When I start working with a new boss, it’s like taking a new class. You know, the first day of class they say, “Here’s what this class is about. Here are my rules: You can miss three classes before it affects your grade, there will be three quizzes, a term paper, and an exam.” I’ve had bosses who do that, and I think it really helps a lot.

—Millennial

Some people know how to be managed and others just don’t,” said a senior partner at a major American law firm whom I’ll call Mr. Rust. “I can tell almost immediately with a new associate if I’m going to be able to work with that person and if that person is going to be able to work with me. Some of the young associates today still come in with a good work ethic, good work habits; the kind of work style I can mesh with. Most of them don’t.”

I hear this from a lot of leaders and managers. They claim that many Millennials are lacking when it comes to work ethic, work habits, and work style. The underlying truth of this common complaint is that work ethic, habits, and style are often less developed in younger workers. But it’s a mistake to assume that young employees will just grow up and take on old-fashioned attitudes and behavior that older generations exhibit. You simply cannot ignore the impact of Millennials’ short-term transactional approach to work and their insistence on customizing the details of their working lives to optimize their needs and wants.

These factors leave a lot of managers baffled and looking for the exceptions in the young talent pool—those young employees who seem to manifest a more traditional approach to work and already know how to be managed. Such leaders and managers assume that some young employees have it—the good work ethic, habits, and style—while others simply do not. But often what these leaders are really looking for, whether they realize it or not, is an employee whose own ethic, habits, and style are a good match with theirs. Often when leaders reject new employees, it’s because they perceive a bad match. They act as if these were matters set in stone.

When I pressed Rust, the senior partner at the law firm, he allowed that “some of the associates who seem like losers to me go on to work just fine with one of the other partners. Talk to my partner Mr. Gold. Gold makes lemonade out of lemons. Gold can work with any of these young associates. They all love Gold.”

Mr. Gold sounded like someone I wanted to know.

Here’s what Mr. Gold had to say: “Rust is a great lawyer and a great guy, but he’s very finicky about how things are done. He’s got standards that are very much his own. I would have a hard time working for him. Rust has some very interesting work, though, so a lot of the new associates want to work for him, at least when they first get here.” Then Gold told me a great story about a young associate who came to their firm determined to work with Rust, despite his reputation for being finicky. This young associate, Gold told me, “had been here for a summer in law school and he was very clever. When he came back as an associate, his first day here, he went and made appointments with the three senior associates who work with Rust. He sat down with them, one by one, and interviewed them and took extensive notes, ‘What time does Rust get to the office? What time does he leave? What time does he have lunch? Does he respond to e-mail? Does he like memos double-spaced?’ Then, presto! He’s one of the associates who can work with Rust!”

Wasn’t that young associate just doing his job well by figuring out how to fit with Mr. Rust’s work ethic, habits, and style? I asked Mr. Gold. After all, if he wants to work for Rust, he should take the initiative and figure out how to work for Rust. “That’s just it,” said Gold. “Most of the associates don’t take the initiative. They don’t figure it out.”

Since Gold had a reputation for working well with the young associates, I asked him what his secret was. “What that young associate did with Rust, I do with every associate. I take that initiative for them. I make it so they don’t have to be so clever.” Mr. Gold continued, “I tell them, ‘This is who I am. This is what I work on. This is what time I come in. This is what time I usually leave. This is what I expect from you. This is how to work for me.’” I asked Mr. Gold if he agreed with Mr. Rust that “some people know how to be managed and others don’t.” Gold said, “It’s actually, ‘Does this person know how to be managed by you?’ I guess the difference is that I see teaching them how to be managed by me as my responsibility. I’m not going to teach them how to be managed by Rust. But I can teach them how to be managed by me. You have to tell them ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’” said Gold. “That’s a good place to start.”

Set Clear Ground Rules Up-Front

Managers tell me every day that Millennials fail to meet a lot of unspoken expectations about behavior in the workplace. I have an idea: Speak them!

