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.