Your Millenials

There's a perception out there of Creatives as young 20-somethings with tattoos and piercings, more likely to be carrying an iPod than a Blackberry, and apparently functioning without that little part of the brain that says "oooh, you might want to wait before you say that." Not every Creative is like that, of course. But enough of them are that you should learn how to manage that group known as Millenials.

Whether you call them "Millenials," "Gen Y," or "those kids born between 1977 and 1995 who make me a bunch of money," you need to learn a little about what they're like and how they work. And work they do...they have been called slackers by those who don't know better, but I beg to differ. When I was in grad school at the end of the 90s and early 00s these folks were my undergraduate colleagues. After I graduated and went on to teach college, they were my students. Now, they are, in some ways, my role models.

Fortune magazine last year published a really good article on managing this group of workers. I had picked up the magazine in an airport on my way to Afghanistan and read the article 3 times during the first 2 weeks I was there. What I found useful about the article wasn't just the description of common character traits but more the reasons those traits developed. That helps me adjust my interaction with younger workers. Now of course, I realize these are generalizations and every individual is different, so it's important to tailor your style as needed, but this overview offers a pretty good starting point for understanding your younger Creatives.

So here are a few things to consider, though by no means an exhaustive list, no consider about your Millenials:

They set high standards.
Millenials seem to expect a lot. That's because they do. They are looking for colleagues and a work environment that will challenge them. They expect their company to take care of them. They expect to gain responsibilities concurrent with improving their skills. And they set their highest expectations for...themselves. Since they were kids they have been highly competitive, not just in rough-and-tough, take-no-prisoners world of youth soccer, but also in a world of Advanced Placement courses and high school classmates starting their own businesses. Their heroes aren't Henry Ford but instead Mark Zuckerberg (he founded Facebook while a student at harvard, in case you're too embarrassed to ask who he is). They have seen what is possible and will push themselves, and expect others around them to meet the same standards.

They are info savvy.
They grew up with computers and saw the birth of the Web, unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers they are replacing who had to adapt when they were older. They know the answer to every question is out there and they expect it to be available. So if you tell them to do something they may well ask "why?," not to be a smart-ass (well, not only for that reason) but because they are used to knowing more than just the basics. You should expect probing questions during presentations because they think they can find the answer and so they assume others should be doing their homework, too. And they will get answers for you from non-traditional places...in grad school I once heard an undergrad say "this is the first time I've ever been in the library," even though she'd obviously been around campus at least a couple years. She's just used to being able to find what she wants from the desk in her room rather than a study carrell in the library stacks. Watch out for a potential problem here: they may not be as good as they should be at weeding out fact from opinion or good info from bad.

They may still be living at home.
This generation has an interesting tendency to move back home after college, and many stay for a while. Part of this may be due to those pesky student loans they are paying off, while some of it may be due to the protective bubble their parents built around then when they were younger and which never went away. This has a couple implications for them in the workplace. First, they may not have faced many of the real world requirements like finding and maintaining a home, cooking and grocery shopping, paying for utilities, and other things that many of us take for granted in our daily lives. So it is possible they may not have learned as much about individual responsibility as one might expect. Second, just as their parents were probably involved in their education when they were younger, so too might they be involved in their work now that they're older. When they go home and complain about you, you just might get a call from their parents. These are people who never outgrew the whole "yelling at the Little League umpire" thing (and yes, I was a Little League umpire one summer in college, and yes, I'm still bitter) so just as your Creative may have a thing or two to learn, so too might their parents.

Diversity is normal for them.
When I lived in Colorado a few years back a group there produced bumper stickers that read "Celebrate Diversity." Millenials don't necessarily celebrate it because many of them grew up with it as a natural state and have trouble imagining anything different. They think nothing of working with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds or who are here from other countries. They are more likely to have gay friends and many, even straight people, will look for nondiscrimination policies and domestic partner benefits even if they don't apply to them, just to get a feel for your company's culture. If you have a non-diverse environment they are likely to wonder why, so while you should avoid quotas you might also want to ensure you recruit in a way that attracts skilled people from all backgrounds.

They are not afraid to talk to you.
When I was teaching college I was a little surprised by the change in the professor-student relationship from my days as a student. They were more active in class than we had been and, more importantly, they were more inclined to challenge things I said in class. I thought this was great, assuming they put some thought into their challenges, but it caught me off guard at first. What I realized was that, whereas my peers pretty much accepted our professors' authority in the subject, my students were less inclined to put blind faith in a professor, or any authority figure, and instead were more inclined to engage them. One suggestion for why this is the case is the state of American politics during the 1990s and into the 2000s, which turned incredibly partisan in a public way and which saw many people in authority caught up in scandals or in other behavior that led people to see that just because someone's reached a certain position doesn't automatically mean they deserve reverence. Another possibility is that they've been told how great they are through positive reinforcement their whole lives and they now assume that everyone's as interested in their opinion as they are. You should take advantage of this openness, since many good ideas can come out of this process, while also teaching your Millenials about a little something called "tact" and something else called "keeping your mouth shut sometimes."

They multitask. Constantly.
Seriously. Just because they're on the phone while surfing the Web and listening to their iPod doesn't mean they aren't working. They might be turning out some really incredible work with all that stimulation. Hopefully.

Like I said, these are generalizations and many Millenials won't fit these nice, neat descriptions. But hopefully this gives you some idea how they function and why so you can manage your firm in such a way as to get the best possible work out of them.