Company Culture for Millennials: A Primer for CEO-Founders
Society has been in conversation about the millennial generation - with no small amount of angst and scorn - ever since the “participation trophy winners” made their debut in the workplace around 15 years ago.
Of the innumerable sub-threads in the conversation, one quality emerges as a key generational feature:
At work, this generation places a strong emphasis on “doing things that matter” that “make a difference” in the world.
Therefore, an employer’s purpose and mission turns out to be very important to this group relative to earlier generations, who were more willing to accept a job as a job and enjoy their meanings and purposes on nights and weekends.
A Millennial Supermajority Compounded by Talent Scarcity
In 2021, millenials are expected to form 50% of the workforce, and by 2025, 70% of the workforce.
This trend is evolving the conversation from “how do we manage all these millennials who are so different from us!??” to “how do I get the most out of my <millennial> managers?”
Coinciding with the rise of the millennial supermajority in the workplace is an acute shortage of skilled leaders and knowledge workers relative to demand - leading to intense competition among companies to attract and retain scarce available talent.
This means that in order to attract and retain the best talent, CEO-Founders have a bottom-line incentive to consider company culture a strategic priority, and begin asking questions like:
What kind of culture would most inspire, engage and elicit loyalty from my workforce?
What kind of culture would make my organization the envy of our entire industry, attracting and retaining the best talent?
What kind of culture would make us most creative, innovative, and profitable?
How do we actually develop such a culture?
Before we begin to explore the traits of a winning company culture that reflects the values and highest aspirations of a millennial workforce - a few comments on qualities of this generation that directly influences which company cultural traits will lead to high performance in the future.
The Millennial Generation: Shadows & Gold
Like every generation, the Millennials bring shadows and gold to the world stage (positive and negative qualities.) For the purposes of this discussion, we are going to speak in generalities about the generation as a whole, in order to more effectively explore what sort of company culture will best engage them and harness their talents toward desired business outcomes
Gold Nugget #1
Millennials want to create a better world.
Shadow
Millennials aren’t used to seeing their efforts bear fruit, and are therefore unwilling to buckle up, double down, and make the commitment necessary to create something.
Gold Nugget #2
Millennials deeply crave authenticity, connection, and community
Shadow
Millennials habitually look out for themselves instead of participating in groups with a team spirit, and haven’t actually practiced the basic moves of teamwork, community, and collaboration - often isolating instead of dealing with interpersonal conflict.
Gold Nugget #3
This generation comes with creative and visionary inclination.
Shadow
Millennials can lack faith and confidence that they can do things themselves, hence the entitlement of expecting others to give them things or do things for them.
In light of these qualities, we propose that successful company culture in a millennial-dominant workplace will place a high value on purpose-driven work, collaboration, and personal growth. Purpose driven work answering the need to make a difference, collaboration answering the yearning for community and connection. Finally, personal growth in the form of any combination of staff development initiatives, mentoring & coaching, and ongoing education addresses the need to develop the confidence and genuine sense of self-empowerment this generation has often lacked.
Becoming A Meaningful, Collaborative Place To Work
To reveiw, the CEO-Founder finds himself or herself with a group of people who:
Want to make a difference
Want to belong to a larger effort or community that they find meaningful
Require mentoring and coaching to reach their full potential
In light of this, we propose that the CEO-Founder’s goal at the outset of a culture development initiative could be something in this vein:
To become a company that everyone finds deep meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in belonging to.
Enduring Cultural Shift Starts Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down
Most culture development initiatives deliver mixed results. Why? Because enduring change, whether it is at the level of an individual person or a large multinational corporation, starts from the ground up, like a plant. This would be in contrast to a top-down approach, like that of an administrative bureaucracy.
In other words, many senior leaders, enthusiastic about a business culture trend, mandate a development initiative from the top down. The mandate often does not take root, for a number of reasons: implementation can conflict with the day to day functioning of default modes of behavior, or people can passively or actively resist the change.
At the outset of initiating a thriving company culture where purpose, engagement, and high-performance are the new normal, think ground-up, or organic, or grassroots.
Invite All Voices To Be Heard
Our friends over at Hallett Leadership have an interesting approach to initiating inclusive, high performance business cultures. They provide a placeholder mission statement to organizations where they consult:
“To create an open and collaborative culture where creativity and innovation thrive.”
The placeholder mission statement contains the sequence through which the desired culture is grown in an organization.
Begin with Openness
Schedule a half or full day and gather everyone into the same room.
Most organizations do not begin with openness and trust among people as the norm. It must be modeled first by you, the senior leader. You do this by inviting your people to share their voices and opinions.
Ask them what is working in the company and what is not.
Ask them what kind of culture they would like to create together, and belong to.
Ask them their thoughts on the industry, and what they see in terms of opportunity on the horizon.
Listen particularly closely during the conversation about what kind of culture they would like to belong to.
Then, work out a mission statement as a group - not just of a desired future, but of a desired way for the company culture to be.
What kind of culture would your people would like to belong to?
When you and your people formulate a vision sourced from the heart and mind of each person in the company, you are communicating to each person that they matter, that they are valued, and that they are important to the community. Treated in such a manner, people can transform from employees into empowered agents.
Empowered agents who can hash out a vision of what they would like to belong to, together, become an aligned group of people. Which is very powerful.
This alignment is a cornerstone - or plot of soil, if you will - from which your new culture can grow. When things get difficult or challenges come up, people can refer to their collectively-sourced vision statement to return to alignment and advance together in the same direction.
Collective Vision Achieved, Focus on Middle Management
An aligned workforce is a great achievement. The next step is to focus on the group of people who are responsible for translating executive strategy into ground-level action - and who will be ultimately responsible for making your vision a day to day reality - the people of your middle management layer.
Your new company culture, freshly planted in the form of your aligned workforce, will grow through the process of developing your managers into the people who embody the principles laid out in your organizational vision.
Your managers will spread new cultural traits down into the rank and file of your organization as they manage their people. The traits will grow up the leadership structure as well, as those managers get promoted over time.
Invest In Training For Managers’ Soft Skills
At the heart of your managers’ journey toward embodying in thought and practice your organizational vision is the development of soft skills that will make them better leaders.
Here is a sampler of soft skills that will support your middle managers in implementing the shared vision of the company.
Meet Regularly
We recommend bringing your emerging high performance leaders together once a week to practice their developing skills, and spend time discussing the processes of implementing what they are learning in their respective departments. Finally, after they have established a foundation of openness, familiarity and trust with each other, challenge them to take on projects together and develop ideas for improving your business.
Conclusion
It is a slow process, but a worthwhile one, because if you and your fellow senior leaders commit to fostering a company culture that your entire workforce can get aligned toward - and THEN develop your managers to become the embodiment of that culture in their daily activities… it is highly likely to improve work outputs, increase productivity, retention, and profits.
At the end of the day, it is an opportunity for your company to become the kind of place that the emerging generation of leaders can belong to, in order express and embody their vision, creativity, and achieve their yearning to make an impact on society.
Alan Gaskill is a Wolf Tribe facilitator. In his free time, he writes and creates video content about human development through the arts. Visit his website here.