One of the reasons I started this blog is a lack of mainstream advice for Millennial Leaders, even by researchers who theoretically are experts on the topic.  While scrolling through my LinkedIn feed the other day an article popped up that summed up what I’ve been seeing (or not seeing) so I thought for today’s blog I’d critique it to highlight the challenge I face in getting high quality advice.  The Jan. 6, 2017 article is titled Top Employers Say Millennials Need These 4 Skills in 2017 and the author is Caroline Beaton who according to her bio is, “an award-winning freelance writer and speaker covering psychology, culture, social trends and millennial careers.”  I should add that I don’t know Caroline nor have I researched her other work.  I also haven’t interviewed more than 100 top HR managers, recruiters, and CEOs as she did for this article; rather, my critique is based on a) being a Millennial and b) my own observations over my decade+ career.

Foundation

The article’s main point is to uncover skills that entry-level job seekers need to display.  Right off the bat I question whether Caroline even knows her target audience.  If you read my 2nd blog Picasso you’d know that a Millennial is roughly 21-37 years old.  Assuming most people graduate with a 4-year post-secondary education around the age of 23 and giving them a generous 2 years to find their first role in their preferred field or complete further education/training, a typical Millennial would be in that entry-level position by 25.  This means that a large majority of Millennials aren’t currently looking for entry-level positions; they’re well past them!  This article is only useful for ~20% of Millennials at the tail end of the generation.

The article then goes on to highlight four skills that Millennials need so they can secure that entry-level position so let’s see how many of these are skills that apply more to Millennials.

Skill #1: Attention

I do somewhat agree with this one.  While generalizing, a typical Millennial has grown up in a world with more screens, notifications, devices, global social media, etc. relative to previous generations so being able to focus on one thing for many consecutive hours is not an innate skill.  The students that work for me along with me, to be fully truthful, always have a mobile device in our hands whereas I don’t observe that potential for distractions in some of the Gen Xers or Baby Boomers I work with.  This doesn’t mean that Millennials aren’t able to be very successful though so I wonder whether the absence of this skill is directly linked to job performance.  Perhaps it’s just a different style of working that prior generations aren’t used to?  I’d argue that when given a task or project, a person of any age would need to apply the appropriate level of focus and attention to get it done on time.

Skill #2: More than college

Putting aside that this isn’t really a single skill and is very industry specific, the author states that, “curiosity and commitment, not college, will be among the most important skills for millennials in 2017 and beyond.”  This is true but it doesn’t just apply to Millennials.  Given the rate and pace at which industries are being disrupted and the impact of new technology in every aspect of life, everyone in the workforce is going to need curiosity and commitment if they want to succeed at work.  How useful is a college/university degree gained 20+ years ago relative to one gained recently?  Sadly both are probably equally as useful.

Skill #3: Agility

I found this section confusing.  The author provides many definitions of agility such as,

• “the ability to overcome.”
• “not getting stumped at an early stage.”
• “‘athleticism’: individuals who demonstrate resourcefulness, goals-driven behaviour, team player mentality and relentlessness.”

Huh?  I stepped back a bit to see the point that’s being made and my conclusion was that the author is really talking about persistence or tenacity as the skill.  Maybe it’s because I work in high-tech but to me agility is being able to successfully pivot your focus/priorities quickly to something different, whether that’s quickly learning a new skill, changing the scope of a project or deliverable, or reinventing something.  Definitions aside, while valuable advice for Millennials I’d argue again that this applies to everyone in the workforce given all the change going on.

Skill #4: Humility

I strongly disagree with this section!  To be clear I don’t disagree with the point—all employees need humility—but that this is being focused at Millennials is a little frustrating.  This section starts with the following sentence: “Not taking yourself too seriously, admitting when you don’t know stuff and asking for help when you need it are some of the most advanced skills of all.”  It ends with this: “On a day-to-day scale, people who think they know everything aren’t trainable, nor are they good collaborators. Admitting you’re a beginner, over and over again, takes practice.”  This is the exact advice I give to people who are mid- or late-stage career because I find they’re less humble or less willing to listen to different ideas or perspectives relative to early-stage career professionals.  I’m sure everyone can think of those one or more individuals who have been in their role for a long time, don’t change, don’t listen, and talk down to less experienced colleagues.  I recently had a colleague tell me that they have 20+ years of experience at multiple companies and because I am junior in years they wouldn’t take my advice (note: I’m at a higher job level so technically I outrank them), and have had a few similar situations throughout my career with longer-tenured colleagues.

