Millennials are the worst…At least that is the sentiment of many who are not part of the Millennial generation. But is that truly a fair assessment.
Many of my days are spent in coffeehouses and restaurants writing, studying, or developing tools. There is always a low roar of noise in the background around me as I work, but I am able to ignore it most of the time. There is one conversation that consistently draws me back into an awareness of the room around me, and the topic swirls around the disruption Millennials are causing in every aspect of life.
As any generation, Millennials are products of the world around them, and in their case, the world we have created for them. If you are a member of the Baby Boomer generation or Generation X, you are the architects of the world the Millennials were born into, the parents who raised them, and the bosses who have employed them. It is their interactions with us that have shaped their perspective on the world, their understanding of themselves, and their mission of life. We have been responsible for Millennials from the day they were born, and now that they are becoming independent individuals who are able to make their own choices, lead others, and shape the world, the rest of us are getting uneasy and critical. We use words like ‘entitled’, self-involved’, ‘socially detached’, ‘lazy’, and other derogatory words that express our frustration with how they are choosing to live their lives. Somehow in the midst of our frustration, we are also forgetting it was our choices to parent them the way we did, teach them the way we did, and challenge them the way we did that helped make them how they are.
Now to be fair, there are major national and global events, phenomenons, and realities that also developed the worldview of Millennials, so it isn’t our fault as their predecessors. I would argue, the experiences of their childhood and upbringing coupled with the events of the world around them shaped them to be exactly who they needed to be to lead in the future that is coming. The difficulty is that we want them to act and behave to function in the world we grew up in and built our successes upon. That world is fading quickly and the future realities that are staring us down are threatening to shift us Boomers and Xers right into obscurity. Unless…
We have an opportunity to prepare now to lead in the coming future. Our leadership models and methods need to adapt and change, and I would suspect many of us feel that reality already. The answers for us are going to come from a very unlikely source, and some of us may have a hard time accepting it as a valid source, but our answers are going to come from Millennials themselves.
In the coming posts, we are going to be exploring how the worldview of Millennials that has been shaped by Boomers and Xers is shaping the future all of us are going to live in. As leaders, it is important for us to sit up and take notice, because the answers we are looking for may be right in front of us in the frustrating behavior of a Millennial.
Field Notes 