Integrate, don’t alienate

Millennials get a bad rap, but business managers and leaders can apply and deploy a wealth of knowledge and special tactics to get the most out of the Millennials they employ.

My book “Activate Leadership” is a guide to the unique leadership qualities, beliefs and practices of Millennials. Learn more at www.thindifference.com. Here are a few strategies to help integrate Millennials into the workforce to achieve maximum performance.

Don’t separate people by age. Keep them together.

1. Create aspiration space: Communicate succinctly the purpose of the project, initiative, or challenge to be resolved. Answer why the successful completion or resolution is important to various stakeholders.
2. Create technology space: Provide tools to productively empower team members. Find secure ways for team members to extend virtually, solving problems and identifying better ideas.

Tap into the Millennials’ unique qualities to benefit your business.

1. Leverage the digital mindset: Use their technical savvy and youthful energy to refresh and re-energize key business initiatives and tactics.
2. Enhance empathy – self and others: Focus them on specific tasks to develop their self-awareness and patience; engage them in complex projects; create opportunities to work outside their comfort zones.
3. Strengthen problem solving skills: Structure their on-the-job education to enhance their problem-solving skills and increase the depth of their knowledge and understanding.
4. Create horizontal mentors: Mix them with people and groups of all ages; foster cross-mentoring – young to old, old to young.
5. Engage social leadership: Task them to participate, engage, and lead your social media engagement; enlist them to develop your social strategy and train key leaders; give leeway to experiment, adapt, and measure results.

Demonstrate patience and communicate your vision to all.

1. Create the vision for everyone: Paint the picture of what happens when things go right and when things could go wrong. Speak to scenarios of a strategy implemented well along with what happens if derailed.
2. Tell the story of your business: What happened quickly and why? What developed slowly yet robustly? Storytelling brings to life how patience helped develop the business and when moments arrived to pick up the stride.
3. Tell your story of being a leader: What were your disappointments? What were your achievements through each decade of your work life?
4. Delegate and invest in your teams: For longer term initiatives, add Millennials to the team and give them substantive responsibilities. Projects that extend over 6-12 months will by their very nature bring patience of doing the work to the forefront.