Conclusion

The article is geared towards entry-level job seekers which encompass the tail-end of the Millennial generation and the leading edge of Generation Z.  I think having the word “Millennials” in the title is a bit misleading or maybe just click-bait-lite.  It should probably be titled Top Employers Say Entry-Level Job Seekers Need These 4 Skills in 2017.

It also talks about skills that for the most part apply to the entire workforce.  Imagine for a moment that it was only Millennials that needed these skills.  You’d have part of your workforce being highly focused, agile, be more than just their degree, and humble while the more mature part isn’t any of that—obviously that’s not the intention.  This is just generally good advice for anyone.  So maybe the title really should be Top Employers Say People in the Workforce Need These 4 Skills in 2017.

So what is the relevance for a Millennial Leader?  It means that we need to dig deeper to find meaningful and specific advice that can help us grow into better leaders.  It means analyzing the advice you’re given to determine whether it’s just generic advice dressed with a Millennial-labelled bow on top.  It also means that your leaders probably don’t even view you as a Millennial which could lead to differences in perspectives that can then lead to misunderstanding.

In late May 2013 I was a few weeks into my first people manager role.  I had been asked to take on the responsibility of running our organization’s IT Security Governance & Compliance team and our Customer Care team (essentially 1st level helpdesk).  The Customer Care side was about 10-15% of the role; it was a well oiled machine with dedicated staff that I inherited from another manager who ran it very well.  I essentially had to keep it going and look for ways to tweak/improve it where possible.  The IT Security side was much more complex: the team had lost a couple of people the month prior to me taking it on (including the highly experience manager who was promoted to an exciting position elsewhere in the company), it was suffering from an identity crisis within the organization, and generally IT Security is a challenging/high-risk topic.  So pretty exciting except for one minor detail: I had almost no experience in either space.  I had worked on teams and led projects in many areas of IT up to this point but none of them were in the areas I now owned.  The icing on the cake was that I was also younger than all but one of the employees I was now responsible for leading.

Given that context, the topic I want to cover in this blog post is how I thought about and prepped for a particular meeting, one I felt would make or break my ability to be successful.  Picture 31-year-old me about to have my first one-on-one/career discussion with the team lead on the IT Security team who was an employee with 38+ years of experience with the company.  Think about that.  The person’s career was longer than my life!  While prepping I literally remember wondering who would be giving the career advice.

I had a few objectives for the meeting:

1. Build trust, as we hadn’t worked together closely before
2. Determine what I could do to help the person with their career aspirations
3. Request help, given I had no practical experience in that space and needed to learn fast
4. Earn respect as the new manager of the team

#4 was the hardest one to prepare for especially since if I screwed that up it would have impacted the other three objectives.  I didn’t want to come across as a pushover from the beginning yet I also didn’t want to come across like some hotshot know-it-all either.  It’s tempting for people in management roles to be authoritative from the beginning but I really felt that this kind of approach wasn’t going to help me meet the objectives of the meeting.  I was genuinely confident in my abilities but had to ensure that confidence came across in the right way.

To build trust I figured the best approach was honesty (shocker!).  During the meeting I opened up about myself and my family, my career goals, why I wanted to get into management, the knowledge gaps that I had in IT Security, and my weaknesses.  I asked them the same things too so I could learn about them as a person as well as where they saw themselves in the coming years, their motivations, what kind of work environment they thrived in, and more.  This informal approach to start the meeting led to relationship building which is essential between a manager and an employee.

I was fairly blunt in my request for help.  I asked where they felt I should focus, what the strengths and weaknesses of the team were, how I could be most helpful and also how could I ensure I didn’t get in the way.  I asked open-ended questions and let my employee do most of the talking.  By being blunt I was able to set the tone for the next few months: that I would be counting on the person to help me learn and that it would mean more effort on their part, i.e. run the team and train the manager.  I didn’t sugarcoat and by being clear on what I needed from them it set us both up for success.

