Leadership Skills Training for Generation Y

Some experts believe that leadership style and effectiveness is the number one motivation for members of Generation Y and I agree with them. I am a member of Generation X, but I work all the time with folks that are Generation Y, and having experienced both groups, I see some similarities between them.

One of the main similarities between these two generations is a distrust of organizations. There are so many corporate scandals that go on these days that employees, and especially Generation Y employees, don’t feel like they can trust companies.

When it comes to Generation Y, they’re not going to respond to institutions or ideologies as much as they will to individual people. They’re not going to just blindly put trust in something that’s freestanding. They really need to have their trust earned, and that trust is only going to be earned by an individual who takes an interest in Gen Yers’ careers. 

Difference in Leadership Skills Training
There is a difference in leadership skills training for Generation Y than the training for previous generations. The difference you’re going to see is in what the focus is on.

Gen Yers are self-motivated and have grown up with technology more than any other generation to date. So when you look at Generation Y, they are really the most tech-savvy group, which means they have access to a wealth of information and wealth of data right at their fingertips.

Sometimes, however, that savvy can result in “data overload,” so companies need to be able to give them the tools they need to make critical decisions without forcing them down a specific path.

This is a very important leadership skills training difference. Managers need to teach Gen Yers how to weed out the information and data that’s most important from the information and data that’s not as important.  

Give Them the Tools They Need
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be tough to give them what they need. A really good way to start giving Gen Yers what they need is by teaching them time and priority management.

Gen Yers are often high-volume multitaskers, meaning they can handle 20 different things at the same time. This is a fabulous skill to have, but when only three out of the 20 tasks are truly valuable, that can be a problem.

This is when the Pareto Principle comes into play. The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, “For many events, 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes,” according to Wikipedia.org.

What this basically means is companies or managers need to help their Gen Y employees (and all employees, for that matter) identify what their high-quality activities are and teach them to discern where they’re really getting the value out of their time. This will allow them to pare back their activities to mainly focus on the ones that are essential to reaching their—and the company’s—goals.

Gen Yers have the ability to attack projects from every angle, but managers need to make sure they have the tools they need to pick the two or three angles that are going to give them the most bang for their buck. Once they have the tools in place, then they’ll have everything they need to attack a project from those two or three essential angles.

Communication is Key
When I’ve worked with Baby Boomers who are leading a workforce or hiring people into a workforce that’s now primarily made up of younger generations of workers, there really needs to be a focus on communication and trust building. Managers need to institute some one-on-one, face-to-face communication. They also need to learn how to get two-way communication flowing because it’s really the first step to building relationships and trust with Gen Y employees.

Managers need to teach younger employees “the ropes” and then allow the employees the freedom to operate within those boundaries. This is the best way to segue into providing them with leadership skills training.

In my next Insight, I’ll detail some steps a company can take to provide leadership skills training to Generation Y employees. 

Some experts believe that leadership style and effectiveness is the number one motivation for members of Generation Y and I agree with them.