Managing Millennials

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

We’re hearing an awful lot about millennials and how managing them requires a fundamentally different approach. Does it really? Understanding and adapting to the needs of your team has always been a vital function of strong leadership. If you’re losing touch with a generation of people, that’s on you, not them.

The Oxford Dictionaries recently announced its 2015 Word of the Year, and it’s not actually a word — it’s an emoji (representing “tears of joy”). This generated debate in some circles about how the world — work included — is fundamentally changing (and not for the better) now that millennials and the ‘digital generation’ are coming of age. In other words, a “crying face” emoji from those that accept the simplistic notion that we can pigeon-hole people based on being born in a period spanning 15 or 20 years.

I disagree. For one, I believe the existing behavioral models for styles of personality are just as relevant today as they were in the past; they just need to be updated in terms of the visible evidence of those traits — as has been the case for the last 50 years or so since these models were created. More important, we have to recognize that every person is an individual and must be managed accordingly. If the needs of millennials are something that we as leaders find hard to understand, that&…

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