Work with your millennials, it’s not worth the fight

Our working lives will span 70 years in future, and not the usual 40-year careers experienced at the end of the last millennium. ­Retirement from everything will be postponed until we are in our late 80s, meaning five different generations will be working together for many years to come.

Much has been made of intergenerational clashes between younger and older workers. For example, it’s hard to imagine two US presidents more different in attitudes and practices than the Gen X Barack Obama and the Baby Boomer Donald Trump, but evidence available to the Aust­ralian Human Resources Institute is that the greatest conflicts occur between older generations and millennials born in the 1990s.

As a consequence, many organisations are investing heavily in training their 40-plus something leaders to better manage millennials, whose thinking and approaches tend to differ.

When communicating, millennials prefer to use digital media over face-to-face exchanges, and can become quite annoyed if their electronic questions are not answered quickly. Leaders of millennial teams are being encouraged to blend available communications forms, and not to get sucked into angry responses to annoying follow-ups from millennials.

Younger workers often like to learn continuously in a flexible and sometimes random way. They acquire knowledge and skill as they go along, and prefer tapping into sources and advice from peer groups rather than higher authorities. They eschew formal planned review points and prefer to figure it out as they go.

Millennials also tend to measure their success by the critical ­assignments they are allocated, and not from the formal position they hold. If they deliver on top- priority tasks, they expect reward and advancement to be aligned to that expeditiously. This approach requires their leaders to emphasise progress on tasks and not time-based management, and also to provide continuous informal feedback and not to emphasise formal performance management.

Effective leadership comes from spending more time with millennials as they do their work, and being able to stop, post replies and chat when it is needed.

Millennials also often express a strong preference for open systems. They prefer to tap into digital crowdsourced media that will tell them where a project is up to. They tend also to seek to engage in group brainstorming discussions at critical junctures, at which point they want to share all data and viewpoints regardless of how confidential that information is, or needs to be. They understand and will respect proprietary competitive information, but not complicated bureaucratic silos.

Many older leaders are being advised to take on mentoring roles with millennials. Two-thirds of these older mentors learn significantly from those they mentor.

Sometimes that means older leaders walking away with half a dozen highly valued new mobile phone apps they never knew ­existed. More often it means getting closer to millennial attitudes, hopes and fears, which enhance the fiduciary stewardship between generations in the workplace.

Millennials will break boundaries to explore and source innovative solutions for their em­ployer, to whom they will be professionally loyal.

But they expect instantaneous feedback, career development and rewards against achievements on assignments allocated. They know a restructuring announced today can take their job away tomorrow. So the quid pro quos expected by millennials are actually reasonable and unsurprising.

It’s better to acknowledge and build on that than fight it.

Peter Wilson is chairman of the Australian Human Resources Institute