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5 Millennial Leadership Tips from A Millennial Leader

I was at a great conference recently and found myself in a deep conversation with some peers about millennials in the workplace. You’re shocked, right? Who isn’t talking about this? It actually seems like we talk about it way too much!

Someone made a comment about how they feel like there is a lack of perspective on this topic. She said that she constantly finds herself trying to learn about millennials but every speaker and writer she came across seemed to be of a different generation. It got her thinking about the gap in this picture – why aren’t we getting advice and hearing about millennials from actual millennials?

I get requested for thought forums, interviews and presentations on the topic of multiple generations in the workplace because I fill this gap. I am a millennial in the workplace.

One of the most popular questions I get is about what advice I have for millennial leaders. Many millennials, very much like generations before them believe it or not, are itching to get into leadership and sure, many probably think they should already be there. That annoys some people like there’s no tomorrow!

So, here’s my leadership advice for new and aspiring millennial leaders and if you haven’t caught on, I am a millennial leader.

1. Put Your Earmuffs On…Strategically

Stop complaining about the noise around you and feeling sorry for yourself. People are going to judge you. They are going to make unfair remarks about your generation and somehow, ridiculously define you by your generational stereotypes. Then, they will argue why you cannot and should not be in leadership because of it. People will always tell you that you are not capable. Go for it anyway. What you tell yourself is more important.

In the end, this stereotyping is just useless noise. Become familiar with this type of noise and learn when to put your earmuffs on. Getting sucked into it, being overly hurt by it (it always hurts a little), feeling sorry for yourself or retaliating with equally hurtful remarks will get you nowhere!

2. Play Nice In the Sandbox

So, they pick on you for your age. It does not mean you get to pick on them for their age. Don’t stoop to lower levels. As a leader, you have to be able to play nice with everyone – people from all walks of life, with diverse backgrounds and with different ideas. Use this as your competitive advantage.

There is so much drama, hate and manipulation not just in the workforce but in the world. If you can turn this around, you’ll be ahead of the curve. Bring people together; be a connector. Help people see their similarities despite their differences. Help people find solutions together despite their problems. Help people reach their potential despite their doubt. Help everyone play nice in the sandbox.

When your team reaches that point of working well together, recognize them. Don’t ever forget to recognize and reward people both individually and as a team. Just be sure it is genuine and meaningful.

3. Don’t Give Up or Give In: You’re In Sales

As a leader, particularly a millennial leader, you will face a lot of scrutiny, a lot of resistance or distrust and a lot of skepticism. It can become very easy to give up on yourself or give into the pressure. The way to overcome all of this is to do things you believe in and believe in everything you do. If an organization’s values does not align with yours, you are in the wrong place.

Every leader is a sales person. Millennials, you better start believing this. If you want buy-in and influence, you have to be able to sell your ideas, your initiatives and your changes. You absolutely cannot assume that if you suggest something that everyone will get behind it. Many people are doubting you already. Prove that you are worthy.

It may not seem fair. You have to work extra hard to gain the trust of your team, especially if you have a diverse team that may not believe in you right away when you take over the team as the new leader. It’s even harder if you were a peer and got promoted into a leadership role. If you really want to be successful, don’t give up, on yourself or others, and don’t give into the pressure or the fear.

4. Always Fail Forward, Never Fail Back

You will fail so get a little comfortable with that. Don’t look at failure as a setback. Use it to your advantage every time it happens. Learn from it and let your lessons launch you forward. The weight on your shoulders will only get heavier every time you fail, but don’t let it weigh you down.

Yes, some people might even thrive in the fact that you failed. Don’t waste time thinking about that. Use your precious time and effort focused on the next great idea, project or initiative. Show everyone how your failures made you even stronger.

5. Be Willing to Stand Alone

In leadership, everyone is watching you. As a millennial, you are likely to have even more scrutiny. So, you have to be doing the right things all the time even if that means doing the difficult things – making unpopular decisions, coaching poor performers or challenging your superiors.

Like most things, the grass always looks greener on the other side. Leadership often looks glamorous from the outside looking in but for those who are in it, you know it is not all roses. Leadership can actually be an extremely lonely place. You are constantly balancing the pressure of the people on your team with the pressure from your superiors and the two never seem to agree. It can feel like a lose-lose situation sometimes.

If you want to succeed in leadership, you have to be willing to stand alone. When it seems that everyone else wants to take the easy road or the right thing is not the popular thing, you have to make that tough call. Contrary to popular belief, if you’re willing to stand alone as a leader, you actually rarely have to. Your employees will support you. People who believe in doing the right thing but who are too afraid to will follow you.

