Millennials as leaders – Entitled or Destined

After hearing a couple of HR professionals this week referring to the millennial generation as seeming to feel  “entitled” in the workplace,  I started to think . . .  while the Xers had/have a strong sense of entitlement . . . the millennials are different.  I have high hopes for this new generation entering the workforce.  They don’t just want it . . . they’re preparing to take it!

My HR colleagues’ comments were really directed at younger workers who in ever greater numbers, are driving to get ahead, wanting more responsibility, sooner, now even, embracing change, driving it.   Unlike the Xers and boomers who’s brains seem to be hard-wired to resist change in the workplace.

These “kids” want more of a voice when they’re at work, similar to the voice many have online, socially.  They are demanding that their company hears the voices of those in need, they are leading the charge for corporate social responsibility.  They will challenge, and want to be challenged . . . in a way that these HR leaders felt the millennials were not prepared. In my view, being prepared means appropriate skills and the emotional intelligence and willingness to take on leadership responsibilities, to take risks.

Simple generational math tells us there is a problem looming . . . a shortage of mid and top level leaders.  It has been predicted that this leadership void is going to dramatically impact our ability to compete, to innovate.  We can develop skills but emotional readiness at a young age is a gift. Embrace these young people willing to step-up, and coach/mentor them to quickly develop critical` “soft” skills. We need them to fill a chasm that is unfillable without them.  Some have already stepped up, just look at the launched Facebook and Tom’s Shoes.

The millennials . . . and only 25% are old enough to be in the workforce now . . . are not “entitled” they are destined to expand their leadership footprint.  Their future is now!

Prediction:

Either we, as HR practitioners become expert at Human Capital Strategy development, Workforce Planning, Workforce/Business Analytics and Employee/Employment Marketing . . . or, this leverage will be ceded to  Corporate Strategists.

Human Resources will, by default, will relegated to the transactional back room and the service delivery caboose.

HR Unplugged: The Value of Imperfect Imitability

Profit can be earned from resources to the extent that they are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, non-substitutable and exploitable.

Note:  these criteria are based on the human resources of the firm leveraged to supply a product rather than the from the product itself.

Distinctive Competencies are competitively valuable capabilities that a company performs better than its rivals.  Distinctive competencies are the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. Valuable, rare resources can only be sources of sustainable competitive advantage if firms that do not possess them, cannot obtain them.  They must be “imperfectly imitable.” In other words, it must be impossible to perfectly imitate those valuable, rare resources.  Research has identified three principal ways imitation can be avoided:  unique historical conditions, causal ambiguity and social complexity.

1. Unique Historical Conditions – an unusual evolutionary pattern of growth that has contributed to the development of competencies in a manner that is unique to those particular circumstances. For example, Disney created Mickey Mouse when animated motion pictures were new.  It would be difficult to create a character as iconic today.
2. Causal Ambiguity – resources that create a sustainable competitive advantage are not widely known (sometimes not even by the firm owning them).  Imitating firms cannot duplicate the strategy since they do not understand why it is successful in the first place.
3. Social Complexity – occurs when the firms capabilities are the result of complex social phenomena such as interpersonal relationships, trust, friendships among managers, or a firm’s reputation with suppliers and customers.  For example, a competitor could hire everyone from Apple and relocate them to a new facility but the dynamics, culture and atmosphere would not be the same.

As we attempt to understand our organizational uniqueness, we must understand that we cannot create this.  All we can do is build a solid foundation for it to flourish.

HR Unplugged: One Size Fits Some

It’s no longer relevant to band talent to create consistency across the organization.  We need to change our thinking . . . segmenting talent into “Replaceable” “Needed” and “Mission-Critical” roles, tracking pay dispersion, widening the merit increase gap between high performers in critical roles, and everyone else.

The creative leader accepts and leverages high new-hire turnover in non-critical roles.  Granularizes “cost-per-hire” into cost-per-hire by source, by quality of hire, by tenure.  Segmenting metrics like you segment markets and talent . . . focusing on critical roles.

Unplugged but connected.  Widen one gap, fill another.  Think in terms of bite-sized jobs, filled by the contingent workforce, the free agents, completed in several weeks to several month rotations.  Build and manage the talent pool.  Keep the margins in-house.  Let your customers manage your contingent workforce.  Allow your Supervisors to supervise no one, rather drive the quality of service delivery by the free agent workforce.  This is here, it’s now, we’re doing it.  Both people and businesses benefit.

These new to market workers want to control their destiny . . .  let them!

HR Unplugged

Unplugged from business partner think, a concept rapidly receding in HR’s rear-view mirror.  Abandoning, jettisoning all mundane perceptions of HR as “supporting” the business.  Instead, HR subversively driving epic business results.

The helping professions have hurt HR.  Nurses support physicians, paramedics support emergency room docs, dental assistants support dentists.  HR supports the business.  Mindset changes take time, if they happen at all.

Reading a financial statement, workforce analytics, technical competence . . . the price of admission.  When a profession starts to get commoditized, it’s time to innovate.

