Leadership has been a focal point of many studies for a long time, and new issues regarding successful ways of leading emerge continuously. Nowadays, the main objective is to find ways of training millennials to become competent leaders, as they are usually considered to be the generation that will transform the way we see the world of business. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the significance of the problem of cultivating leadership among millennials.
People born since the 1980s, commonly referred to as millennials, we’re brought up and now live in a different environment. They are the first generation to grow up with digital technology such as the Internet, mobile phones, and computers. Therefore, their main differentiating feature is that they are familiar with technology, which significantly influences the way they interact with other people, including those they are working with.
This fact suggests that the approach to learning that was used to train previous generations to become leaders is not relevant anymore. As a result, employers and higher management are to design new methods to teach the generation of millennials in ways that motivate and engage them in their learning of leadership skills. The effectiveness of newly developed methods will play a crucial role in businesses’ success in the future.
The problem of training the new generation to be efficient leaders becomes evident after looking at the forecasts. By 2025, three-fourths of the global workforce will consist of people born between 1981 and 2005 (Harrison, 2017). With that in mind, resources are to be invested in leadership cultivation in millennial workers. Another thing worth mentioning is that current employers should also learn how to teach millennials, as leaders of previous generations should be able to adapt to the change newcomers are demanding. This task is crucial for higher management because the risk of losing potential leaders to another company is high (Bottomley & Burgess, 2018). Therefore, leadership development programs should be designed in compliance with the leadership preferences of millennials.
As millennials gradually replace workers of previous generations, there is a discussion on how millennials behave in the workplace and how they build credibility with other workers. In that regard, the main issue that businesses should manage to deal with is the problem of communication. Millennials use different ways of communicating, as they apply technologies to every sphere of their lives, while people of previous generations are not so used to relying on various kinds of gadgets.
Therefore, it is believed that companies’ current leaders sometimes lack an understanding of how to communicate with millennials, and, thus, they are unable to share the experience that newcomers need to become leaders. In addition, millennials are mostly described as the generation that prefers not to be supervised, but to be mentored, which should also be taken into account in this issue.
To sum up, the problem of developing leadership in millennials is crucial as they are the generation that will take control of the business world in the nearest future. In that regard, in order to stay competitive and not lose prospective talent, it is vital for companies to train new leaders. Therefore, businesses need to invest resources in new technologies and development programs that will help with the leadership cultivation among millennials, while also the changing nature of their requirements needs to be considered.
References
Bottomley, K, & Burgess, S. (2018). Millennials in leadership: An examination of the practice-immediacy model. In J. Marques & S. Dhiman (Eds.), Engaged leadership: Transforming through future-oriented design thinking (pp. 223-234). Frankfurt, Germany: Springer.
Harrison, A. E. (2017). Exploring millennial leadership development: An evidence assessment of information communication technology and reverse mentoring competencies. Case Studies in Business and Management, 4(1), 25-48.