You may hope that people will not judge you by your generation but you cannot wish something like that away. All you can do is stay focused on what matters. If you become a strong leader that your team trusts, they will stop seeing you as a “millennial leader.” They will see you simply as their leader, someone they trust and support.

Loyalty is not dead…but it requires effort.

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Leaders Execute

I had the privilege of hearing Chip Madera, renowned speaker and organizational development expert, speak again for the second time in one month. This past week, he talked to us about leadership and execution and his message really stuck with me. We were a bunch of healthcare leaders in the audience and if you know healthcare, you know that the industry is going through a boat-load of changes.

But, going through change is not a good excuse for not executing. Leaders need to be the example. As Chip puts it, we are the “keepers of the culture.” It starts with us and it is up to us to lead it. If we don’t get this right, we will not survive because “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If we don’t keep the culture, our employees will create it anyway and it won’t be the culture we want because if we’re not part of it, they will know that pretty quickly.

We cannot continue blaming employees and trying to hold them accountable without first holding ourselves accountable. I constantly run into leaders who complain about their employees not performing but they never actually do anything about these employees. If we want A players, we need to pick A players, we need to grow A players and we need to be A players. Only when we start looking within ourselves can we start leading and executing for our teams and our organizations.

To lead a culture that people will follow and buy into, we need to connect with them. We need to be able to relate to them and to meet them where they are. As the workplace gets more chaotic and stress levels rise, leaders are challenged with channeling their emotions while maintaining operations and leading people. This is no small task but where leaders often fail is the people part. They begin to drown themselves in the day-to-day and neglect their teams.

Chip challenged us to “fall in love with our people again.” He didn’t mean this literally, of course, but we need to take a step back and remember that we chose to accept leadership positions and that decision comes with specific responsibilities to our people.

So, have you reflected about your leadership lately? What are you going to do to reignite your passion for people and execute, particularly the culture?

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Right isn’t always easy

Doing the right thing often means doing the difficult thing. If it was a piece of cake, we would all be doing it. As our work became faster paced and our to-do lists became never-ending, did we forget about ethics in the workplace? Did those values we post around our walls just become blurry pieces of decoration?

We continue to see a lack of ethics training for both front-line staff and leadership. Many of these programs were cut from organizations’ budgets during a recession and have not made an appearance since. We need to invest our resources back into these programs if we want our employees to do the right things.

It goes beyond just ethics training though. It also means having difficult conversations, embracing accountability and developing a culture where people feel comfortable doing the right things.

When we build culture and programs around ethics, morals and values, there are many things to take into consideration. The most common mistake is that organizations focus only on the technical concepts like what’s illegal – sexual harassment training, anti-theft policies and information security protocols.

Helping people to do the right thing requires supporting them to speak up when something is wrong, conduct difficult conversations with others who may not be compliant, and incorporate values into team cultures. Once there is a culture of accountability and ownership, employees will be living out the values of the organization.

Getting companies to do the right thing isn’t always easy. It takes time, energy and genuine buy-in at all levels. But it’s worth it.

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Engaging a Free Agent Workforce

We’re all free agents. We always have been but more and more, we’re seeing people take advantage of their free agency. So, how do you engage a workforce full of free agents?

It’s not going to be easy but employers need to start thinking about customization and personalization. Each generation, each profession and each person may want something totally different out of their companies. The most forward thinking companies are trying out some different tactics to keep their best employees around. You should too!

Flexible Scheduling

Don’t just enforce a 4-day work week policy on everyone and call it a day. Flexible scheduling means that you allow for employees to flex their schedules as necessary so that they can have a better integration of their work and life. It’s about empowering people to do what they need to do and connecting the different pieces of their lives to make it whole rather than separate parts.

Service Initiatives

Offer financial and other resources for employees to support the nonprofit organizations and causes that they care the most about. Allow them to volunteer together. It builds teamwork and makes people feel like their values are aligned with the organization’s values.

A Sense of Place

With so many differing opinions, perspectives and values in the workplace, it’s never been more difficult to provide meaning for people at work. It’s the key to engagement, though. We need to be able to provide employees with a sense of place, a sense of belonging. Companies need to work extremely closely with leadership to ensure that employees feel connected to their work.

Regardless of the methods you choose to achieve the above factors, make sure that you are always re-evaluating to make sure that your practices are changing as your workforce changes. Customization and personalization are difficult things to accomplish but they are extremely important to engaging a free agent workforce.

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Ignite Their Passion!