Almost nobody is going to earn respect in a single meeting so I wanted to lay a foundation that would allow me to earn the necessary respect one needs to succeed as a leader.  I outlined my management style but was honest about the fact that what I had outlined was just a theory and that it would evolve as I grew into the role.  I asked for insight into what they felt were the characteristics of the better managers they had during their career.  What I think was probably the most important thing though was that I created a culture of feedback.  I knew I was going to make mistakes so I asked to be called out whenever they felt I was going down the wrong path.  I wanted them to know that I would take that feedback seriously and without repercussions to them (this also helps with building trust).

Overall the meeting went very well and was the launchpad to years of great work between the two of us and the rest of the team.

As Millennials take on leadership roles I think many of the lessons here are key since they will likely have more experienced people working for them given the current mix of generations in the workforce.  Show respect for that experience and be humble about your current level of skill and experience.  Ask for help and show your appreciation when helped.  Ask for feedback, and more importantly act on it (otherwise you’ll find the feedback will dry up real quick). Yet, be confident because ultimately you were selected to lead based on your track record and potential.  New ideas and perspectives combined with the wisdom gained over years of experience can lead to wonderful outcomes for Millennial leaders and the teams they lead.

Seriously? How could I possibly be writing about Millennial leadership when I’m not a Millennial? I’m in my mid-thirties, over a decade into my career, and have a couple of kids.  More importantly, as my youngest sister would be the first to tell you, I’m not even remotely (a?) hipster.  Those Millennial rascals are out there busy “finding themselves” while the rest of us work, right?

Wrong. That’s perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about this generation (and really, every generation); that it is a homogeneous group of people that can be painted completely with the same brush. Having said that, researchers are able to identify some very high level tendencies that apply to a large swath of Millennials. There’s a slight inconsistency in how the generation is defined but Wikipedia says the following:

The majority of researchers and demographers start the generation in the early 1980s, with many ending the generation in the mid-1990s. Australia’s McCrindle Research^[28] regards 1980–1994 as Generation Y birth years. A 2013 PricewaterhouseCoopers^[29] report and Edelman Berland^[30] use 1980–1995. Gallup Inc.,^[31][32][33]Eventbrite^[34][35] and Dale Carnegie Training and MSW Research^[36] all use 1980–1996. Ernst and Young uses 1981–1996.^[37]Manpower Group uses 1982–1996.^[38]

In other words that’s anyone who is 21-37 years of age as of today. This would cover people who are still in post-secondary education through to those who could be almost 20 years into their career.  That’s a vast range of experiences.

So why is this relevant to a Millennial leader?  As I’ll get to in future blog posts the best leaders tune their style at an individual level for the people they lead.  This means taking the time to understand what one’s own generational tendencies are as well as those of other generations (Generation Z, Generation X, baby boomers, etc.). I said earlier that you can’t paint an entire generation with the same brush and that’s still true.  But if you’re leading someone from a different generation then having that basic understanding of their potential viewpoint of the world relative to yours can be a starting point in helping individualize your leadership approach for them—again, fully recognizing that a person may have zero in common with what their demographic suggests.

In my ~4 years in people management I’ve led interns who are midway through their post-secondary education all the way to people whose careers are longer than my life! Given I can’t manage the same way at both ends of that spectrum I’ve used demographic research as one of many tools to help me tune my style.

I hope this was insightful. I’m off to buy some rose gold headphones while drinking some overpriced latte.

Why? In a world where there is more free leadership advice than ever before, why would I decide to start a leadership blog? If you can believe it I actually think there’s a gap. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough but all the more prominent people giving leadership advice aren’t like me, or many of my peers.

I’m a Millennial.

There are many great leaders sharing their perspectives who are not Millennials.  There are many articles about how leaders need to manage Millennials who are now in the workforce.  But what about those of us on the cutting edge of leadership as Millennials, especially those who already lead people from different generations? There’s a growing need for insights and perspectives from leaders/managers who are Millennials.

That’s what I hope to do with this blog.

I don’t have a specific plan on what I will write about. I hope to share some stories of the situations I’ve faced and what I did to respond – rightly or wrongly – to spark conversations. I’ll try to convince some leaders I admire to write guest posts. I’ll share articles I find interesting along with my analysis. I’ll share some of the great advice I’ve received over the years along with the advice I give to the people I lead.  I also hope to learn via your comments and feedback.

Sit back, and enjoy the ride!