One credit union manager was telling me about a young employee who routinely came to work late and then made lots of personal calls on his cell phone throughout the workday. “Do I really need to tell him, ‘Come to work on time, and it’s not good to make so many personal calls all day long’?” Yes! You have to tell him, up front and every step of the way.

“I would make lots of offhand comments to him like, ‘Hey, you know, trickle in here whenever you feel like it. Don’t feel any pressure to come to work on time. Make all the calls you want.’ But he just wasn’t getting the hint.” The manager continued, “At the end of my rope, I pulled this guy aside. I had worried so much about having the conversation, worried it was going to be a big blow-up. When I said to him, ‘It’s really not acceptable to come to work late,’ he said, ‘Really? Why didn’t you just say so?’ When I told him, ‘You really are only supposed to make personal calls on your cell phone at a break or at lunch or in the case of an emergency,’ he said, ‘Really? Why didn’t you just say so?’ Then he went into this whole spiel: ‘What else aren’t you tellin’ me, Sparky? Sparky, you gotta tell me stuff that’s important to ya.’ So I told him, “There is one other thing. Please stop calling me Sparky. You can call me Rob, or you can call me Mr. Sarkington.”

Millennials will be open and direct with you if you give them the chance. One Millennial recently told me: “My boss never gets to the point. You don’t have to give me a whole line of BS. Don’t even try to sweeten it up for me. I can just take it. Just be real. Just get to the point.” Indeed, being open with Millennials will help you keep tabs on their attitude, behavior, shifting loyalties, and commitments in and out of the workplace. The problem is that, in an effort to foster that openness, some managers find themselves dragged into time-consuming and uncomfortable personal territory that really should be avoided. The other problem is that, in order to avoid personal minefields, managers often end up soft-pedaling their requirements and withholding candid feedback, no matter how fair and straightforward it might be.

Set Ground Rules on the Intangibles

“This young woman who worked in our office was always coming in moping around here,” I was told by a manager in a medical devices company. “She always had an excuse. Her personal life was always out there. Bad days for her were bad days for everyone. Ironically, if you tried to talk to her about the fact that she was leaving early or moping around, she’d freeze right up. Even if I tried to say, ‘I know you locked your keys in the car, I know you had to go to Cleveland, I know your uncle is sick, but you really can’t leave until your shift is over,’ she’d turn around and tell me in this cold, harsh tone, ‘My personal life is none of your business.’” The manager continued, “I finally sat down with her and said, ‘Listen, it’s up to you whether or not you want to share your personal issues with people here at work. But you need to do that outside your work time.’” I told her, “‘Your personal life is your own business, but you can’t let your personal issues interfere with our business here. You have to follow the same ground rules as everybody else.’”

The manager continued, “When she started to freeze up, I told her, ‘You can’t freeze up now. We have to be able to talk about your job performance. This isn’t about your personal life. You can’t use your personal life as an excuse for leaving early and then the next day tell me it’s none of my business. You need to leave your personal issues at the door when you come to work. This is a place where you focus on work. You don’t need to feel bad about your personal problems here. You can feel good about your work. But you have to smile. Use a pleasant tone of voice. Fake it if you have to. When you come in here, you have to be professional.’ To my total delight and surprise, she was fine after that—not that she didn’t slip up now and then. My catch-phrase with her after that was, ‘Fake it if you have to.’ That was my way of reminding her to be professional. I told her, ‘I have to be able to talk to you about your performance without you freezing up. I have to be able to tell you when your performance is lagging and you need to improve. We have to be able to have these conversations.’”

I hear success stories like this every day from smart managers who are willing to put it on the line and take charge. You have to figure out what your expectations are and then speak up. Set ground rules. Maybe there are corporate policies in place already. But often there are no concrete policies to regulate important intangibles like attitude, tone of voice, and other subtleties of professionalism in the workplace. You may need to figure out these ground rules on your own. You may need to say, “Whenever you are working with me, on any task, for any period of time, these are MY ground rules.” Then lay out your ground rules in no uncertain terms, and make it clear they are deal breakers for you: you can’t work with someone who doesn’t follow these ground rules.

