So far in this series, we’ve examined some of the reasons so many Millennial and Gen Z employees don’t want to be leaders. Far from hollow complaints, many reflect real concerns in radically shifting work environments and technological disruption. There’s the simple fact that values change among generations (along with the challenges of recruiting Gen Z leaders).
In the last two entries in this four-part series on The Future of Leadership, we focused on why younger generations are reluctant to become leaders and how to create a leadership pipeline in the face of these trends.
For this third installment, we’ll tackle a fundamental question: In a world where “leadership” is so often a dirty word, how can you redeem it in the eyes of your promising young colleagues (aka potential future leaders)? Read on to find out.
Whether you think their skepticism of leadership is legitimate or not is, frankly, beside the point. You’ll be far better off engaging with these views productively than ignoring them in hopes that your promising young workers magically see the light.
To briefly recap, some of main reasons are less enthusiastic about leading include:
- Placing less value on rigid hierarchies (and, conversely, being more comfortable with more egalitarian setups)
- More individual and less group-oriented ambitions
- Less respect for authority and power
- Lack of interest in taking on more responsibility for its own sake
- Skepticism of older “leadership” that was in control of things during the 2008 financial crisis, current housing and cost-of-living crisis, turbocharged social polarization, and other “achievements” that have deeply (and negatively) affected millennials and Gen Zers
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. With some effort, you can redefine leadership in a way that speaks more strongly to the values and concerns of future millennial and Gen Z leaders. The following four tips will help you do just that.
How to Make Leadership Appealing for Gen Z and Millennials
1. Make More Space for Exploration
While the advice incumbent leaders like to give (“Here’s what I would do if I were you . . . ”; “When I was in your position, I had to . . .”) is usually well meaning, it’s often not what emerging leaders want or need. There’s a place for dispelling lessons learned and hard-won wisdom, but they should be seen as more of a complement to training and mentorship, not the focus.
Millennials and members of Gen Z tend to be much more experiential. They don’t always want “answers”—they want opportunities to ask questions and work through problems, learning along the way.
Too many incumbent leaders, however, have been conditioned to jump right to “solve problems” (in scare quotes here because what appears so self-evident to some may not be to others). So when a younger employee comes to them with an issue, they are naturally inclined to offer a pat solution and move on.
They have been conditioned to be “answer ATMs” for those they lead, rather than wise guides to help them self-discover answers.
Young leaders also have a different relationship with failure. Far from seeing it as an albatross, Millennials and Gen Z workers view it as an opportunity for deep growth. This ethos is nicely encapsulated in Seth Godin’s assertion that “successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.”
Incumbent leaders, on the other hand, are more inclined to focus on what they’ve achieved, since so many of them have been conditioned to learn privately from failure. To many Baby Boomers, failure is extremely unpleasant at best and something to be ashamed of at worst.
Accordingly, positioning leadership as a process of exploration can help get younger employees more excited to step up and take on new responsibilities. This doesn’t mean they have free reign to mess around or go off on tangents. Expectations and accountability still exist; consistently poor performance, an unwillingness or inability to learn from mistakes, or repeated bad decision-making still have consequences.
It just means that emerging leaders should be given the opportunity to figure things out more by doing and less by following an old script.
2. De-Risk Opportunities to Grow
For their 2020 Harvard Business Review article titled “Why Capable People Are Reluctant to Lead,” four distinguished business school professors conducted multiple surveys on leadership—more specifically, why people don’t pursue it.
Their survey included 100 working adults, 400 MBA students, and 300 managers and their employees. Young leaders were well represented within this cohort, making up more than half of the group, and possibly a much greater share.
The authors ultimately concluded that people pass on leadership due to three perceived risks: interpersonal risk, image risk, and the risk of being blamed. Here’s how they describe each risk:
Interpersonal Risk: The first concern people mentioned over and over again was that acts of leadership might hurt their relationships with their colleagues.
For example, when asked why they were hesitant to step up to lead, one respondent explained that “sometimes you don’t want to risk that friendship and hurt other people’s feelings.” Another said they were afraid that if they stepped up, other people could “start to dislike you and talk about you behind your back.”
Building the Next Generation of Leaders Starts With Guiding by Example
Image Risk: The second common concern people described was that leading might make others think badly of them.
For example, one respondent said they were reluctant to lead because “I don’t want to seem like a know-it-all.” Similarly, another interviewee worried that “it can come across as a little bit aggressive, maybe, to the rest of the team members.”
Despite the fact that both organizations and employees generally claim to admire leadership, people worry that actually engaging in leadership acts might make them look bad in the eyes of their peers.
Risk of Being Blamed: Finally, we found that many people were afraid that if they stepped up to lead, they would be held personally responsible if the group failed. They worried that they would be blamed for the collective failure, and that that could cost them a coveted promotion or future leadership opportunities.
