Managing Millennials

How to Manage Millennials

I’ve read a lot recently about my generation in the workplace. Countless articles have been written about marketing to millennials or hiring millennials, even managing them. But rarely are any of those stories or posts written from the perspective of a millennial employee. After some reflection, gleaning from successful coaching and management relationships I’ve been fortunate to have and witness, I thought I’d share three key tips to managing your millennial employees to best leverage the potential of this emerging generation occupying the global workforce today.

Quick Facts:

• Millennials are individuals born between 1977 and 2000  
• Millennials make up 25% of the U.S. population 

1. Don’t project your past onto your employee’s future

I have a kaleidoscopic personal and professional history – I’ve lived around the world, started my career in a rotational program, and am a serial hobbyist – all of which inform my current employment as well as my future aspirations. A lot of millennials have benefited from travel and volunteerism and multiple jobs across various industries, in some ways obliterating the now-archaic notion of the standard “career.”

Common Missteps:

When managers draw on their own career paths as guiding lights for their employees they fail to leverage the unique characteristics of an individual’s professional history. Now more than ever, young employees are changing jobs and the arc of a career path is often a circuitous jungle gym, as Sheryl Sandberg famously wrote – not a ladder. The mentality of having to “pay your dues as I did” can feel stifling and limiting for a millennial who may have a different vision for his/her career than that of his manager’s.

The Fix:

Ask your employee what interests him. It seems simple, but if a manager asks the question, he has to be ready to act upon the response. Even if it’s 10-20% of the employee’s bandwidth, allow him to cultivate that passion while still executing against his roles and responsibilities. Some companies have formalized the idea of the “passion project” where cross-functional collaboration on projects entirely outside of an employee’s functional purview yield breakthroughs and foster meaningful company-wide relationships that have a positive long-term effect. On a smaller scale, creating opportunity for an employee to hone his skills while satiating a passion builds a foundation for his career as he envisions it and ultimately will produce additional value to his current role.

2. Enable Failure

“Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again. Fail Again. Fail Better” – Samuel Beckett  

I was a collegiate rower, having walked onto the team I was constantly unearthing my potential in the sport with every practice. What I found in rowing, what I continue to see in other endurance sports, and what most certainly translates to my professional life is that you don’t know how good you are until you’ve failed. My coach always said “You’re good, but don’t be afraid to be great.” Fear of greatness simply means fear of failure – because one is impossible without the other. In order to get faster as an athlete, I need to accept that I will fail. I will push myself beyond my abilities; failing, however, is the only way to know what those abilities are and create a marker to then improve upon. Professionally, the best way to grow is to take calculated risks, which is why it is critical for management to create an environment where young employees can try hard, push themselves, fail at times, try again, and fail better.

Common Missteps:

When managers are primarily focused on the way they appear to their leadership, that often results in hypervigilance and micromanagement where employees cannot thrive. Millennials in particular are high achieving, hyper accomplished and failure is not often taken lightly. We were raised in an era where everyone gets a trophy, even those who never scored or finished last. Failure, therefore, can be especially hard and feel especially personal. But it’s inevitable. Thus, creating an environment where failure is okay is critical to professional growth and will generate more long term success both individually and collectively than an egg shell office.

The Fix:

Find teachable moments: when an employee is early in his career or current role, utilize any gaps as teachable moments, rather than criticizing something as wrong either work directly or delegate an opportunity to coach the employee on what steps he can take the next go around, then give him the opportunity to do better.

Encourage appropriate risk taking: Failure doesn’t mean recklessness; believe it or not there’s a right and a wrong way to fail. Guiding an employee so that he takes targeted risks or stretches himself in a way that may ultimately be constructive to him and the office is critical.

Celebrate breakthroughs when they happen: If a millennial employee takes a risk and accomplishes a breakthrough, recognize it, champion it, and affirm the positive behavior.  The best way for failure to yield success is to acknowledge when the latter happens and build upon it.

3. Keep them Moving

Back to rowing: you’d think when you’re deep into a race you want to hear from the coxswain (the 9th individual responsible for steering and making calls in an 8 person boat) is that you’re ahead, winning, or almost finished. But I’d argue the best thing to hear in the boat is “you’re moving.” Why’s that? Because knowing that the searing pain of your effort is resulting in something, is in fact moving you forward is life-affirming; it makes it all worth it. Effort = Outcome. Keep your millennial employees moving. 

Common Missteps:

If a millennial is tasked with the same cycle of work, then the job will feel Sisyphean regardless of the value of the product to the team or the company. Early in their careers, millennials crave growth, they crave movement; they want to be assured that their efforts are driving them toward their ultimate goals, even if by small increments – they want to keep moving.

The Fix:

Look to disrupt patterns of professional redundancy by introducing new challenges for the millennial employee. A new issue, a new problem, shadowing on a new client, all of these are ways by which a millennial can re-engage through a challenge and feel like he/she is gaining professional momentum.

The bottom line: managing a millennial employee is pretty much like managing any employee. There are nuances, though that when honed can really draw out the talent and potential of the younger generation workforce. Encourage. Challenge. Cultivate.