A Primer for Understanding Your Millennial Work Force: "Yo Dawg, If You Don't Know This...You May Be Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight!"
Last week I led with the theme of storytelling and the power it offers for managing/leading..png){kind=avatar}
The implication of the piece was that as a leader/manager it is incumbent on you/us to develop an ability as a storyteller in order to continually provide teams and individuals with a sense of direction through sharing in a relevant context.
Of equal importance is a firsthand knowledge of the story being spoken into and a willingness to let it alter our reality, the one we may think everyone shares, if we plan to stay connected to the people we are leading/managing. This is true especially if the people are twenty-somethings and we are a forty, fifty or in my case sixty-something.”
In July I wrote a piece that strongly suggested managers get interested in what their charges were passionate about. This as a strategy for being able to understand how to “job craft” towards a particular set of enthusiasms younger people might be bringing to the workplace. In mid-August I asked if your managers might be being put in a disempowered position by certain company policies and practices. This week I bring together the central themes of both these pieces and offer that as leader/managers we would be well advised to engage ourselves in a course of study on the “world of twenty-somethings” if we plan to be relevant to the people reporting to us. If we are not willing to discover what tickles their fancy, we may find that as a leader we are indeed “bringing a knife to a gunfight.”
Whenever I need an update on “twenty-something” reality I check in with Jake, my own “twenty something” son. He is 23 as of August this year. Jake spent the summer interning in Manhattan with the magazine Complex that aims right for the psyche and interests of the 20-35 year-olds in our culture. Having just returned from this sortie into the mind of the Millennials, I knew his ‘intel’ would be fresh.
We sat down this morning for breakfast and he gave me the “411” on what he and his friends are interested in. It will be no great surprise to find they spend a lot of time on-line. Before you dive into the websites I am going to share with you, ask yourself whether you are really willing to spend the time to grock what is going on. Beware all ye who enter here!
Organizations, the ones most of us work in, do have an economic purpose and we have been taught for the most part to think if them as machine-like or mechanical in operations. In reality they are, especially today’s highly knowledge based organizations, social systems with an economic purpose. Since they are social in nature as well as substance knowing the norms of important segments of the population would seem to make a lot of sense .
Almost for certain you are familiar with You Tube. Knowing what Millenials are watching on You Tube is another matter altogether. Try these references for starters:
Jurassic Park HEY David After Dentist
Double Rainbow Original Video Double Rainbow Song
By the time you finish with these references you may be certain you’ve been transported to another world… and you have! Just for fun take a quick trip to
By now you'll be certain that your own grip on things is slipping.
To get your bearings back spend some time at Know Your Meme. This site offers explanation, based on research, as to what accounts for the attention getting aspects of certain web phenomena. You may find the "Yo Dawg" episodes particularly educational.
If you get through this and have an appetite for more I suggest Technologically Impaired Duck back at Know Your Meme and if that doesn’t do you in try %&@ck Yea: Struttin Leo.
Having these experiences under your belt you’ll be ready for the relative sanity of Buzz Feed to get caught up on current events, Millennial style, topped off by a visit to Funny or Die.
Congratulations…you are now nearly an honorary Millenial. The only thing left for you to do is take a ride in your car and tune in to one of the 200 AM stations around the US that carry the Jim Rome Show (aka The Jungle). Once you share three hours with Jim and his 2.5 million listeners you’ll have little concern that as we turn things over to the Millenials all is well.
Here are a few fast facts courtesy of the Pew Foundation** regarding the Millenials;
They are history’s first “always connected” generation. Steeped in digital technology and social media, they treat their multi-tasking hand-held gadgets almost like a body part – for better and worse. More than eight-in-ten say they sleep with a cell phone glowing by the bed, poised to disgorge texts, phone calls, emails, songs, news, videos, games and wake-up jingles.
They embrace multiple modes of self-expression. Three quarters have created a profile on a social networking site. Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). Nearly one-in-four have a piercing in some place other than an earlobe –about six times the shar.e of older adults who’ve done this.
** The Pew Foundation has produced a fabulous report on the twenty-somethings titled simply MILLENNIALS. Download the PDF.
- So now, when will you sit down with your twenty-somethings, share your new knowledge and find out what I didn’t tell you about?