Set Ground Rules That Matter

One word of caution: don’t set too many ground rules, or the ground rules will lose meaning. Also, don’t set ground rules just because they are your pet peeves, or they will have no legitimacy. Be honest and rigorous with yourself. What is the business logic behind each ground rule? What do you lose or risk losing as a result of this ground rule? What do you gain? Is it worth it?

Ground rules will be your fundamental performance requirements, so take some time to brainstorm about the broad standards that really matter: Attire? Attitude? Conduct? Cursing? Personal issues? Personal calls? Personal business on company time? What about work hours? Will we keep our conversations focused on work? When I give you directions, can I expect you to ask clarifying questions? Can I ask you to spell out for me the steps you are going to take to execute my instructions? Can I expect you to write things down?

The more you spell out clear ground rules up-front, the better things will go. Make your ground rules clear. Use catch phrases if they come naturally. Then speak them. Write them down. And speak them some more. They will serve as an easy point of reference whenever you want to remind an employee: “We both know that this is one of my ground rules.”

Establish a Regular Time and Place for One-on-Ones

Remember that Millennials have grown up hyperscheduled. They thrive on that kind of structure, and they thrive on one-on-one attention. One of the most effective ways to help your young employees learn to be managed by you is to schedule regular discussions with each of them about his or her work.

At first, err on the side of meeting more often with each person—every day, every other day, or once a week. Start by evaluating what time will best work for you: What time will fit your regular schedule and needs? Also consider what time will work best for each of your employees. Then communicate with each Millennial the expectation that you will meet regularly one-on-one at a regular time.

Whenever possible, try to choose a regular time, and stick with it as long as you can. If you have to make a change, try to set a new regular time, and try to stick with the new time as long as you can. Regularity makes a big different to Millennials. In-person meetings are always preferable to meetings by telephone, but if your only option is telephone, don’t let the phone call slip. Keep those telephone appointments the way you make sure to attend your own child’s birthday party. And make sure to support these telephone conversations with clear point-by-point e-mails before and after your calls. Follow-up e-mails are key, especially following telephone one-on-ones.

Whenever you can meet in person, try to conduct your meetings in the same place. Choose a good venue, whether it is your office, a conference room, or the stairwell. You want these meetings to become familiar and comfortable. The routine of meeting in the same place every time is an important part of the structure these one-on-one meetings provide.

Making a plan with your young employee to meet one-on-one at a regular time and place is a huge commitment for both of you. It is a powerful statement that you care enough to spend time setting this person up for success. When you follow through and spend that time, you are creating a constant feedback loop for ongoing short-term goal setting, performance evaluation, coaching, troubleshooting, and regular course correction.

It’s also a lot of pressure on both of you. But it’s good pressure.

For the employee, the pressure is that of constant accountability. Quite literally, the employee will be expected to give an account of her performance in every one-on-one meeting. Has she met her short-term goals? Has she accomplished everything on her to-do list? Has she met all the guidelines and specifications? Has her performance been timely and swift? Have her results been high quality? Has her demeanor been cheerful and energetic? She will hope to score points—actually or metaphorically—in every meeting. Meanwhile, she will also expect feedback from you, including regular fine-tuning, revising, adjusting, and suggestions for improvement.

For you as the manager, the pressure is to carry the ball without dropping it. After all, you are the boss here. You are the one who has to make sure these one-on-ones happen, as scheduled, in the right place, and at the right time. If it is a new habit for you, this practice may feel uncomfortable or burdensome at first. It will take time to get used to it. It will be easy, on a very busy day, to look at your schedule and be tempted to skip it. Don’t.

