#12: What About Millennials?

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you will get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Ari Andersen, the co-founder of Millennials Don't Suck podcast. He and his partner Matt are on a quest to tell the stories of their generation, and Ari's also my nephew, just to clarify that connection. So welcome, Ari, it's great to have you.

Hello, it's great to be here.

Yeah, so recently Ari and I were in LA together and we got to talking about the big disconnects between millennials and other generations, especially at work. And it's upsetting to people and it's hard. So we want to do some myth-busting in the service of better leadership and work relationships. And that's what you do on your podcast. So we're continuing the good work that you and Matt have been doing here.

Well, I'm very happy to do so and very thankful to be here.

Oh, fantastic. Okay, so let's dive right in. I have a first question for you. What are some of the inaccurate beliefs about millennials that make it hard for their bosses, a lot of whom are Gen Xers and boomers, to forge good working relationships with them?

I feel like this is probably true for, for every generation throughout history, but basically older, older folks don't necessarily have the same worldview that, that we do. So we grew up in a very different age, understandably so. Boomers or Gen Xers kind of look at millennials and say, oh, they're lazy, they're entitled, they're not really willing to work hard and put their nose to the grindstone and sacrifice. We are the generation of instant gratification, of the now, now, now, me, me, me, etc., etc. Understanding the context of our behavior, these myths or these things that people think about us, whether it's That we don't work hard or that we're lazy or whatever, those myths came from some basis of truth. I think where it came from is that we came of age, or at least personally, my senior year of high school was 2008 when the financial collapse happened.

Oh yeah.

If you look at stats, I think I just saw a stat the other day that 90% of millennials don't have faith in financial institutions.

Right.

We have a trillion-dollar student debt bubble that's hanging over our head. All of these things, I think, have coalesced into— we're very much about wanting to work smarter, not harder, because we saw that if you work hard for 30 years and you put your nose to the grindstone and strive to achieve the American dream, that it can all just go away because Some people at Goldman Sachs wanted to make some complex derivative trades.

Right. So from your point of view, this stuff that we did that we feel so strongly about didn't actually work out very well for us.

Exactly. So we're essentially just hedging our bets. We're like, okay, that didn't work. So I think for us it's much more what is the most efficient way to get something done, not necessarily how it's always been done, but what is the quickest— from A to B, what's the quickest path as opposed to the path that we've always taken?

Yeah. So let me pick up on that. I completely agree with you, and what a great, clear way to say it. I feel like that efficiency, that quest for efficiency often leads older people, and I'm including myself in that, but Gen Xers and Boomers, to think of younger workers, Millennials, as being entitled. So, and I'd love to get your perspective on this.

Sure.

So a Millennial will come to their boss and say, How do I get to be a vice president? Can I do it in a year? The boss is like, what the heck? Are you crazy? It took me 6 years. I think the millennial is just asking for information.

I think you're absolutely right. I think because we've grown up in an age where every bit of information is essentially available to us at every moment, our behavior reflects that. I was having a conversation with someone recently about we don't wonder anymore. That just doesn't happen. I think that that manifests itself in the workplace just as much. We're not willing because our entire lives have prepared us to not be willing to just wait around and hope that if we work really hard something good will happen.

Mm-hmm.

We want to find out every bit of information that we can. We want to find out, okay, what is the quickest— again, what's the quickest path from A to B simply so we can best position ourselves.

Yes.

Again, it's going back to that efficiency. We don't want to waste time because— and I'll get into this more later, hopefully, depending on where the conversation goes— but I think one thing about our generation is that we're much more moment-oriented as opposed to working for the future. We're much more experiential. We're much more about what's right in front of us. And so I think that this entitlement is just a continuation of that kind of wanting all of the pieces to be in front of us at any given moment.

Okay, and not necessarily saying, I deserve to be a vice president in 6 seconds, it's just, I want to know everything I need to know about how to get there as quickly as possible.

Exactly, and I think that's kind of a tangent, That's a reason why you've seen this explosion of these self-help, build your brand type of people. Because it's like, okay, how exactly do you get an Instagram following of 1 million people? I'm going to give you the 17 steps in 47 minutes to do exactly that, or whatever it is.

Right. Let's flip it around. We've been talking about millennials as employees, but now the leading edge of the millennials are now in their mid-30s and are starting to get into positions of responsibility and leadership and management. How do you see millennials leading differently than people in previous generations?

