Why are so many people asking “how do I be a leader?”
We’re in the middle of a historic change. In 2014, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics found that Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) are now the largest generation in the U.S. labor force.
Over the next five years, Baby Boomers will decline by 28% to 30 million while Millennials will grow by 30% to 72 million. In short, the tenured leaders are leaving and the new kids are here to take over.
But are Millennials ready to lead? Maybe not. According to Deloitte, 64% of Millennials say that they are in leadership roles where they feel unable to thrive. Yet Millennials’ expectations and intolerance around the conversation make it difficult to make progress.
Leadership in Strategic Management Begins with Taking the Initiative
Take ownership of your development and work with a leadership coach
Leaders thrive (and businesses win) when individuals excel at their jobs; and in order to excel, leaders must transform their leadership skills at a pace with or faster than their evolving context (e.g., change in competitive landscape or company strategy, or being thrown into a role beyond their years).
Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But what’s obvious to many is practiced by few. This is all key in how to be a leader.
Strategic Leaders: Making the Time to Succeed
Millennials who thrive prioritize time to identify the requirements for success, evaluate their leadership against those requirements, and create development actions to become the leaders they need to be to succeed.
Unfortunately, for most Millennials, time for such experiences and process intolerance (due either to the ever increasing speed of business or lack of desire to approach the process as it has happened in the past), leave the majority of these new leaders feeling unprepared. I had a conversation with one such leader, and here’s how he described it:
“I’m getting laid off. Some of their feedback was founded, but they didn’t do anything to mentor or develop me; they just let me go. It doesn’t seem right that they can do that. They need to help me get better.”
In his words there is an underlying expectation that ‘they’ should be approaching this as ‘I’ would approach it.
If you are a Millennial and find yourself with 64% of your peers feeling unprepared, you most likely desire development that is customized, includes real-time feedback, and looks deeply at your personality and passions.
While that is the way you would do it, these high-touch, frequency-intensive, customized initiatives are difficult to scale across growing businesses, and thus may not be as readily available as you would like at the outset of entering a new company.
The Importance of Leadership Development for Strategic Leaders
So, how then can our organizations prepare themselves for this leadership shift? If you’re a Millennial, or work with a leader who is, the following suggestions may come in handy when discussing leadership development.
- Don’t believe you can become Jeff Bezos overnight.
- Do pace your development efforts and take a marathon approach to your transformation.
Research indicates that it takes roughly one year for new employees to effectively assimilate into a new organization. It also indicates that best practice onboarding includes new employees meeting one development milestone within their first year of employment – yes, that’s right, ONE.
Whether you’re a new employee or veteran, a cram-packed, overly ambitious development plan is a recipe for development burnout; so redefine what success looks like and pick your most important opportunity, realize that, and move to the next. Becoming Bezos takes years.
- Don’t believe your development is so unique that you have to reinvent the wheel every time.
- Do express your development desires and work to co-create the process and outcomes.
Underneath the need to customize is usually the need to be included. Leadership development is no different. More than ever before, leaders want to be included in the creation of the process and delivery of their transformation – you’re probably no different.
If you’re a Millennial, sign up for the process as it is, and express your desire to have your fingerprints on the design. Be careful not to take an all-or-nothing stance: get involved where you can. More important than reinventing the wheel is making sure Millennials feel heard and believe their voice matters.
Learn how to be a strategic leader with these blogs:
Meet in the middle, and develop an approach that incorporates tenured experience with opportunistic idealism.
- Don’t wait for a mentor or employer to own your leadership transformation.
- Do assume you need to learn, take personal responsibility to do so, and be creative.
Many of today’s workforce misguidedly believe their development is someone else’s responsibility. Managers and talent professionals play Gumby, trying to figure out what ‘they’ want and need and by when. Meanwhile, entitled leaders play hard to get and wait to be presented with the development ‘how to’ guide.
Regardless of where you sit, don’t succumb to that dynamic. The primary ownership for your development ought to fall squarely with YOU — and sometimes you just have to get creative. This is key in strategic leadership skills development. Many companies do not have formal development programs, so be resourceful.
The Importance of Feedback for Strategic Leaders
Regardless of what your company does or does not have, there are things you can do right now to own your development. Go seek out five colleagues and ask them to tell you what’s most and least effective about your leadership. Get specific examples. Your job is to mine patterns and choose more effective future leadership.
We are now used to getting virtually anything at the click of a mouse, but development doesn’t happen that way. It’s iterative and builds over time, so you may need to reimagine the speed and progression of development processes.
So, while Boomers may be leaving right now and Millennials may be waiting in the wings, it is important for us all to understand that it takes time and intention to thrive. Both are essential in leadership in strategic management.
For more insight on this subject, check out the data from a 10-year longitudinal study in Rising to Power to see how many new executives could better prioritize and enact their development.