I wrote a post a while ago about how passion makes our work worth doing. There was a pattern in some of the comments and emails I received that broke my heart. People asked, “What do I do if my manager doesn’t support my passion?”

There are a lot of options to answer that question and each person has to do what’s best for them at the time. My response is more so directed to all the leaders out there that these employees are referring to: start paying attention to what you’re employees’ passions are and empower them to do great things with those passions.

It all starts with simply talking to people. Formal leadership may not be for everyone. It’s for those who understand how to connect with people and push them to achieve the best possible things in work and in life. Leaders care about employees on a personal level and assume the responsibility of helping them reach far and high.

Once you know what your employees are passionate about, try to empower them to use their passions to take risks at work, try new projects and make decisions. When they succeed, fight for them to grow within the organization so that they can continue the momentum rather than let their passion and energy go stale.

Don’t diminish people’s passions and don’t let them go to waste. People who are passionate about their work are out to make you look good as much as they are out to make themselves look good. It’s a win-win situation that too many leaders miss out on because they’re afraid of failure, pushback and employees passing them up in the race to the top.

Now, level of passion and how passion shows up is going to be different for everyone and that should be respected as well.

Things are changing at lightening speed these days and there are plenty of people willing to leave a leader or organization that won’t allow them to succeed. I maintain my belief that passion makes our work worth doing but we also need great leaders who allow us to continue our passion for our work. Luckily, there’s a great way to keep our teams energized, motivated and inspired and that’s to ignite their passion and don’t let the flame burn out!

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Opportunities are the key to value-based loyalty

If you’ve been keeping up on recent studies and news, you’ll know that the world of work is changing dramatically. Once upon a time, loyalty was a mutual desire for employees and organizations. Employees wanted to just stay with their organizations until retirement, slowly working their way up the corporate ladder. Human Resources (HR) departments revolved their initiatives – recognition programs, benefits, perks, etc. – around keeping employees around for the long-run (e.g., years of service parties and gifts).

Things are picking up fast though. All over the internet, you’ll now find advice from thought leaders and career experts telling you not to stay in a job too long. The specific advice varies but experts say that most people are now staying in jobs for only two to five years. Some are only staying in their organizations for that long.

So, should the goal of leadership and organizations still be to keep people around longer? Not necessarily, but loyalty should still be a goal. Loyalty does not always equate to staying with an organization for a long period of time. Loyalty can mean that even when an employee leaves your organization, they rave about it. They send their best coworkers, friends and acquaintances to work for your organization. They recommend you with sincerity and passion. They might even return one day if the right opportunity presents itself in your organization.

Organizations need to focus on providing opportunities for people. Opportunities include much more than promotion into a management position:

  • Lateral transfers allow employees to learn new skills and do a new job.
  • Promotional opportunities don’t always have to be into management. Create senior level positions for employees who excel at what they do and want to continue doing it at a higher level.
  • Sending employees to conferences allows them to expand their knowledge and network with other professionals.
  • Sending employees back to school to get a new degree shows your investment in their future.
  • Giving employees special projects that challenge and mean something to them will help them grow and help the organization grow.
  • Providing specialized and meaningful training for employees helps them gain confidence in doing their jobs better.

These are just a few examples of how to provide opportunities within your organization to great employees. The idea is to focus on helping employees achieve their personal career goals. Leaders often fear that if they offer these opportunities, employees will leave the organization. This is totally possible but it is not what management should be focusing on. As I mentioned, it’s the new reality that employees will be switching jobs and companies more often. Your goal should not be to keep employees around longer but to grow them and gain their loyalty.

You won’t always have the right job for the right employees at the right time. They may leave but if you don’t offer them opportunities to learn and grow while they are with you, you may be closing the door on them so that they never come back. That’s where leaders and organizations fail: not maintaining an alumni network.

Some of the opportunities I mentioned allow employees to network with other professionals. Leverage the relationships they build at these events. They may be meeting amazing people who are willing and ready to take their places once they leave your organization. Make sure you give them a reason to recommend your organization and your leaders to other great professionals. As times change, we need to change our definition of loyalty from a time commitment to a value commitment. To maintain loyalty that means something more than time, we must provide employees opportunities and play a role in their professional growth and success.

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How a punitive culture will punish you

Why are we so afraid to fail and why are we so afraid to let our employees fail? Often, it’s because we’re punished for it. If we make a mistake at work, we get written up for it or in the harshest of organizations, maybe even fired for it.

I challenge you to change this mindset in your organizations. I’m not asking you to give up accountability. I am asking you to rid the punitive cultures that exist in your workplaces. Failure without accountability has no place in the workplace but allowing people to learn from failure holds great value.