I think there are 2 main reasons for this. I think that it's much less of a pyramid and much more flat. I think there are 2 reasons. One is we've grown up in a social media age, and so we're constantly, in one way or another, we're almost collaborating on our social commentary or whatever it is. We're continually collaborative.

So less hierarchical.

Way less hierarchical. But then we also saw what happened. We're not willing to work as kind of like a drone or whatever for 30 years and just to see everything melt away. So I think that in the context of leadership, we're much more willing to kind of pivot. I think you see that a lot with these, you know, a lot of millennial leaders are in Silicon Valley, and that's why you see so many Silicon Valley companies just pivoting from one thing to another, and you can hardly keep up because it's like, oh, now we're a social network, now we're an online marketplace, now we're this, just because we're willing to just kind of do whatever makes the most sense. I think there's much less There's much less adherence to tradition.

Okay. So if I'm working for someone who's a millennial, if my boss is a millennial and they say, okay, that thing we've been doing for the last 6 months, it's not working. Now we're going to try something else. It doesn't mean that they don't have commitment. It doesn't mean that they're spacey. It doesn't mean that they're frivolous. It just means they're saying the evidence doesn't support our success in this direction. We're going to move in a different direction.

Well, and again, I don't want to be black and white here. I think it can mean all of those things.

Depending on the quality of the leader, as always.

Exactly, yeah. If you have a spacey and impatient person who's willing to move, to change tracks every 6 months, I think that's a problem. But again, it goes back to the context more than anything.

That's good. So ask some more questions before you make an assumption either way.

Right, yeah, it's just, I think, you know, making as little assumptions as possible is generally a good tactic.

Generally a good tactic. So then, so my last question is just, I always promise listeners that this will be practical and you'll have some takeaways. So what are a couple of pieces of advice that you have that you think would be helpful for leaders especially to create productive and enjoyable working relationships with their millennial employees? Right.

Well, if you look at how— again, going back to how we grew up, what is the world that we've grown up in? That's a world where most things are customizable. We can customize the font that we choose, the profile picture that we have, all kinds of— the degree to which we're able to customize the superficial things in our lives is pretty high.

Mm-hmm.

I think that we take that, we would like to take that to the workplace too. I think for employers, maybe giving millennials a feeling of responsibility, a feeling of like, okay, it's up to me at least to do this thing that I'm doing, a sense of purpose. We're also, like I said, we're also very experiential. You see more of us spending money on travel rather than saving. You see, again, going back to the lack of trust in the future right now.

Mm-hmm.

I think that employers giving their millennial employees a chance to— the space to figure out what the right fit for them is and not necessarily, okay, This exactly is your task and this is exactly when it has to be done and it has to look this way and feel this way. I'm sure there's— I'm sure to some people I sound kind of unrealistic right now because there are scenarios that have to be done certain ways, but just more generally, I think understanding that we're much more about whatever's happening moment to moment as opposed to planning for 30 years in the future for our grandkids or whatever, just because— The trajectory that it feels like right now for a lot of us is that that's not going to happen, or the way that it happened for the boomers isn't going to happen for us. And so we have a different expectation of the future and we bring that into the workplace.

Okay, that's super helpful. So focus more on current reality, current success, and giving as much control as possible as to how that success will be achieved. Like, here's the results we want from this project, what are your ideas about how to get there?

Exactly. And I think the levers for our motivation are much less about the future and much more about like, what can you do for me now as opposed to what can you do for me in 10, 20, 30 years?

Okay, that's really helpful. Oh, this is really helpful. I feel like we're just scratching the surface, but for a quick hit, you know. And listeners, if you're— we talked some about assumptions, which I think are critical in this regard. So if you're interested in finding out more about how to question your assumptions about anybody, not just millennials, and talk to yourself in more useful ways about the people in your life, I suggest you go to ProteusLeader.com/topics/self-talk, and there's a lot of interesting resources there. So thank you so much.

I'm going to check that out.

Yeah, good. So thank you so much, Ari. This is great. I really appreciate you making the time to do this.

Oh no, this is a total pleasure, and I'm always happy to do it.

Good. And everybody listening, we'll talk again soon. Until then, here's to creating the life that you most want.

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