If you skip meetings, you are sending a message to Millennials that the schedule is not real, the structure is not solid, and the relationship is not reliable. They will take it as license to start skipping meetings when they feel like it. It will be very hard to reestablish the routine. So you’ll feel the greatest pressure on those times when you inevitably do drop the ball. At those times, you only have one good option: “Mea culpa!” Confess and ask forgiveness. Say, “I let you down. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.” Explain that it is precisely the very chaos and uncertainty at work that makes the structure of regularly scheduled meetings so important. Then ask, “Will you please trust me to resume our regularly scheduled meetings with discipline?” The only thing to do is to get back on schedule immediately, get back to work, and do better.

Create a Focused Routine for Your One-on-Ones

One Millennial told me: “The coolest job I ever had was working for this guy who was really intense, but he made me have these ‘focus meetings’ with him every day. He’d show up or call and say, ‘Okay. Focus meeting. Are you ready?’ It was his chance to tell me what was going on and what he needed me to put at the top of my list. It sounds terrible, but it was great. I knew it was coming every day: ‘This is what’s important right now.’ I always knew what I was doing was important work, at least to him.” I’ve heard this kind of testimony over and over again from Millennials and managers alike. Millennials thrive on the familiar and comfortable structure of a focused routine, especially in relationships with authority figures. The routine doesn’t have to be pretty, as long as it’s a routine—the faster and tidier, the better.

It won’t be enough to start meeting regularly with your Millennials one-on-one. You’ll have to teach them how to meet with you. Spell out how long you expect each meeting to last (my advice is to keep them to fifteen or twenty minutes). Don’t ever let these meetings become long or convoluted. Make it clear that your meetings will follow a fast and tidy agenda, preferably the same basic format every time. Start each meeting by reviewing the agenda. Whenever possible, present an agenda in writing that you can both follow. These meetings should be cordial, but all business. This is not the time for chitchat.

Often managers have a difficult time talking to their young employees. “I always feel like I should touch base personally before moving on to my list. It’s slightly disingenuous, I guess,” said one manager in a small professional office. “I might say, ‘What did you do last night?’ or ‘Did you see that show last night?’ or ‘Did you get in okay this morning? How was traffic?’ But really, I’m just trying to warm up to, ‘Great, here’s my list.’” Don’t waste these meetings shooting the breeze, pretending to be friends or, worst of all, talking about deep personal matters. These meetings should not become therapy sessions. This is not your chance to play older sibling, confidante, wise sage, or pal. Also beware of letting your regular one-on-ones digress into big-picture career discussions or long-range planning sessions. There may be a time and a place for everything, but your regular one-on-ones are not the time and place for anything but helping each Millennial focus on priorities in the short term. All references to matters really deep, big picture, or long term should be immediately tied back to short-term details that can be written down on a to-do list.

Customize One-on-Ones for Every Employee

Like everything else, this dynamic process will change over time, and your approach will have to change with each young employee you meet with regularly. For each of your employees, you’ll have to figure out how often to meet, how much time to spend at each meeting, what format to use, and what topics to cover. And remember: you’ll have to make adjustments over time. If things are not going well with a particular Millennial, maybe you’ll have to meet longer and more often, going over his to-do list twice a day with a fine-tooth comb. And if things are going really well with a Millennial, maybe you only need to meet twice a week—just long enough to check progress and troubleshoot any issues that come up with her current tasks, responsibilities, and projects. No matter how well things seem to be going, you still must verify that things are indeed going as well as you think. If they are, make sure that Millennial knows just how many points she is scoring today.

Never forget that your one-on-ones are your primary method for keeping the lines of communication open. Keep your expectations on the table, and make sure you are showing them exactly how to meet and exceed your expectations. And keep asking, “What do you need from me?”

Give Them “Real” Power

“I think these Millennial guys are power hungry,” whispered a manager from the world of high finance. “They always want to know about the pecking order when it comes to who is really in charge. They want to know who controls the resources and who can really help them advance. One of the new guys asked me: ‘Who do I need to listen to, and who can I ignore?’ I can’t help saying I thought that was pretty savvy, and I did end up telling him, ‘Listen to me,’ and I gave him a few other people and told him we were the only ones he really needed to keep happy. That guy is turning out really to be very sharp, and he’s going to be very successful if he stays with us.”

