When I was coming up through the ranks and making a name for myself, it was quite common to hear more senior folks ragging on millennials for being lazy, entitled, short-sighted, having a poor work ethic—the list goes on.
I looked around at my peer group, who were working 50-70+ hours a week, held multiple degrees (usually at least one graduate degree), and who were stepping in to fill the shoes of late-career leaders that were retiring en masse. The reality in front of me was completely separated from what I was told to believe about my generation.
In the power industry, we’ve faced a 20-year gap in our industry’s leadership pipeline, driven by slower hiring in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, before rapidly picking up pace again in the 2010’s. Senior leadership positions are being filled with increasingly younger folks as growth in our industry explodes, and guess who is now stepping up to shoulder the massive weight of this leadership gap—you got it, these “entitled” millennials.
I see the same villainization happening with “Gen Z,” and a similar cognitive dissonance arises after personally managing multiple large teams stacked with these younger folks. With only a few exceptions, I’ve seen this younger workforce bring excitement, vigor, curiosity, creativity, and an opportunity for leaders to push ourselves to adapt, challenging us to find more customized approaches to each individual team member rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Food for thought: this next generation will be the one you hand the torch off to. Rather than villainizing them, consider how you as a leader can step up to the challenge to grow, adapt, and prepare them. Every new generation gifts us with this opportunity. Each new generation provides a new wave of energy, and it is on leaders to help them find healthy ways to channel this energy.
Every problem is a leadership problem.
Think this generation is uniquely different?
Here is what they were saying about young folk 2000+ years ago:
“They – Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things – and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning – all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything – they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.” ~Aristotle