Trying to Train Millennials Without Knowing These 6 Characteristics?

In today’s Advisor, we hear from guest columnist, IMD Professor Martha Maznevski, on 6 things you need to know about Millennials in order to better train and manage them.

I didn’t know what I was getting into before spending 5 years on the front lines finding out what makes Millennials tick.
The research I read before I became director of IMD’s MBA class in 2009 didn’t prepare me to lead members of the digital cowboy generation, those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s.
We’ve all read plenty about Millennials before: They are used to being told they are good all the time from a young age. They are not ready for real-world setbacks. All they want is instant gratification. They lack loyalty. The list goes on.
While some of these characteristics have some truth to them, they can be said about previous generations as well. The stereotype of a Millennial is a digital version of what 20-year-olds have been like since the industrial revolution.

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Here are the 6 things I learned that today’s leaders need to know to really harness the power of Millennials.
1. They learn through experience. We don’t call them the PlayStation® generation for nothing. They grew up playing a lot of video games without using instructions. They learned to make it to the next levels of these games by dying over and over again. They can be like that in their professional careers, too. They throw themselves into new experiences without a lot of planning and learn by failing.
They expect a leader to play the role that the walls and cliffs do in a game. Leaders should be aware of this and help point out the potential pitfalls of certain courses of action, both before and after.
2. Their lives are nonlinear. The world has always been complex and volatile for this generation. They have witnessed the Asian financial crisis, 9-11 and the war on terror, climate change, the 2008 financial crisis, all before they were established professionals. This generation has never seen the world as a safe and coherent place.
They will have nonlinear career trajectories and they know it. A lot of them will go back and forth between traditional employment and entrepreneurship.
For a large part of their lives they have been reading on the Internet focusing on one subject one minute, and something completely different the next. Previous generations learned in a more linear way by reading books from start to finish.
For leaders this means that Gen Y is prepared for complexity. They don’t know anything else. Older managers may have a hard time adapting to the new normal.
3. They ARE loyal—but to principles and not to people. This is where some of the accepted wisdom about Millennials comes to play. They appreciate personal development. They love new opportunities. But they will not follow your lead just because you are the boss.
Instead of trying too hard on developing loyalty to your leadership or your organization among your team of Millennials, you should focus more on developing and communicating the principles and purpose behind your organization’s work, no matter whether it is a company, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), or a government agency. Millennials need to know that they are working to make the world a better place.
They believe that there is no success without sustainability for individuals, organizations, society, and the environment. If you can convince them in an authentic way that what you are doing is principled, they will get behind you.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll get Maznevski’s last three qualities about Millennials that you need to learn in order to better train and manage this generation.

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Martha Maznevski is professor of Organizational Behavior and International Management at IMD. She will be leading a daily interactive discussion on Millennials at Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP), the unique global business program at IMD, which takes place from June 21–26, 2015.
She also teaches in Strategies for Leadership for female executives and the IMD-CKGSB Dual Executive MBA, which builds knowledge and networks to do business with China and the world.