Not Everyone Gets a Trophy

Millennials will be much more difficult to recruit, retain, motivate, and manage than any other generation. But they will also be the most high-performing workforce in history for those who know how to manage them properly.

Millennials are more concerned with short-term opportunities and rewards. Employers have to talk to them about what they can offer them today, tomorrow, next week, this month, the first six months, and the first year, rather than in the next three or five years.

It is better to leave a position unfilled than to fill it with the wrong person.

Millennials want to hit the ground running and on day one. But they don’t want to be thrust into a sink-or-swim situation either. They want a lot of guidance and support every step of the way. This can be exhausting for managers, but if you don’t plug into their excitement and enthusiasm on their way into the door, you are in serious danger of turning a good hire bad.

Keep Millennials focused on the work you hired them for while simultaneously encouraging them to leverage knowledge and skill into that work. Rather than becoming frustrated by their enthusiasm and shoot down every idea they come up with, choose to channel it in the right direction.

Millennials need to know that their managers know who they are and care about their success. Managers need to prioritize spending time with them and guide them; break things down like a teacher; provide regular, gentle course corrections and clear boundaries to keep them on track; be honest with them to help them improve; don’t pretend to be something they’re not; keep track of their successes no matter how small; and reward the behavior they want to see.

Millennials give the impression to their seniors that they don’t respect age and experience or don’t see why they matter in the workplace, but research has shown the opposite. Millennials appreciate and respect age and experience, but that appreciation doesn’t translate well into deference and acquiescence.

Giving Millennials the gift of context means explaining that—no matter who that Millennial may be, what they want to achieve, or how they want to behave—their role in any situation is determined in large part by factors that have nothing to do with them. There are preexisting, independent factors that would be present even if they were not, and these factors alone determine the context and limitations of any situation.

Millennials have a strong customer mindset—they think like customers—which creates problems when they reach the workplace and become employees. The reason they always see themselves as customers than anything else, even if they don’t realize it, is because all their lives marketers have targeted them more aggressively than any new consumer market in history.

Millennials are amazingly advanced in their knowledge and skills at a very young age, yet they often lack maturity when it comes to the basics of productivity, quality, and behavior. What’s worse, managers often report that Millennials tend to be unaware of gaps in these basic skills and are completely unconcerned about it.