‘Leaders' Of A Different Kind

At an organizational level, in a sense, millennials are change-makers. While not taking the expected course, they demand a relook at many aspects, hitherto considered beyond the scope of change. For instance, they bring home the fact that impactful leadership, in no context, can operate within a command and control paradigm; it has to be democratic, and involve guiding, coaching, supporting, and facilitating.

- Morgen Witzel

Q: How do you lead millennials?

A: You don’t.

A colleague of mine at the University of Exeter Business School once observed of our students: “These people want to work. But they don’t necessarily want jobs.” He had summed up the millennial outlook on life in a nutshell. Millennials want to work, not for the sake of it, but so they can do something that gives their lives both meaning and pleasure. They are an equal compound of selfishness and selflessness. They see the wrongs in the world and want to put them right, and they see opportunities for themselves in doing so. Nor, unlike some older generations, do they see any contradiction between doing good and doing well.

We talk a lot about how to motivate people at work, but with millennials the problem is different. They are already motivated. The problem is that what they want to do is not always what we want them to do. Eddie Jones, coach of the England rugby union football club, put it very clearly in an interview with the BBC. “Rugby players are very good at doing what they want to do,” he said. “My job is to get them do what they don’t want to do.”

That is one way of looking at the problem; taking a group of individuals with disparate notions about what is important to them and what they want to achieve, and welding them into a team with a single purpose. But as any coach of team sports will tell you, this is not always easy, especially when working at a high level. If we try to tell millennials what to do, they will push back. And as leaders, if we cannot impose sufficient authority on them to get them to do what we want them to do, then we have lost. Instead of a closely knit team pursuing a single goal, we will have individuals pursuing their own goals—quite possibly at odds with the goals of the company.

supporters and facilitators