Managing the Millennials

CHAPTER 14

BUILDING A MILLENNIAL-FRIENDLY CULTURE

Here we must resist the temptation to say, “It all starts at the top. If the executives do not embrace ‘Building a Millennial-Friendly Culture’ in some sort of large-scale change initiative it won’t work.” Sure, executives ought to be thinking about the future of their organizations and the role Millennials will be playing in them. They should also be preparing to train and equip managers with the skills necessary to engage Millennials. But we remain true to our introductory remarks. The lead character in our story is the manager.

IDENTIFY YOUR ALL-STARS AND GIVE THEM A PLATFORM

A huge emphasis has been placed on knowledge sharing over the past couple of decades. As a result of the emphasis, organizations have become more innovative, more productive, and more profitable. If you were to analyze peer knowledge that actually gets shared in organizations, you would discover that it rarely includes managerial best practices. If you recall from the description of our study, human resources (HR) knew whom to select for both the effective and challenged manager groups, but struggled to explain what managerial competencies differentiated its selections. We think it is because our systems are built to deal with problem people and not all-stars. As long as there are no complaints about a manager, all is well. Perhaps you cannot offer the amount of time it takes to deal with problem managers but identifying all-stars and giving them a platform ...