Chapter 12
Accelerate Your Development: Tips for Millennials
by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd
Many of the 70 million jobs that Baby Boomers will vacate over the next two decades—from the front lines up to senior management—will go to Gen Xers and Millennials (also known as Generation Y). If you’re a Millennial (born after 1980), that might mean early career advancement for you, though you’ll have lots of competition for those positions: 88 million others in your generation, plus about 50 million Xers, will also be vying for them.
How do you compete for jobs formerly held by people with decades more experience, especially when you’re younger than at least a third of the candidates out there? By putting your mentoring and development on a fast track. Don’t wait for your company to notice you and groom you. Be bold—and hungry—as you seek out the counsel you need to become a serious contender for one of those roles Boomers are leaving open. These seven tips will help you scour the landscape for the right mentors, persuade them to work with you, and collaborate with them to accelerate your development.
1.Build a diverse network of mentors to round out your skills and knowledge. To fill a retiring Boomer’s shoes, you’ll probably need to broaden and deepen your skill set—and the longer that takes, the more likely you’ll be to lose out to someone who’s a quicker “study.” Got your eye on a position above you that may open up in a year or two? Compare your experience with that of the person currently in the role to see where you have catching up to do—and look for several mentors who can speed up your learning in key areas. For example, consider reaching out to:
–A senior executive with experience in a country where your company is expanding—perhaps in an emerging market, such as Brazil or Russia. Use this mentoring relationship as an opportunity to develop a global mind-set about the business you’re in.
–A high-performing peer in an adjacent unit or industry. Say you’re a health care marketer, and you’re struggling to create innovative campaigns. Try connecting with someone who naturally looks at the health care world through an innovator’s lens—a medical-product developer, for instance. He may be equally eager to glean your insights into customer needs.
–A midlevel manager in a sector your business serves. Suppose you work at a tech company, and one of your biggest customers is a government agency. An IT manager in that sector can help you understand how agencies think about security, for example, and what impact new regulations will have on the services your company is developing.
Each mentor in your network should have a distinct area of expertise that complements your knowledge. (For more on building a diverse network of mentors, see Priscilla Claman’s article, “Employ a Personal Board of Directors,” earlier in this guide.)
2.Select at least one mentor with only a few more years of experience. Experts may be so far removed from your day-to-day world that they can’t articulate good approaches to the kinds of problems you face. If you wanted to learn to play chess, Bobby Fischer wouldn’t be the best person to teach you the basics. Same goes for acquiring work-related skills: Ask a senior executive to counsel you on challenges she hasn’t tackled in 20 years, and you’ll both probably end up frustrated.
As Andi Litz, a Millennial who works in human resources at General Electric, explains, “Those who are only a couple of years senior can . . . relate to our experiences. Their input and advice will be realistic and achievable.” Also, she points out, it’s often “easier to develop a trusting relationship” with them, because they’re more accessible than senior executives.
When Litz moved to Selmer, Tennessee, to take a new job with GE, she reached out to the person she was replacing. “Since he had just left the job for another one at GE,” she says, “he was really helpful. We exchanged lots of phone calls, text messages, and instant messages. I’d be on a big call with people from all over the place, and I could IM him to get quick insight on an initiative that came up in the discussion.”
If your organization has an affinity group for Millennials, such as a new-hire club or a young leaders’ group, start there to find people who have recently walked in your shoes. Or look for groups in your community that sponsor development for young leaders.
3.Show potential mentors that they can have a big impact with their limited time. Your potential mentors—Boomers and Xers in particular—may have complex jobs, time commitments outside work, and multiple mentoring requests coming in from other Millennials. So it’s important to treat their time as a precious resource. With some thought and creativity, you can design a mentoring relationship that moves your development along without placing too many demands on the mentor’s schedule.
For starters, select a few critical goals to focus on, and identify ways of measuring success. There’s nothing more draining for a mentor than a growing list of goals, with no end in sight. Also, consider buddying up with Millennial peers at your company and asking an experienced manager to work with you as a group on a specific skill, such as making a compelling business case for a new product. A mini class on a discrete topic like that is attractive to a busy mentor because it reins in the conversation. It not only gives the mentor bigger bang for buck but also lends you and your Millennial cohort strength in numbers: You gain visibility as a group that pursues professional growth—and your mentor earns a reputation for nurturing young talent.
4.Use your mentor’s preferred method of communication. As a Millennial, you may rely heavily on Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and texting to communicate efficiently. These tools accommodate you wherever you are and can help you keep a brisk dialogue going with your mentor— but only if she likes using them, too.
If she prefers interacting with you in face-to-face meetings and over e-mail, then so be it. She’s sharing her time and expertise with you. Make it easy for her to be generous. After you’ve found a method that works for her and established a comfortable rhythm, you may discover that she’s interested in learning more about social media, for example. That would be a good time to offer a crash course on Twitter and see whether she’d like to start using it to supplement your dialogue.
5.Remember to listen. Your goal is to learn and develop quickly—and rich feedback is a critical part of rapid development. As a young protégé, you may view your mentoring sessions as opportunities to impress someone who has the power to advance your career. But your mentor will be put off if you do more self-promoting than learning. Access to someone with influence is a terrific benefit of mentoring, but you’ll gain greater access by putting growth first, showing a little humility, and making it clear that you take your mentor’s advice seriously.
So, if he provides feedback on how to make a more succinct, polished customer pitch, don’t respond with a knee-jerk “Yes, I knew that already” or “That doesn’t really apply to me now.” Instead, restate in your own words what your mentor said, to make sure you’ve got it right, and ask questions to clarify. Mentors will test you by seeing how you respond to feedback, and the better you are at receiving it, the more of it you will get.
6.Ask what you can do for your mentor. Look for ways to give rather than always take. As a Millennial, you have digital skills that your mentor may want to pick up, so offer some reverse mentoring: Show her how to sign up for Google Alerts and receive articles on topics of mutual interest. And if you share documents with your mentor—for example, PowerPoint presentations or white papers from industry analysts—teach her how to use a cloud service like Dropbox so you can easily discuss these without having to e-mail them back and forth. She may discover she likes collaborating this way and start doing the same thing with her own team.
7.End the relationship before it becomes a chore for the mentor. It’s easy to extend mentoring relationships beyond their usefulness. You get into a groove; you enjoy the stimulating conversations; and you’ve still got lots to learn in a tight time frame. But resist the temptation to wring evermore value from your mentor.
Follow the excellent advice of Ryan Healy, a Millennial who cofounded Brazen Careerist, a career website for young professionals: “Be clear about setting goals, and assess whether you have achieved them,” he says. “If the answer is yes, it’s time to move on and find a new mentor to assist you with another set of goals while continuing to keep in touch with your mentors past and current.” Thank your mentor for all the help you’ve received—and ask permission to use him as a reference when you’re scouting for the next one.
____________
Jeanne C. Meister is a partner at Future Workplace, which helps organizations redefine their corporate learning and talent management strategies. Karie Willyerd is the chief learning officer at SuccessFactors, a cloud-based-software company. They are the authors of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (Harper-Business, 2010).