I hear stories like this all the time, and not just from people in high finance or other similarly competitive industries. Recently a director in a large nonprofit organization said to me: “Every one of the Millennials seems to have overly inflated views of how much responsibility he should have. They think they should be able to make decisions that are really appropriate only for much more senior people with much more experience.” She went on: “It’s like they’ve always been taught to question authority, so they come in here questioning the existing hierarchy and the way decisions are made.” I explained to this director that when kids grow up with parents who actually teach them how to question authority, they usually learn to be pretty good at it.

Think about this: What if your voice had been given great weight since you were a small child? Might you expect to be taken seriously? What if you grew up being able to answer just about any question instantly with the touch of a keyboard? Wouldn’t you be a bit of a know-it-all? What if you watched institutions and titans and celebrities rise and fall every day? Would you really expect authority figures to be set in stone?

Millennials are acutely aware of power relations. One of them recently told me: “I just want to know where I stand. Who am I supposed to be taking orders from? Whose ass am I supposed to be kissing? Who is supposed to be kissing my ass? You know what I mean? What’s my territory? What’s my zone of power? So I can operate freely and work my magic.” And they definitely want as much power as they can get their hands on. That’s not just true in the workplace. That’s true about any situation in which they spend considerable time and care one wit about the people or the undertaking. If they spend time there and they care, they want to know: Who is in charge? Who controls the resources? And where do I stand in the pecking order?

Give Them Real Power

A very common mistake managers make is trying to humor Millennials. These managers want Millennials to spend their time and energy on concrete tasks and responsibilities. But all the while, these managers distract Millennials from their actual lack of power by giving them “fake” power, telling them: “You are my right-hand man” or “Do it however you think it should be done.” But power in the workplace is not a pretend game to Millennials. As one aptly put it: “Don’t tell me I’m your right-hand man and then keep me running around all day doing your personal errands. If my job is to pick up your kids after school every day and bring them to your house, I’m not exactly your right-hand man. If I’m your personal errand boy, just tell me I’m your personal errand boy. Tell me what a great job I have to do with your personal errands to get some more real work. What do I have to do to prove myself so I can get some more responsibility for real work?”

For Millennials, power is about control of resources, wielding of status, authority to make decisions, and autonomy to take action. In reality, they do not have the power to ignore the tasks they don’t like or take on responsibilities that don’t belong to them. They are not free to do things their own way or get others to do things their way. They do not have a title recognized by their co-workers as prestigious. They cannot access and deploy money or anything that costs money. Stop pretending.

Millennials want power, all right. But they are not interested in fake power. They want real power. Focus their power hunger on their real work.

If you want to give Millennials the power to make decisions on their own, you need to prepare them to do so. If you want to give Millennials the power to take action on their own, you have to spell out all the guidelines and parameters up-front. You need to tell them: “If you are in situation A, follow steps 1, 2, and 3. If you are in situation B, follow steps 4, 5, and 6. If you are in situation C, follow steps 7, 8, and 9.” If you want them to use their own judgment, then you have to make it clear exactly where their discretion begins and where it ends. Spell out what they can do and what they cannot and may not do. Define clear goals.

The key to giving Millennials real power is to set strict deadlines with detailed timelines and regular benchmarks along the way. In between those regular benchmarks, let Millennials work in their own terms and time. The more concrete the goal and expectations you set for them are, the greater their feeling of ownership will be. In general, the more structure you provide, the more freely Millennials can operate within those certain boundaries.