I’ve seen organizations lose exceptional employees because they punished them for a “mistake.” Some of these “mistakes” include making a decision that the organization felt should not have been made by the employee or forgetting to do something once. If you have a good employee in this situation, they may start looking for another job because you punished them right away instead of empowering them to learn from their mistakes.

It goes beyond mistakes though. Sometimes, employees are punished simply because they made a decision that the organization or leader does not agree with even though that decision may play out in everyone’s favor in the end. Employees don’t always have the chance to see their ideas, risks and decisions come to fruition because they get in trouble just for presenting them.

Allow your employees to fail and take some risks without punishing them. A punitive culture keeps people down after they fall rather than helps them back up. Remember that as leaders, we make mistakes too but we sometimes have the power to avoid punishment for them. We’re often trusted and expected to learn from our mistakes without any guidance from others.

Think about the last time you did something wrong. If you can’t think of something, you’re in desperate need of some self reflection. Then, think about the last time you did that same thing again but did it right. The feeling of relief that something that once went poorly now went very well is a pretty amazing feeling. Afford your employees the same right to have that feeling. Let them learn from their mistakes and have the opportunity to fix them or change them for next time.

Some of the most successful people and the best employees are the ones who make a lot of mistakes because they are the ones willing to take some risks. They learn from each mistake and eventually, they could be the ones who do something really cool that makes you and the organization look good too. So, stop punishing your employees for making mistakes or taking risks without first empowering them to learn from those mistakes or see the outcome of their risks. A punitive culture only punishes you.

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It’s performance review time: Tips for the dreaded self-evaluation

It’s performance review time – my favorite time of year…just kidding! It’s not really a fun time for anyone. Employees usually dread it. Managers hate the paperwork. Human Resources goes bananas because they have to sort through all of the reviews and their phones are constantly ringing with questions and concerns.

Plus, there’s been quite a lot of controversy about performance reviews. Thought leaders have been debating the value of performance reviews and whether or not we should even have them. While this debate continues, most organizations are still doing performance reviews.

As a Human Resources professional, I’ve coached a lot of managers on how to best deal with performance management and reviews. However, the people who usually don’t get much direction from Human Resources are the employees who are actually being evaluated.

There’s this thing called the self-evaluation that people often dread completing for their managers as part of the performance review process. Usually, they get submitted with nothing on them except a signature. Sometimes, there’s a joke written on it to see if anyone’s actually looking at it. Other times, people basically write what their job is rather than how they added value to a project or how they went above and beyond.

Here are some great tips that I’ve learned from being evaluated and from evaluating others (and reviewing their self-evaluations):

  • Make it a year-long task to save time in the end. Starting on the first day of your performance year, commit to completing your self-evaluation. As you accomplish things, receive positive feedback or meet goals, make a note of it on your self-evaluation (or your own document if you don’t have the actual form yet). You’ll save a lot of time in the end if you don’t wait until the year is over to try and remember or find things to put on your evaluation form.
  • Stop putting things on your self-evaluation that are simply your job duties. It always amazes me when I see this on self-evaluations: “I’m always on time to work.” Well, it is part of your job to arrive on time! Your manager and Human Resources both know what your job is already. You don’t have to tell them again.
  • Go ahead and brag. It’s okay to talk yourself up if you’ve accomplished a lot. Structure your thoughts though. What did you accomplish? What was the impact of what you accomplished on your team or the organization? In other words, what value did it provide to the overall goal or mission?
  • After you brag about yourself, talk about some of the areas you would like to improve in. If you don’t tell your manager this, they won’t help you get better.
  • Document the status of your goals. Did you have goals for the year? Did you meet them? Perhaps, you even exceeded them. Either way, document this. If you did not meet a goal, explain the reason, the obstacles and the plan to complete it within a specific timeframe.
  • Be real. Be honest about what you put on your self-evaluation and write it with a genuine tone/voice. Don’t try to make bad things sound good or good things sound better. Also, don’t diminish the value of something great because you’re modest.
  • During your review, talk to your manager about what you put in your self-evaluation. Have a conversation about what you’re proud of and what you would like the two of you to work on next year.

These tips will help you complete your self-evaluation and hopefully, find value in it so that it’s not just paperwork that you have to complete every year. These tips should help the performance review process become more meaningful and less dreaded for both you and your manager. As I always tell people I mentor, “The first step to improving ourselves is to engage in constant self-reflection. Make it a habit, part of your everyday.”

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