias toward full disclosure of the thought process leading to decisions that matter to the organization. Create a forum that outlines a major decision the company is considering; allow employees to react and offer their ideas.
7. Emphasize learning agility. Develop an ability at the organization level to acquire new knowledge and skills across functions to adapt to a changing environment. Insist on learning reviews after every major customer win or loss to determine causal factors and to build a common understanding for the next customer proposal.
8. Build citizen leadership. Develop a pervasive approach that reinforces the principles of openness and democracy through access to information and social collaboration in order to deliver sustainability and integrity within the society in which the organization operates.
9. Drive systems thinking. Design and connect systemically across functions and bodies of knowledge, understanding their interdependencies, to gain a competitive advantage at the organizational level.
10. Create an inclusive culture. Build a welcoming corporate environment and employer brand that are sensitive to culture, ethnicity, race, age and other differences and that provide equitable access to opportunities, products and services for employees, suppliers and customers. Arrange to be reverse-mentored by someone as different from you as possible. Sponsor organizations and events that promote diversity and inclusion.”

The 2020 Workplace, Meister and Willyerd, 2010

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Photo credits (in the sequence of use): kayla_moya, National Library of Ireland on The Commons, Greg's Southern Ontario .... Greg Stacey, Michael (a.k.a. moik) McCullough, Grant Hutchinson, mintghost, Lubomir Goban, Kevin Jarrett, .androidTeen., Ted Eytan, Vinnie Lauria