Lend Them Your Power to Get Things Done

There will always be unexpected obstacles, problems, and people who get in the way of those certain boundaries. One aerospace manager in a large manufacturing facility said to me: “I’ll tell you what always messes up my guys and makes them feel powerless: when they cannot get something they need out of someone in another work group, department, or another division or sometimes an outside vendor. I’ll come in and ask how things are going, and they’re totally dead-ended because they are waiting to get some missing link and they are being ignored because they are peons.” The manager continued, “I just tell them, ‘You are peons. Nobody is afraid of you. I am just a notch above peon, but my boss, Mr. Green, is a big wheel, and I use his name to get what we need. If someone is stonewalling you, you have to let me know immediately and let me make the call so it doesn’t hold up the project.’ The funny thing is that I think this actually makes them a little cocky, like, ‘Do we need to get Mr. Green involved in this?’ But it actually makes them more powerful and things get done.”

I can’t recommend telling your young employees they are peons, but I highly recommend telling it like it is. These are lessons I’ve learned from many wise leaders of Millennials in the real world:

• Teach them how to get things done in your organization.
• Let them know where they truly stand in relation to others.
• Make it clear that you are a power source in their working lives, and lend them some of your power to help them get things done.

One senior partner in a consulting firm helped me put a fine point on these lessons by sharing this example: “Our problem is that you can have a perfectly solid working relationship with an associate, then another partner will swoop down and dump work on him. All of a sudden, I’m not getting the work out of this associate, even though I see he’s here until all hours of the night. I’ll say, ‘Did you tell Mr. Jones you were working on this matter for me?’ He’ll just look overwhelmed and tell me, ‘I told him that, and he said this was very important and he really needed me to do it.’ So what am I supposed to say?” This senior partner continued: “What I came to realize was that the younger associates think they can’t say no—and in fact they don’t want to. The more partners they work for, the more decision-makers they are winning over, the more power they are connected to. But that means they are always caught in the middle trying to set priorities when they really have no way to know what should take priority. Now I tell associates whenever I give them an assignment, ‘If another partner tries to give you an assignment, here’s what I want you to do. First thing you do is tell him you are working on this matter for me with a tight deadline. Second thing you do is tell him I told you that you do not have the authority to put his assignment ahead of mine. Tell him to call me to discuss the competing assignments. Third thing you do is text-message me immediately to tell me. I’m your panic button.’ It’s just not fair for us to expect these brand-new associates to set priorities on assignments. We have to help them do that.”

Lessons learned: Prepare Millennials for the expected. Then counsel them to expect the unexpected. Give them a standard course of action in the face of the unexpected. In case of emergency, you may have to be their panic button.

Create an Upward Spiral of Continuous Improvement

Managers often tell me they have a hard time talking to Millennials about failures great and small. “When they make a mistake, you hesitate to tell them because they take it so hard,” I was told by a partner at a prestigious law firm. “They seem to take it personally, like you are breaking their hearts. I want to say, ‘Don’t feel bad. Just go back and make these changes, and then next time try to remember to do it properly in the first place.’ That seems pretty basic.” It is pretty basic.

When it comes to addressing Millennials’ performance problems, the most common mistake managers make is soft-pedaling honest feedback or withholding it altogether. Sometimes managers take back incomplete work and finish it themselves or reassign it. Other times the problems are not addressed at all, and the work product remains substandard. Millennials are left to fail unwittingly or improve on their own impulse and initiative. As one Millennial put it: “What do you want me to do, scream it? Beg for it? Help! Help me get it right. Help me do it faster. Help me do it better. Help me improve.”

The second most common mistake managers make when dealing with Millennials’ performance problems is hit-and-run criticism. Unlike soft-pedaling managers, hit-and-run managers don’t hesitate to offer honest negative comments about Millennials’ performance. But hit-and-run managers often critique work randomly—when they happen to notice a mistake and also have a moment to reach out to the employee in question—instead of systematically reviewing work product. They are likely to disparage errors and omissions, even when they haven’t taken the time earlier to make expectations clear. Millennials usually feel blindsided. One Millennial shared this story with me: “There was this one guy who would just attack me out of the blue. I wasn’t even working for him, really, but he was on the project. I’d see him in the cafeteria, and he would grab my upper arm and tell me something I did was crap: ‘Your presentation this morning was crap.’ ‘That e-mail you sent around this morning was crap.’ I hated that guy.”

