Leadership: Empower them & they'll surprise you

For the last 4 years, I've been working to create an online learning school for Bangladesh where anyone can learn academic & self development topics at ease.

What very few people knew is, the entire time, I have been working with part time university students. Only recently, we got a few full timers after they finally graduated from university.

I've experienced a few very interesting behavioral patterns while leading this very young, vibrant & sometimes 'ranting' team (or should I say, kids).

1. Empower them & they'll surprise you: We still judge people by their age & hence young talents often get neglected because their opinions are deemed 'inexperienced'. Now it's not possible for a big organization to hear everyone out but in our case it was the only option. So we did hear them out & approved a few ideas which at the beginning seemed quite outrageous. Some of the ideas included teaching people on Facebook Live, collecting handwritten notes from students, taking survey from Instagram stories, bringing experienced teachers (who never in their lives faced a camera) for taking live classes, hosting 3 events in 3 different places (outside Dhaka) at the same day, producing 500 videos with a budget of only 5,000 taka and a few crazy ones which I can't disclose because of their sheer insanity. Needless to say, all the projects (well, almost all) were quite successful. And oh boy, we did get surprised by the sheer ownership of the projects that they were leading. So my first big take away from this is that this generation really wants to create a mark.

Positive side: Empower them & they'll show the magic.

Negative side: Give them an operational repetitive task & they'll be bored in no time. They absolutely hate doing regular tasks as they deem them petty jobs 'not worth their time'.

2. They know that they're creative but they're not exactly sure how: Well this is rather interesting. Everyone wants to do creative projects but they'll be dumbfounded when you ask them about a creative solution that they brought in their life. This in no way proves that they're not creative. This situation basically taught me to CRAFT THE QUESTION in the right way. My ranting kids hate getting interrogated. So, when I asked them what creativity that they had or showed, they felt interrogated, questioned and worse, insulted. So I started asking the question differently and started taking their inputs on the critical decision making process. And again, they surprised me with the creative weirdness to solve regular problems.

Learning point: Be careful of how you're asking the question. Don't hurt the feelings, Bro!

3. Being relevant to the popular culture should be on your job description: As I'm approaching my 27th birthday, cat fights on Facebook, emotional rants on statuses & celebrity gossips are becoming more meaningless every day. But this is the popular culture or what we term as THE POP CULTURE. Now if you're not updated with these, you can't leverage old dad jokes anymore because the pop culture won't show you any mercy for your ignorance. So the pressure of being 'relevant' and somewhat funny for leading the young guns is greater than ever.

Your action plan: Know the game of social media as it's being played right now.

So what's the purpose of writing this piece? A generation that was born into the world of the internet, these youngsters problem-solve much differently than previous generations. They have become extremely resourceful and efficient at using the web to find and/or crowd-source the answers they need. They will turn to Google, YouTube, or Alexa first for answers instead of their managers. Therefore as managers, we must adjust our approach and serve as a guide where we can coach them through their self-directed learning, mistakes and successes.

So my final 2 cents on this:

1st cent: Surprising them with relevance works better than wowing them with facts & figures.

2nd cent: Leadership mechanism is shifting from authority based to a coaching based one, so we need to adapt the same way.