How To Enlist The Millennials
And Build For Long-Term Impact
The key to influence for any enterprise - be it political, civic or corporate - is engagement with the future.
Influence and growth come not from how much we celebrate past, or enjoy the present; they are a product of how much we engage the future now.
Future-engagement means enlisting the support and involvement of the people who will carry the future on their shoulders, even if we seem to have very little in common with them.
Our research at 2020Plus has shown up some of the likely flash points for our society over the next decade. One of the biggest potential pressure points for business, community groups, charities and organisations of all kinds, will be based not around gender, race or religion, but generations.
Businesses and other enterprises that want to build influence and market presence for the long-term must start now to engage the interest and support of emerging generations – particularly the Millennials, or GenY.
This unique generation, currently aged from early teens to around 26 years, will in the next decade totally revolutionise many aspects of business.
Already, some employers are struggling to work out how to engage them as their way of thinking is so different from that of their GenX and Boomer forebears. To leaders from these generations, Millennials can seem brittle, over-protected and short-termist in their thinking.
Yet engaging Millennials holds rich rewards for savvy leaders who will persevere with them. For one, they understand digital technology. As the world’s first digital natives – the rest of us are immigrants – using digital technology is second nature.
Nobody will adapt more quickly to new technologies in your industry – or adapt your industry to new technologies - than Millennials.
They’re also a peer-to-peer generation, with a keen understanding of how to reach their own. Nobody will sell your project or idea to new youth markets better than other Millennials. And no-one else will prove as good a recruiting gifted young talent for your business.
So, how do we enlist this generation? First, by engaging them at their points of strength.
One of these is their highly collaborative approach to life. In part, this is a response to the ubiquity of interactive media technology in their world.
The age of mass communication has given rise to an obsession with cooperation, or what the gamers call the ‘architecture of the participation.’ This is the age of the ‘wiki’: users no longer merely experience games or web-resources, they interact with them, creating something new each time they use them.
The Millennials are the generation of ‘we think’ and what some have called ‘the wisdom of crowds’. Clever marketers have been quick to lock onto this. The branding for the phone company O2 carries the tag: ‘We’re better, together’.
For Gen-Xers, who were for the most part less well nurtured in childhood, coming together with peers when they were young adults represented an important way to bond and discover friendship.
For Millennials, collaboration provides more – it’s an engine for change.
These young men and women understand globalism as a present reality. They’ve grown up in an age where barriers are constantly coming down, to trade, migration and cultural exchange. For them, ‘global village’ is a pragmatic reality, not a poetic ideal.
They recognise that large-scale, collective responses are mandatory if the global community is to solve some of its most pressing problems.
Millennials understand the power of the collective to solve problems. Some research suggests that one of their key attributes may be civic-mindedness. They want to produce positive change for the largest possible number of people.
Yet rather than being idealistic in the way that we Boomers were at their age, these Millennials want to marry ‘blue skies thinking’ with grass-roots action. Their idealism is tinged with pragmatism.
They expect huge corporations to work together, forming alliances to provide services in everything from the internet – the Cloud – to housing, travel and financial services.
They expect political groups to look beyond ideology, building cross-party coalitions on common values and ideals.
This is a generation that actually believes it can shape the future for the better, by working collectively.
In one study, Millennials were asked which two groups of people they thought would produce the biggest changes over the next decade or so. Their top answers were ‘scientists’ and ‘young people’.
In January 2007, then-Senator Obama was virtually a political unknown. By June 2007, with just two debates under his belt, he was a virtual and viral sensation.
The steep rise in his profile was largely down to a strategic decision made by his team very early on – a decision to engage the viral, collective thinking of the Millennial generation. They used the internet and specifically social networking and new media to promote their man on a scale that had never been attempted before.
They didn’t simply set up websites; they bought ‘space’ on Xbox games, built iPhone applications and sent viral text messages which could easily be forwarded to others. They even rented entire satellite TV channels.
Team Obama video-streamed its campaign events. It used Twitter extensively. On his election, President Obama became the first ‘twitterer-in-chief’, only very reluctantly surrendering his ever-present BlackBerry for the highly-encrypted secret-service version known as ‘BarrackBerry’.
The team reached out through Facebook, too, and their man became the subject of hugely complimentary YouTube clips, generated by individual fans. Obama Girl’s ‘Got A Crush on Obama’, has had more than 17 million hits. Will i Am’s ‘Yes We Can’ has generated 20 million hits.
To engage and keep Millennials, you need to turn your team culture into a collaborative one. The key word in ‘Yes, we can’, is ‘we’ – and that’s the part that attracted this generation to Mr. Obama.
A generation that’s been taught from childhood to contribute, to let its voice be heard at every opportunity, will not fit in a team culture where only the boss, or senior employees are allowed to throw out ideas.
Your culture will need to be more democratic that perhaps you’ve been used to. You will need to open up decision-making processes wherever possible, allowing people to develop a sense of ownership for, and therefore loyalty to, decisions made.
Even when you need to make unilateral decisions – and, let’s face it, some of leadership is a solitary process – you will need to explain your decisions, sharing the processes that brought to that point.
Externally, Millennials are drawn toward leaders who are willing to form alliances with other leaders outside their own enterprises, forming alliances based on common pragmatic goals.
They are turned off by leaders who’re myopic rather than focused; those who would rather go-it-alone than share resources – or credit.
To enlist the support of Millennials, you will also need to engage their innate tech-savvy.
A wired strategy, driven by Millennials, will allow your team to benefit as did Obama’s. You will be able to offer rapid responses on unfolding stories that affect your market or industry – and the customers you are trying to reach.
If you run a charity, or a business with a cause to promote, a Millennial-driven strategy for social networking and new media can also help you raise significant funding. (President Obama’s campaign raised money from 3.1 million online donors, at an average of $86 per donor).
Finally, to enlist the support and engage the gifts of Millennials, you will need to demonstrate trust.
As a collaborative cohort, Millennials want to believe that people are basically trying to do the right thing. They choose to believe – naively or not - that if people are willing to demonstrate transparency and accountability, they should therefore be given the benefit of the doubt.
This attitude is driving the emerging ‘trust economy’ which powers peer-to-peer approaches to business (eBay etc), charity (Kiva) and even venture capital (Zopa, crowd funding).
So, you will need to demonstrate trust: toward your team, your suppliers and your end-users or clients.
Building a collaborative, tech-friendly and trust-based culture in your enterprise will greatly enhance your chances of enlisting and keeping talented young Millennials.
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