Formulating Leadership Part II

Jeff Bishop, Jeff Cole, Alex Pena and Aris Somarriba

The premise of this week’s paper will be scenario based in which our company's Vice President of Human Resources has approached our team for assistance in recruiting and developing your organization's future leaders. 60% of our company consists of millennials, and our team has been charged with how to successfully increase the number of millennials as leaders in our organization. At this time, senior management is reluctant and uninformed as to how they should promote the millennials as leaders. This first step is to create a plan. This plan will include examining the best practices that our team can cultivate to enhance the number of millennial leaders, and include an explanation on how our team would present this information to senior managers in our organization.

A process that will be used to foster millennial leadership will be reverse mentoring. Reverse mentoring will pair an older experienced employee as the mentored, with a new younger millennial employee as the mentor, to encourage cross-generational relationships. This will help millennials build on their leadership and mentor skills and train the older generation employee in the new technology that comes as second nature to the millennial (Marcinkus Murphy, 2012).

Aside from reverse mentoring we will provide the millennial work force with the tools and vision that they seek in order to be successful employees and then work up to be successful leaders in the industry. This will be the big three for them. First it will be giving them the big picture. The millennial wants to see the grand scheme of it all to see how they can improve in the process to get there. Second help them find how they fit in the team. This generation wants to be a big deal, they want to be an integral part of what is happening. Third of the big three will be mentoring them on how to build a career (Ferri-Reed, 2012). These best practices will ensure that we have the millennial work force on a path to leadership roles.

The way that this information would be presented to senior managers in the organization would be a meeting or conference. A video conference for those not physically present at our organizations headquarters will be available. This is in order to make this presentation one hundred present accessible. This presentation will be incorporating or relying heavily on human resources millennial workforce and experience for this presentation. This will allow the organization’s senior management a quick look at how it’s 60% millennial workforce would put together such a presentation. The presentation will include a fun and upbeat format. Each person attending will need to join the rest of the conference by entering through a social media site, and create a small online account for the conference site. This will allow the senior managers to enter as though they were the millennial, we are reaching out to. The information and discussion will be via the social media site, as this is how the majority of millennials communicate and interact. Included with the information to disseminated will be adds for the organization. Programs that have been designed for social media recruitment and retention will also be part of the presentation. “For millennials, work is supposed to be fun. Fun isn’t the thing we have when we leave the office; it’s what we want all day. For this generation, there’s a free-flowing intersection between work and life. Bringing joy to what they do should be celebrated and recognized. Keep millennials engaged and challenged by giving them additional responsibilities, especially when offering a pay raise isn’t an option. It makes them feel they’re moving somewhere, being challenged. This is a group that loves change so mix it up for them. Also keep in mind that a millennial’s timeframe for accomplishing goals is 18 months or less – anything beyond that is incomprehensible (Mulholland, 2-14)”. During the presentation, a description of required management feedback will be discussed. “Millennials have a need for instant gratification, which means they’re always on point to deliver rapidly. ‘But as a manager, you need to provide frequent feedback to fill this need’, said Erica Salinas, workforce planning analyst with the California Department of Human Resources. ‘That helps them fulfill that desire for wanting information back quickly,’ she said. ‘This is their opportunity to learn, because you’re offering information for what they’re doing well and opportunities for improvement’ (Mulholland, 2-14)”. This will wrap up the presentation to senior managers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, millennials should not be exempt or overlooked when management positions are concerned. Management should see individuals as they come and not worry about what demographic cohort a potential manager belongs to. Understandably, a selection process has to start somewhere, and a specific demographic or generation is always a good place to commence the search for fresh management. Presentations are always a good recruiting method that way, it motivates the right individuals to pursuit the management position of their choosing.

References

Marcinkus Murphy, W. (2012). Reverse mentoring at work: Fostering cross‐generational learning and developing millennial leaders. Human Resource Management, 51(4), 549-573. doi:10.1002/hrm.21489

Mulholland, J. (2-14-2015). 8 Tip for Recruiting and Retaining Millennials. Retrieved from http://www.govtech.com/state/8-Tips-for-Recruiting-and-Retaining-Millennials