As one respondent explained, “If I were to dictate the work, then the potential bad results could be pinned onto me.”
The professors’ proposed solution is to give potential leaders smaller responsibilities at first to help them build confidence. As employees who have more recently entered the workplace get a small taste of success, their self-image should improve, and their hang-ups about being a decider may diminish.
Even if they do fail at these smaller tasks, the stakes are low enough that they shouldn’t be too demoralized to move forward and try tackling something else. Lower stakes also provide more wiggle room for experimentation, allowing these leaders to a) see what works for them and b) get more comfortable in their own skin and style.
The point here is to minimize the risk—at least at first—of taking a particular action. Once leaders realize that isn’t so bad, they’ll be that much more willing to get aboard the leadership train.
3. Make Things More Democratic
To younger employees, the top-down, “speak-when-spoken-to” model of management is about as relevant as CDs and VHS tapes. Study after study makes clear that younger generations are far more comfortable in looser, less hierarchical arrangements inside the workplace and out.
Zappos’s experiment with “holacracy” (a radical management philosophy based on the idea of “no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy”) is an extreme example of this trend toward breaking down walls.
It also shows the limits of decentralizing; not long after holacracy was implemented, many Zappos employees took buyouts—an alarming development at the company, which for years was considered one of the best places to work in the country. (The experiment was eventually phased out a few years later.)
Despite Zappos’s negative experience, its willingness to try something so extreme indicates something important: the high value younger employees place on egalitarian workplaces.
You don’t need to go the Zappos route to foster a spirit of democracy among young team members. Endless consultations and waiting until anonymous agreement is reached is obviously impossible and impractical, as Zappos found out the hard way. But there are still plenty of things you can do.
To start, dedicating yourself to transparency, encouraging feedback (especially critique), and being okay with admitting “I just don’t know right now” all go a long way in giving employees the sense they are being heard and valued. The same goes for creating a culture where senior leaders make a deliberate effort to solicit the opinions and buy-in of emerging leaders.
“When we give up our desires to be outstanding or different, when we let go of our needs to have our own special niches in life, when our main concern is to be the same, and to live out this sameness in solidarity, we are then able to see each other’s unique gifts.”
– Henri Nouwen
4. Forge Deeper (Generational) Connections
A few years ago, one of my clients was a large, multinational greeting card company. Part of the reason they contacted me was because they were struggling to reach younger, emerging consumers in the marketplace.
In large part this was because many of the leaders inside the organization didn’t mirror their target population, and those that did had too little organizational influence to make a difference.
I helped them realize it was time to learn how to reach across generations within their organization. They understood that once that divide was bridged, they would be in a much stronger position to do the same in the marketplace.
They tried several approaches to clear up misunderstandings and foster real connections. The most successful one, however, was intentionally pairing leaders from different (diverse) generations to learn about each other. Once the ice was broken and everyone loosened up, the pairs would inevitably start discussing what they could do together to help achieve their goals.
In a survey taken later on, almost every pair agreed they had a lot more in common than not, and they would have never discovered this had they not deliberately worked at it. The increase in sales offered further proof of the strategy’s success.
Like every generation before them, emerging leaders have a set of stereotypes and assumptions about previous generations. If younger employees think (wrongly) that they can’t relate to leaders, it’s no wonder they don’t want to be like them. But, as the above shows, this just isn’t true.
People can connect with each other no matter their background, age, or experience. The bridge isn’t beyond repair—if you’re ready to work on it.
Tip
Remote work adds a new level of challenge when it comes to helping future leaders. That obviously doesn’t mean you should abandon supporting Gen Z and Millennial employees if they work entirely or mostly remotely, but it does call for a more structured effort.
Instead of leaving check-ins and relationship-building to meetings and serendipitous encounters in the hallway, you’ll have to reach out by email or calling. If you know you’ll have trouble keeping track of this kind of stuff, schedule time in your calendar.
Putting It All Together, and Building Up the Next Generation of Leaders
Emerging leaders are there, but they may be hiding out. Whether you like it or not, it’s up to you to create the conditions that will allow them to emerge.
That means taking their concerns about leadership as they understand it seriously. It means creating space for ambitious but wary young employees to grow and take on responsibility. It means making the time and effort to forge real, lasting connections.
It means being transparent, even when the news isn’t always good. It means acknowledging perceptions of leadership have changed—and working from there. In a word, it means . . . leading.
Bring out the best in your up-and-coming leaders—learn the best ways you can engage and encourage, all while giving them the space to grow. At Navalent, we’ve spearheaded more than 1,800 leadership and organizational transformation projects, advising CEOs and other C-level executives to bring out the best in their teams.
Start building your company’s next generation of leaders. Contact us today.