Millennial Mastery: Leading High Potentials in a Digital Age

by Jamie Anderson & Bernard Moerman

Almost ten years ago Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones of London Business School published their Harvard Business Review article titled Leading Clever People.  In the article they talked about those employees whose unique knowledge and skills enable them to produce significant value within the organisations within which they work.  But they also explained that harnessing the talents of these people is not always easy, because they often don’t want to be led, they know their worth, they don’t always care about promotions, they demand access to senior management and they are easily bored. And on top of all that, they rarely thank the boss for leading them well. 

To hang on to these “clever” people and to reduce the risk of attrition, Goffee and Jones recommended several important management principles:

1.     Reduce administrative distractions by protecting clever people from the rules and politics associated almost any project in a large company.

2.     Maintain diversity of ideas by avoiding centralized management structures that stifle innovative thinking. Give them freedom to pursue projects they are passionate about.

3.     Make it safe to fail. Effective leaders know that for every successful product, many will fail and therefore help clever people to live with their failures as a way of encouraging future experimentation. 

4.    Let clever people pursue private efforts as these efforts may generate new business opportunities in the future and help to boost loyalty and engagement. 

5.    To establish credibility, the leader must demonstrate that they are an expert in their own right. They must show how their expertise complements or supports clever people’s expertise.  

The overall message of these recommendations was that leaders need to balance coordination and control with creativity-nurturing practices, and we believe that all of these recommendations still ring true - but what Goffee and Jones did not address specifically in their article was the issue of the generational shift going on within many companies and industries. They offered general advice for leading clever people, whether that person be an ambitious 20-something employee or a tenured worker in the twilight years of their career. And of course, since the article was written the corporate world has seen a significant shift towards flatter organizational structures, with a greater emphasis upon collaboration. Whereas decision making was often top-down a decade ago, in today’s world decision making has become much more democratic and team-based. 

So what is different about leading clever millennials in flatter organizational hierarchies? We see two important elements:

1.     The first aspects that we have observed is the impatience of the millennial generation. They want exciting projects, recognition and promotion. And they don’t just want it fast - they want it now!

2.     Secondly, they know that they are smart and, in many ways, more digitally capable than their older colleagues-but they are often lacking skills in empathy, humility and openness, which can sometimes be perceived as being internally competitive or even arrogant. 

Let’s turn to each of these two points in turn. 

There is nothing wrong with youthful impatience, but millennials need to appreciate that trust and recognition within an organisation comes from two elements – direct credibility and indirect credibility. While a strong educational track-record and knowledge base is a starting point for direct credibility, true respect within the organization only comes when one can demonstrate ways in which this knowledge can be applied to generate value. 

Indirect credibility comes not from what one has achieved, but from that individual’s professional network and how others view the individual and are willing (or not) to speak as a promoter or referee. The establishment of both direct and indirect credibility can take a little time – a fact that leaders’ need to help millennials understand. 

But leaders also need to be bolder and take more risks in embracing the impatience of millennials by being less conscious of tenure and seniority when creating project teams – if employees from the younger generation are not allowed to participate, then it is difficult for them to acquire the experience to gain the direct and indirect credibility that we have spoken about. So it is not about putting the brakes on ambition – but communicating that the “I want it now” mindset can derail one’s ability to work towards shared success.

And what about the fact that many millennials are really smart and often know stuff that their older colleagues don’t? The important think here is to help people to appreciate that the ultimate success of an organization is rarely built upon the brilliance of the lone genius – it is built upon people working together and supporting each other.  

So the leader needs to be able to orchestrate interactions between cross-generational employees in a way in which trust and empathy is created as a platform for knowledge sharing. This means that egos need to be left at the door, with people respected for the ideas and insights that they bring – and not for what it says on their business card or birth certificate. 

Critical traits that clever millennials need to be coached upon are empathy, humility, communication and openness to the ideas of others. We have observed that many clever Millennials can have short attention spans, are easily distracted and prefer digital communication over and above face-to-face dialogue. 

These behaviours can make it difficult to engage in the deep listening and empathetic conversations required to truly understand the perspectives of others. And if these real human conversations do not take place, then it is almost impossible to build trust and find the common ground for working collaboratively across generational divides. 

In conclusion, the challenges of leading clever millennials are not so different to leading any kind of clever people - the main objective for the leader is to have the courage to take risks on bringing younger people into projects, while at the same time helping these young talents to be more empathetic and open to the views and experience of others. Clever millennials also need to acknowledge that the responsibility lies with them to embrace collaboration and to strive to better understand the people and situations around them – before bringing their great ideas to the table.

Jamie Anderson is Professor of Strategic Management at Antwerp Management School and Visiting Professor at INSEAD. In addition to his teaching, speaking and writing, he works globally as a coach and advisor to C-Suite Executives and Management Teams. Email: [email protected]

Bernard Moerman is an Executive Coach and expert in Organisational Development and Change with more then 35 years of international professional experience in Europe, USA and China. Email: [email protected]