What Millennial Workers Have That Everyone Else Is Ignoring
June 24, 2019Last month, I ran an article on LinkedIn about how to work more effectively on intergenerational teams. To my surprise, many millennial workers contacted me after the article ran. They wanted to thank me for presenting them in such a great light, which they said was rare, especially coming from a Generation Xer.
As the millennials who wrote to me explained, in the workplace, they are all too often dumped on or simply written off. All the stereotypes about millennials being immature, needy, naive and overly ambitious prevail. Colleagues complain about their need for constant feedback and love of tech. Younger colleagues worry they’ll never catch up to their millennial colleagues. It’s a lose-lose situation. And, as more millennials move into the C-suite, the situation seems to be getting worse.
If you step back, there is no question that millennials have already been successful in the workplace. From Mark Zuckerberg, who was worth billions by his early 30s, to executives such as David Knopf, who became the CFO of The Kraft Heinz Company at 29, there is no shortage of millennials in key leadership roles. In the startup world, younger leaders are even more common. In tech, being young is so common that a resort for “elderly” workers in tech — that is, anyone over 30 — recently opened!