How to inspire a millenial workforce for transformation

Depending on whom you ask, you would get the definition of a millenial as anyone born between 1981 and 2000. Wide though that time span is, there are two things you could be sure about millenials: 1)Their aspirations could be different from the generations before. 2) They have already changed the way organizations function.

But the truth of the matter is that there are more misapprehensions about millennials than right understanding about them.

This could be frustrating for the millennials. But for (typically older) leaders in organizations, failing to understand the millennial mindset could be a grave mistake. That’s especially true in transformation of organizations when you need to work closely with the millennial workforce.  

Keeping this in mind, we felt it a good time to bring to fore a crucial topic about which leaders should be aware: How to inspire a millennial workforce for transformation.

Nurturing a millennial workforce leads to growth for the whole organization

Encourage diversity of vision

Dee Poku, the founder of The Other Festival mentions the importance of diversity in the context of millennials. And by diversity, she doesn’t just mean the diversity of race and gender, but also diversity of thoughts and ideas.

Perhaps, the biggest expression of your ideas is a vision- a strong objective towards which you could progress.

Your True Personal Vision is to be found in your own self. The problem is that sometimes distractions and information overload from the external world makes it hard for you to see that vision clearly.

Temenos Vision Lab (TVL) is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility to help you realize your vision. Based on 25 years of business consultancy experience, TVL incorporates psychological insights to help guide change agents to their True Personal Vision.

Going from the personal to the group-level, you would find that vision is important there as well.

For practical reasons, you may have to cluster the individuals into teams or silos. And a team pursuing a singular vision is a self-driven team.

Following the ethos of finding your vision in your own self, a team’s compelling shared vision is born from among themselves. TVL helps teams discover this as well.

Encourage learning and development

The stereotype that millennials are lazy and feel entitled seems to be a misjudgement.

A study conducted by Udemy, for instance shows that 73 percent of those surveyed were keen on additional training to improve their career prospects. Also, 42 percent claimed learning and development as among the key elements they look for in a job environment.

Leaders would do well to take this into consideration when they wish to transform a millennial workplace. In fact, nurturing a conducive environment for learning could itself be a key part of transformation. For as the change agents get more skilled, transformation is a natural outcome.

However, much as they wish to learn and transform, some change agents may find it difficult to accept changes. It’s not unusual to see change agents being reluctant to acquire new learnings for change because of misapprehensions about processes or people. These misapprehensions, they may have acquired due to poor past experiences. This makes them frictional towards leaving a comfort zone.

The Clean Slate session included in TVL helps them identify these negativities and weed them out.

Millenials have aspirations unbound like the sky

Be your true self with team-members

Dee Poku also stresses the importance of being true to yourself to inspire millennials. As a social entrepreneur with focus on women’s empowerment in the workplace, she believes that the more honest you are about the issues you face and the direction you plan to take with your team members, the better it would be for everyone involved.

Poku’s idea relates to the concept of being present as a complete being in your interactions with others. In other words, you should be in sync with the different parts of your self, so that you present yourself as a whole human being- trustworthy and true, rather than a fragmented self.

In the present age, it’s the norm to compartmentalize your self into professional, social, personal self etc. Such compartmentalization is not only unnatural but it could also prevent you from having easy and open interactions with team members.

You could read about how to make space for the different parts of yourself here.

Encourage narratives of the self

By definition, many millenials are young. Young enough not to have lived long yet to frame a personal narrative based solely on the past. By nature, the young look to the future with anticipation, hope and perhaps even a little trepidation. It’s then important for them to frame a narrative about themselves which encapsulates both the past and future.

Aspects like the challenges they faced and how they overcame them could be derived from the past. The aspirations about the future they wish to build based on their skills would complete the narrative.

In TVL, the space for framing such a narrative is provided via Personal Mythology. Personal Mythology is a key step in Influence Maps- a proprietary tool used in TVL that helps you map all the influences, external and internal, which address your behavior.