Leadership Training for Millennials Done Right
Leadership training for millennials isn’t only a necessity, it is a desire for millennials. Business owners need it, millennials want it.
Even more to the point, millennials want opportunities to be leaders.
In Deloitte’s 2016 Millennial Survey, they reveal that millennials rank “opportunities to progress/be leaders” as the third highest criteria to determine a “perfect job environment.” Salary and a good work/life balance beat out “opportunities to progress/be leaders.” Millennials want the opportunity and the training to promote into leadership.
On the surface, this formula seems to be a good match, but expectations muddy the water at times.
Employers and managers get frustrated with millennials’ expectations to be promoted too quickly. If this is your situation, align differing expectations and do not let it prevent any future millennial leadership development.
Whether businesses are frustrated with millennials or love millennials, training millennials for leadership is a business necessity now.
Leadership Training for Millennials – They’re Ready
The majority of millennials are no longer entry-level employees. They are the leaders and managers now in your workplace. Whether you have promoted them yet or not, they are your current talent for new leadership roles.
Sure, they might be younger, but they are still in the position to be leaders now. The oldest millennial is 36 years old. They are ready and waiting for the opportunity—are you?
As you are well aware, leadership development does not happen through promotion, but training and development. The greater resources you put into your leadership training for millennials, the better your new leaders and mangers will be. You might just need the steps to do it right.
8.5 Crucial Steps to Train Millennials for Leadership
These steps are vital when planning out your talent development and succession planning strategy:
- Match Up A Mentor. Millennials want mentors. The right mentor is key to the development of millennials. Shortcutting the matching process could hurt you more than help you in the long run. Allow a grace period or allow employees to “date” a few mentors before they are officially matched up.
- Embed Company DNA. Most companies teach the values, mission, and purposes in the onboarding stage, but you need to go deeper. You need to teach expected culture for future leaders to understand the DNA of the company. This can happen through teaching and training in multiple ways on language, expectations, goals, and plans in addition to everything else. As leaders, they need to represent your company accurate and train other employees to do the same.
- Provide Coaching. Not all managers or executives are great coaches. Your company needs at least a handful of coaches to coach leaders. A top talent with leadership potential working with a great coach is a recipe for a great leader. Put the same top talent in the hands of bad coach and they will find another job. Outsource this if you need to, but you need great coaches ready to coach.
- Plant Self-Awareness. Self-awareness is one of the top indicators of future success. Ingrain an ability for employees to be self-aware. Having the ability to acknowledge strengths and weakness will the foundation to building a great leader. Empower self-awareness in all your employees, but especially the future leaders of your company.
- Strengthen Emotional Intelligence. A strong emotional regulation is crucial when managing and leading other employees. Even before a leadership role, having a solid emotional foundation will help employees be more productive. As your employee moves through the leadership pipeline, watch for ways to elevate and boost emotional intelligence so they are ready for a leadership role when it arrives.
- Invest into Soft Skills. Employees need to constantly be increasing their soft skill set. Soft skills can come from many different places. You can train, coach, and teach soft skills with a lot of variation. However, do not ever assume your employees will just learn to mature their soft skills. You must have an active role in investing into the development and maturity of soft skills.
- Capitalize on Strengths. There has been a lot said for playing towards employee’s strengths for the last 10+ years. I fully agree to playing toward employee’s strengths. Teach your employees the value of capitalizing on strengths. Employees and leaders do not need to be great at everything, they need to be great at a couple of their strengths to be real game-changers as leaders. Great companies have game-changing leaders with different strengths.
- Exercise Failure. Leadership will always have failure and millennials need help learning how to fail. Teams will encounter failure regularly. The leader’s ability to handle and work through failure will enable them to lead efficiently. Helping future leaders learn how to work through failure will play a large role in their success as a leader in the future. Give your future leaders the opportunities to fail and fail forward. Teach them how to process failure and grow from the mistakes from themselves and others they are leading. This step will be extremely advantageous in their future leadership role.
8.5 Keep Applying. None of the steps have a completion point. Every step is more like a tool to be added to a tool belt as employees mature and grow into leadership. Keep applying these lessons and steps to their growth as a leader.
Take Present Action for Future Leadership
Leadership development can be tricky in general. The millennial dynamic can add to the trickiness of leadership development. Making a plan to develop millennials into leaders will avoid any more possible frustrations. It is a fluid process. Keep the plan developing as you train millennials for leadership.
The future of your business rests on your development of millennial leaders.