HR must drive transformational, not incremental change.  Focus on:

• Talent marketing and employee branding, not succession planning
• Mission- Critical roles, not employee performance management
• Multi-dimensional Talent pipelines (FTE’s, Contractors, vendors, strategic partners, consultants), not job families
• Talent search agents, not competencies
• Data hunting, not metrics
• Talent planning, not headcount planning
• Collaborative learning on-the-fly, with user-enriched content, not formal learning
• Integration, conversation, collaboration . . . not silo’d, confined, disjointed effort

The game changing play is to fly above the radar, constantly on the brink of crashing . . . transforming the organization through simplification.

Simplistic is easy, almost natural,  . . . simplicity . . .  complex, often daunting.  The goal is to leverage the simplification of HR programs as catalyst.  Simplicity is not the counterpoint of complexity, it is complexity refined.  In fact, when you deliver on your promise consistently and accurately to a specific need, you become the only solution in your target audience’s mind.

Read the Label: NO MSG

Food manufacturers add different forms of sodium,  and individually we add various seasonings to enhance flavor of food; we drink caffeine to jump start our systems, give us energy and get rid of our headaches . . .  and, in business,  we write mission statements, vision statements, and document core values to align and presumably motivate our employees . . . giving us business purpose and a course of action . . . assuming that integrating these into to our performance evaluations and compensation programs drives employee behavior.   We’ve become accustomed to additives that we believe satisfies the masses and make our lives . . . business and personal . . . tolerable . . . comfortable . . . therefore, more enjoyable.

What if . . . instead . . . we delivered an infrastructure that allowed people to create their own recipe, to make their business lives more appetizing . . . delivering innovative ideas to the company?

Richard Pascale’s book Delivering Results: “People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting.”

What if . . . we exposed people to things that will capture their interest and keep them engaged . . . building commitment and keeping people embedded in the fabric of our company?

What if . . . we gave people access to the right resources, at the right time, in the right form to unleash the untapped reservoir of workforce innovation . . . accelerating time to market?

What if . . . we gave our workforce a place to find their voice and hear what others have to say . . . and were able to capture that conversation and learn from it?

What if . . . we gave people a forum to shine, the ability to share successes, to build social capital . . . allowing for the leveraging of the entire talent landscape resident in our workforce?

What if . . . people experienced real-time change in a more palatable way, with no disruption or even acknowledgment of change given its subtle nature . . . embedding dynamic change capability into the organization?

What if . . . we had the ability to guide the conversation to ensure energy spent aligns with and fuels strategic business objectives . . .  evolving our ombudsmen role into one of business results driver?

Employees can then not only read the label, they could create their own labels, read, learn from and leverage each others labels, build collaborative intellectual capital without the need of additives, be a distinct and pure source of competitive advantage.

Thoughts for 2010

Enterprises don’t usually crumble, they splinter.  Collaborative technologies are both elegant and thrilling with nuances and hidden intricacies to counter workers malaise, and enterprise complacency.

Can they be an enduring competitive advantage?  Likely not.  Or perhaps . . . depending on how innovatively they’re applied, how effectively executed.  “Victory goes to the organization that can put together the largest consortium of brains,” says Eric Raymond, a computer programmer who wrote the essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” describing the open source, community-as-creator approach that launched Firefox.

2010 is not the year for HR to sit back with the pooper-scooper picking up the remains of the organization.  Enterprise transformation is participatory, breaking down hierarchical and functional borders.  Now is the time for HR to bring a compelling voice for user collaboration to the boardroom table.  Own the decision to integrate web top HR with collaboration tools that support interaction and innovation.  Light up your flat screen, pull up your virtual chair and lead the conversation.

DNA’d to Learn: Reinforce Retention

Leverage community to make learning and development durable.

Learning is no longer a one-time event.  Gain competitive advantage through a more engaged, networked, flexible workforce, each of whom has access to a vast array of internal experts.  The era of waiting for formal courses to learn is disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

Just-ahead-of-time learning and informing.  How do you search for the right SME at the moment you need them, when they don’t know you’re looking?  How do you access networks of situational experts in your own company, on subjects you don’t know they’re expert in?

DNA’d to Learn: From One to Many

BMW engages consumers to redesign its GPS navigation system using a company provided digital design kit.  IBM uses the web to solicit global input for 7 international conferences on innovation.  Motorola creates a Wiki for the customers of its latest mobile phones under the premise, “Given a large enough beta-tester, and co-developer base, almost every problem will be identified quickly, and the fix obvious to someone.”  Your LMS is now just a tool that sits inside employee learning communities.  Nissan created an internal social networking site for 50,000 employees.

Allow your employees to engage the masses.

• DNA’d to Learn

Meet learners where and how they are genetically programmed to work and learn.

Allow employees work time to search for, create and share content as you provide the platforms, tools and editorial expertise to enable, refine and drive conversation among the workforce.  Millenials AND Boomers—like all of us, were born with the DNA to, with a reverberating curiosity—and are now learning and working through stimulating networking experiences behind and outside of your firewalls.

Give up control, but manage the network.  Convert renegades to discoverable subject-matter-experts and content creators.