How To Nurture Millennial Tech Leaders

Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers in the workforce, according to a study released by Virtuali, a leadership training firm. Amazingly, half of these individuals are now in leadership positions. And frighteningly, fully 64% of these individuals are unprepared when entering leadership roles, the survey of 527 US-based Millennial professionals finds.

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A leadership position means having individuals who report to you. This is an enormous responsibility, and one that, even in the best of times, first-time managers come woefully equipped to address, given the limited knowledge, experience, and skills they bring into the job.

Social science indicates that most of us exhibit some mild level of savantism. That is to say, when we have a clear strength in one area, it is less likely that we'll have equivalent strengths in other disciplines and skills. Technology translation: An individual with high-performing technical skills is less likely to have strong skills in others areas, including leadership. We see this when highly skilled individual performers fail when asked to lead other skilled team members.

Simply put, the skills required to execute a task aren't the same as the skills needed to lead people in that role.

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IT managers are often even less prepared than those in other disciplines, since advancement and recognition are typically driven by technical competencies, not by personality or natural leadership capability. While technical proficiency should be a prerequisite to manage a team of technical professionals, tech fluency isn't remotely related to the skills that predict success as a manager and a leader.

For the Millennial generation, understanding these distinctions will be even more important. Here's why.

This generation arrives in the workforce far more tech-savvy than previous generations, having grown up immersed in technology. While Baby Boomers and Generation X members have had to learn and adapt technology to their roles in the workplace, Millennials come well-equipped to interact with technology. The technical competence gap is diminished, and deep technical experience is less necessary for mere proficiency.

Instead, Millennial technologists view managers more as coaches and mentors. The job of a tech leader is not to compensate for the technical deficiencies of certain members of the team, but rather to develop a high performing team that does not need that technical crutch from the top leader.

Millennials also arrive at the workplace more as collaborators than cowboys. This generation didn't grow up in a world where kids left the house on their bikes every summer morning and returned in the evening just in time for dinner. They've been driven to soccer practices, music lessons, and T-ball games. They played organized team sports, not pickup games. They were supervised, organized, and instructed in teamwork and collaboration. They bring the expectation of joint effort with them to the work environment. Their early (and constantly supervised) exposure to team sports has made them the best team players and collaborators in generations.

The importance of picking an IT leader for their management skills, rather than technical skills, is very similar to the old adage that the best performing sales pro usually gets promoted to sales manager -- regardless of whether or not he or she can manage staff. A top sales professional produces as much as six to ten times what an average person does. Yet, the same competencies that make someone a wildly effective individual salesperson often work against the person in a sales management role. Only a small percentage of successful sales professionals have the behavioral DNA to be natural sales leaders.

You need to ask hard questions about your tech leadership pipeline. What percentage of technical people -- be they developers, systems architects, or software engineers -- have the makeup to be successful managers of technical teams? If coaching, collaborating, measuring, and motivating are keys to gaining high performance from the Millennial generation, what skills, competencies, and training will be vital to lead the next-generation workforce?

Today's new leaders must not only provide the initial leadership and development for this talented, tech-savvy, motivated, and invested group, but also groom them to become leaders themselves in the very near future.

What's different, what's not about Millennials

One big step is to acknowledge that Millennials are indeed different from other generations in the workforce. As a group, they value different things. The Millennial generation, to a degree greater than their predecessors:

Not everything is different for Millennials. The following advice has been true in past generations, and will be true going forward: Highly capable technology pros often won't transform into great technology leaders. Remember the lessons learned about doing versus leading.

However, there are real distinctions and variables tied to generational differences. The specifics regarding how to best lead Millennials and nurture them as they become leaders continue to be uncovered. It is both possible, and essential, to build a fact- and data-based approach to quantifying the distinguishing capabilities. Once you are aware of those capabilities, incorporating them into the recruiting, selection, onboarding, and development of the next generation of business leaders is the key to success, especially with the Millennial workforce.

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