Millennials are still getting a lot of press and it isn’t just because, “the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household”, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, or the roughly 1 million Millennials under 26 who are still on their parents health coverage, for now… While these are some interesting stats to facet the largest population group’s move through history, it is time to realize that the system is under strain.
While addressing the system as a whole is a much broader topic, the statement that is at issue here is the cliche, “How to manage a millennial?” but not the way you might imagine.
How to manage a millennial is dead. Long live, how to manage with a millennial.
We know that there are thousands of reports, studies and opinion pieces on how millennials have changed the world in which they interact, but it has been very arms length. The same way we observe rising sea levels and then look down and realize our feet are wet. Well, we can’t keep talking about how “different” millennials are and then not realize that generations get older and, for a time, become a peer before the composition of the workforce more fully changes over. It is a nice way of saying before the oldies retire.
So, Millennials are getting older, as we all are, now aged from 19-36 by many measures, or were you so caught up in the recent seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to realize that 1981 was 36-years ago? Spoken from a biased position, 36 is getting legit and a time, when many gen X-ers were beginning to run divisions of their own. Yes, that’s true. The headlines of Millennials not having kids and only rocking Blue-Bottle pour over, car-sharing, start ups is true but understates the fact that we are everywhere. Yes, we are dragging ourselves to retail jobs with piles of student loan debt that dwarf car loans as the largest consumer debt for the first time in history and we are flocking to cities, but we also occupy the largest number of seats in the leveraged human capital business models that dominate many corporate structures, think of consulting firms where post-MBA Millennials are driving the value to 10’s of thousands of companies worldwide and assisting in authoring white papers about the Millennial plight.
This is a key point because the maturation of the Millennial condition is an authoring of contemporary evolution and it is complicated.
Be sure to note that, the Millennials that started Lyft are also the generation that’s driving many of the cars.
Don’t think that what was presented here only covers the tensions between X-ers welcoming Millennials to the exec table, but all the permutations that includes Millennials managing Millennials in a structure none of them created nor aspires to sustain. Also, don’t construe what I’m saying to mean that gen-Z isn’t important and a rising stakeholder in the economics of this country, nor are generations North of Millennials no longer relevant, the dynamics have changed and we need to move from thinking about Millennials as the ones getting management’s coffee to a valuable peer at the exec table. All three generations are now at the table and it is time we engaged in meaningful discourse.