Assignment Content Resources: Formulating Leadership Part II Grading Guide (Attached) Formulating Leadership Part I (Attached) Scenario: Your company's Vice Presi

Running head: CULTIVATING MILLENIAL LEADERS 0

Cultivating Millennial Leaders

Nathan Bailey, Sarah M Salois, Ted Godfrey, and Dan Clettenberg

LDR/300: Innovative Leadership

Mari Hadley, Instructor

May 12, 2020

Cultivating Millennial Leaders

Millennials are dominating the workforce as older generations are phased out, due to retirement. Our company vice president is cognizant of this fact and has solicited the input of our team on the mechanisms of cultivating leaders among millennials. The best practices that we recommend will be contained in the following three-pronged strategy.

First, we need to consider how millennials learn. The days have gone for relying on classroom and lecture-style learning. This digital community is consuming information and educational content when and how they want it, and at a faster rate than ever before. To that end, creating project-based positions and providing millennials the opportunities to lead these teams is essential to the organization (Marcos & Burkus, 2019). Leading project-based teams are vital to enforcing a sense of responsibility, as opposed to the traditional hierarchical positions. While there are tried and true, tested aspects of project-based positions, millennials are bringing fresh perspectives. They are savvier with leveraging technological advancements and placing additional focus in areas like economic, ecological, and social factors. Leadership skills like capitalizing on team strengths to attain project deadlines, leading remote meetings, and effective mechanisms of virtual communication and holding others accountable without antagonizing them can be learned. Millennials desire opportunities to accumulate leadership experience. The archaic approach of continuously training staff through lectures, in preparation for leadership opportunities that may never materialize, is detested by this generation.

Secondly, empowering millennials through mentoring. Having a mentor gives them a sense of importance. Mentors play a significant role in inculcating leadership skills to amateurs in almost every career. Millennials like feedback, having a direct contact and direction from someone above them is a fantastic avenue to keep them involved. The opportunity to learn from top executives can invoke a leadership interest among them. Then if after a while, the millennial is showing prowess, allow them to mentor someone else. The mentor-millennial-mentee is a trifecta of leadership growth. The millennial now has the ability to get feedback from both directions, both good and bad. Internal mentoring among millennials should not be ignored. Future leaders can be made or broken based on the mindset that is inherent in their groups. A personalized and flexible mentoring approach should be employed to cater for the needs of different participants (Bernstein & Lynde, 2019). Avoid mentoring in large groups as the group dynamic creates more of a team atmosphere rather than a close, personal connection. A large group mentorship enables someone with the ability to grow, to fall to the wayside if they aren’t getting the attention and feedback they require.

Thirdly, challenging millennials to develop solutions for the problems that are ailing the organizations. Leadership is about solving problems that may arise in our Organizations. Millennials are the generation that seems demanding and pretentious. When we talk about Millennials and leadership, we need to focus on right now. Millennials are always ready for new challenges and are always engaged in something that can benefit them. Millennials tend to be a rather creative bunch of young people. The expertise power that is associated with creativity is essential in fostering credibility in leadership (Bernstein & Lynde, 2019). The followers must be convinced that you have something exceptional to offer.

The above information will be presented to the senior managers in form of a brief report. The report will contain a brief background that highlights the significance of gradually incorporating millennials into leadership positions. The technological savviness of this generation and their youthful age that allows them to serve the organization for a long time are their major strengths. The abstract will contain all the major points that have been discussed. The individual strategy practices will be contained in separate pages. The implementation criteria will be chronicled in those pages. In conclusion, millennials are the largest generation in existence. An organization should adopt structured practices of preparing them for leadership to ensure that there is no leadership vacuum when the previous generations retire. The future that the millennials were promised is now.

References

Bernstein, E., & Lynde, K. (2019). Developing Yourself as a Leader: A Framework for Millennial High Potentials & Emerging Leaders. Routledge.

Marcos, S. N. & Burkus, D. (2019). Developing the next generation of leaders: How to engage millennials in the workplace. Journal on Leadership Management.