Leading Millennials

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“These young people just don’t understand. I really fear for our future.”

Obviously a comment about the Millennial Generation right? Wrong. It’s actually a comment that we Baby Boomers heard a lot when we were entering the workforce. In fact, I’d guess that every generation has worried about what the next generation was going to do to the world.

While it’s true that every generation is different than the one before in some way, the Millennial Generation is more different than any before it. It is a huge collection of people born between 1980 and 2000: 83 million of them. Even though it’s common to say that all Millennials are this or that way, they really defy any effort to fit them into neat niches. In fact, this is the most diverse generation ever.

That diversity is the result of several influences. First, this generation has a tremendous number of members who are first or second generation Americans so they bring a wide variety of cultures with them. The immigration that brought them here is also much more varied than ever before so there is a wide range of cultural influences.

There has been a steady but not well recognized rise in the age of birth mothers over the last 50 years so that by the time the Millennial Generation began to appear, there was a significant upward shift in the age of their mothers. That means Millennial children were raised by a wide variety of parents with a wide variety of values and ideas. Some even had mothers who remembered the great depression.

We think of the Millennial Generation as the computer generation. These guys were born with computers right? No they weren’t. What’s significant is that they grew up with the computer industry and, as Marc Pensky put it, they are digital natives. But, there are many Millennials who did not have ready high speed internet access, or whose parents did not allow constant use of today’s technology gadgets.

This is an exciting generation. One thing that has seemed to be pretty constant is that they are anxious to learn and take on challenges. As leaders we need to take advantage of that trait. But more importantly, we need to get to know the individual. Don’t try to fit these guys into a neat box. They don’t fit.

Learn more about leading the generations with Balancing the Generations: A Leader’s Guide to the Complex, Multi-Generational, 21st Century Workplace.