When it comes to performance management with Millennials, the best practice is to be systematic, honest, and positive. That’s how you create an upward spiral of continuous improvement.

Focus on Solutions, Not Problems

“I learned early on that the trick with Millennials is exactly NOT to ignore performance problems, exactly NOT to tell them they are doing better than they are. But you can’t ambush them either. It has to be a process of continuous improvement.” That’s what I was told by one of the most successful business leaders in the restaurant industry—a man with a reputation for developing young, high-potential employees into industry superstars. “When I am developing a young talent, I spend a lot of time focusing on problems, one little problem after another. I don’t sugar-coat it, but I never treat it like a problem.” He continued, “No matter what they do, they know my focus is next steps.”

I could see why this guy was so successful at developing Millennials. He continued, “They want to improve, even the less talented, less promising young men and women. If you talk about continuous improvement, they are all ears. You can’t ignore problems because that’s really what continuous improvement is: removing imperfections one at a time. But I never bother calling it a problem. For me, it’s all about next steps. I have a district manager I’m trying to move up quickly to regional manager. His general managers have been way over on their labor budgets, which tells me he is not focusing on their labor budgets. So we went over the numbers, but I never said a word about it being a problem. I just told him, ‘Let’s talk about next steps. For the next two weeks, I want you to call every general manager in your district every day to remind them to focus on controlling the labor budget in their restaurants. Set aside your whole morning for that if you have to, but I want you to call every one of them every day for the next two weeks.’”

This manager explained, “I’m not focusing on the problem; I’m focusing him on the solution. That’s what continuous improvement really is anyway. It’s always about whatever we are focused on improving at the moment. I find that when they have a whole bunch of next steps focused on solutions, that problem not only is solved, but it doesn’t come back, not with that person anyway. It’s not just a great way to improve at the moment. It’s a great way for them to fill in that gap in their performance. They learn the lesson, and it sticks.”

This “next steps” focus is one level deeper than a “results focus.” Next steps will help you concentrate your performance management efforts on the concrete actions within the control of each individual employee. Maintaining a next-steps focus requires a constant accounting. Keep asking your young employees: Exactly what concrete actions—next steps—are you going to take next? What can you do to improve? What do you need to revise and adjust?

Keep Track of Their Performance

The challenge with this deep level of performance management is how to monitor performance closely enough to make fair and accurate evaluations and to provide the guidance necessary to facilitate constant improvement. There is no substitute for actually watching Millennials performing their concrete actions.

“It’s kind of like going to my kid’s Little League game,” said one retail manager. “I learn more about my employees from watching them deal with a customer for a few minutes than almost any other performance indicator.” I call this approach shadowing. Any time an employee is struggling with a recurring performance problem, shadow that employee for a little while and watch him in action. Nine times out of ten, you’ll be able to help the employee solve the problem with relative ease by focusing on next steps. But it is the rare manager who can regularly watch employees work with his or her own eyes.

You must have a way to monitor and measure their performance on a regular basis. That means you need to spot-check their work. Ask customers for feedback on individual employees. Ask other managers. And ask Millennials themselves. As one Millennial said: “I’d rather have a manager who is keeping really close track of what I’m doing than one who doesn’t know who I am or what I’m doing or even care. My boss trusts me to keep really close track of myself, which is what I want. I’m the one doing all the talking. I tell her everything I’m doing in a weekly report. I have a running list so it’s easy. I e-mail her which things are done and what I’m working on at the present time. Then we go over it on the phone. She trusts me, and I am a total star for her.”

