week 4-Formulating Leadership Part II

To create millennial leaders, it is important to first create a mentorship program. Millennials want to advance in their careers so it is important to take them under your wing and teach, mentor, and give them goals. As a mentor it is important to begin to give millennials more responsibility. More responsibility will encourage them to step up and take charge of projects and will give the mentor a better chance to learn strengths and weaknesses. It is important to monitor and advise but to not micromanage and problem solve for them. This should be a learning curve. According to Forbes, “91% of millennials aspire to leadership” (para. 2) With this in mind, depending on the company size, it may be in your best interest to even create a special program or team separate from normal work duties to teach young employees leadership skills and provide a class to train them. With this strategy, communication will come to the forefront which is what most millennials prioritize. While classroom learning and extra classes can be effective, they are much better when paired with on the job, hands on training and personal experiences. This means classroom learning can be beneficial, but millennials like to learn by trying something themselves and learning experiences by solving them or encountering them first hand. With these strategies, millennials thrive by learning transferable skills not necessarily job specific technical skills. These skills include things like communication, relationship building and time management. These transferable skills will be extremely helpful in the long run, since according to Training Industry, “approximately 70% of millennials aspire to be leaders but are likely to leave their organizations in the next two years” (para. 12). This can be due to a number of reasons, but if or when they do leave, they should be prepared to take on leadership roles. There are not always enough spaces to promote everybody, and with future millennial leaders being such a large number, it is common sense to think they might have to promote outside the company. A lot of young future leaders are coming into their own and their leadership style that they develop may not necessarily be useful in your organization, and with a large pool of prospects, your company has the advantage of training, observing and hand picking who it thinks will be the best fit for the future of their company. This does not mean that the other choices that weren’t selected are incapable, only that their style may be better used elsewhere and many tend to continue to have successful careers, and this will be because you trained them and they will be a reflection of you and your company. In order to present this to your management, it is wise to first explain the importance of continuing to develop young leaders. Two main reasons this is important are that obviously current leaders will be advances, retiring and perhaps even moving to other companies for opportunities. The second main reason is that times are changing with a lot of people shifting to young leaders and it is important to include young leaders of your own to keep up or surpass your competition.

References

Fries, K. (2017). 12,294 viewsDec 20, 2017, 02:45am 5 Effective Ways To Prepare Millennials For