My clients ask if I have success training millennials. The answer, in short, is yes, I have hired, trained, managed and developed millennials into great sellers. Like every generation, their communication, learning style, life goals, and worldviews are different. Part of the reason I was able to adapt my training to the younger sellers is by never getting far from the frontlines. It was a point of pride for me to do a ride-along with my team to help them close deals, and also watch them develop their own style. I was always in the hunt and working hands-on to understand the motivation and goals of my team, including the new hires. I can understand how executives who have been operating with colleagues similar in age and culture are struggling to connect with the new hires.
I have found millennials to be incredibly bright, easy to train, open to conversations and generally unwarranted of the negative press. I remember when I graduated College as a Gen X’er, the same generalizations made about us are now being tattooing on millennials.
From my perspective, to engage millennials, you need to examine two areas: Human
1. Resources AKA – the nice police
2. 24/7 access to everything
Human Resources:
HR has morphed into the nice police. If your feelings are hurt, you tell HR. It is the adult equivalent of “I’M telling.” Why is this hurting the millennials? It’s because some of the best training I received, was not nice, and certainly not HR friendly. I had a boss; we will call him KS. He assigned us projects to deliver to our team in a conference room. The first two presentations I did, he cut me off after 5 minutes and would shut down the meeting because he felt I was not fully prepared and was running an inept session. I certainly thought I was prepared to deliver an excellent presentation. What he was teaching me was nothing operates in a vacuum of singularity. Therefore, your understanding has to go outside just the immediate information, but develop a total understanding of the related issues, secondary impact, and residual impact. Why didn’t he tell me? He expected us to think, use our logic and find our way. I learned later he used it to separate those with drive and motivation from those that just do what is asked. After the initial problems, we developed a great relationship, and to this day, I still prepare like I am presenting to him. Good luck doing that type of hard love training. KS had to take his time, focusing on me, breaking down my ego, and rebuilding it. Nowadays, he most likely would have been fired after the second meeting where I was told to stop.
24/7 Access
Millennials are plugged in 24/7. This has created a level of fluidity in their lives that most of us never experienced. Therefore, the old hard stops and starts of a traditional workday no longer apply. I am just as likely to get an email on Saturday at 2 AM as I am Wednesday at 2 PM from a millennial. It is also as likely to be a text versus email (with a bitmoji). This “plugged in” effect created a flux in “working hours.” Where the cutoff was clear before, it is in a gray area now. I used to send employee’s emails on the weekend, with the expectation they would answer it on Monday when they arrived at work.
Whereas most of the traditional generation still do wait until Monday, the new generation usually fires back that day. How do you get someone who is always moving, to stop, pay attention and engage with the now? Well, you can’t. I had to change my style. You learn how to create urgency around your needs and transfer it onto them. As a manager, you need to help them integrate their consumption habits into work.
It is a two-way street. Millennials need to learn how to deliver for executives. Sometimes HR playing good cop creates unnecessary issues trying to placate the employee’s instead of teaching the employee how to listen. This is coupled with organization understanding the new generation does not have an off switch. Take time to learn how their lives engage in social, mobile and help them find a means of balancing these life stresses.