One of the best approaches I’ve seen to the challenge of monitoring Millennials’ performance is making them responsible for keeping track of their own performance. Give Millennials tools like project plans, work diaries, and checklists. Ask them to keep track of their own work in writing and report to you on a regular basis. “I have them write down everything,” said the manager of an entry-level group in a large insurance company. “I have them keep track of their whole day in an activity log. Most of them find it very helpful. For me, I couldn’t function without it because I have twenty-six people. I can help them track down just about any problem any time because I say, ‘Let’s just go through your activity log and see what happened.’ My group is the least experienced one in this entire company, and our error rate is the lowest. I attribute that entirely to the activity logs. What they love is being the highest-performing group and the rewards that come with that.” I asked, “Exactly what was it about those activity logs that made such a difference?” “We use the logs to go back and find errors, eliminate the errors, and prevent the errors from recurring. But the biggest impact is how it impacts their work. It slows them down and forces them to double- and triple-check their work. Just keeping the activity logs makes them more careful.”

The best managers I know create a constant feedback loop with their Millennials—what one very experienced manager in information technology calls “coming full circle.” He said, “That’s my mantra with them: ‘Come full circle with that.’ What that means is, ‘This assignment begins with a conversation between you and me, and it’s going to come back to a conversation between you and me. I’m going to want to know what happened. Did you do what I asked you to do? Did you do it the way I asked you to do it? If not, why not? Did anything come up that I hadn’t anticipated? Did you think of a better way? So come full circle, and we’ll talk about what happened.’ That’s what it means to me.”

When I interviewed this manager’s Millennial employees, they all said the same thing, “Oh yeah, ‘Come full circle! That’s his mantra.’” I wasn’t surprised that they all seemed to appreciate coming full circle. One of the young programmers told me, “Basically, that’s how he helps us help ourselves. You’d think it was him being a control freak, always asking us tons of questions and keeping such close tabs on everything we are doing. But I’m starting to think he doesn’t even keep as close tab as he seems to. I think it’s really about keeping us on our toes.” Another programmer on this manager’s team told me, “He definitely knows exactly what everyone is doing all the time. But it’s his secret weapon. He doesn’t want anyone leaving loose ends hanging out there. So you always are second-guessing yourself, making sure you haven’t forgotten anything, or left any loose ends because he is definitely going to ask you about it.” Yet another programmer on the team told me: “He calls it ‘coming full circle,’ but it never ends. He’s always there with you. It’s more like an upward spiral.”

Teach Them How to Get What They Need from You

Managers often tell me that Millennials make a lot of requests and demands. I say those Millennials are doing you a favor. Once you know what they want from you, you have the key to getting what you want from them. Case in point: One Millennial told me, “I cannot work Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I know that sucks, but I can’t. The thing is, I’ll do anything else. Give me Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and I’ll do anything else, and I mean anything. I’ll wade through a river of shit.” Stop taking insult when Millennials make demands and requests. Start using that opportunity to drive their performance.

“I tell my Millennials, ‘If you want to carry some weight with me, you’ve got to bring your very best effort to work every day,’” an experienced mechanical service contractor told me. “‘You’ve got to get here early and stay late. Don’t screw around while you are on a job. When you are here in the shop, find something to make yourself useful. If you see something out of place, fix it. If you see one of the other guys screwing around, tell him to knock it off. Take some initiative. Keep moving. I’m right here. I know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. You want to carry weight with me, carry your weight around here.’” When I talked to some of the Millennials who worked for this contractor, they all nodded in agreement, and one of them said, “There is no doubt. The slack-offs wouldn’t dare ask him for anything. But the really hard workers have no doubt that he’ll do anything for us.”

That’s the key: spell out for your Millennials exactly what they must do to gain your assistance in getting their needs met. Help them help you help them.

One health care executive offered this approach: “You want something from me? Before you ask me for something, I want to know: What is the benefit of what you are proposing? Is there a benefit to me? To the company? To the group? Who benefits? What does it take to make this happen? What role are you going to play in all of this? Who else is going to be involved? How long is this going to take? Where is this going to happen? How are you going to do it? Just answer those questions for me.”

Indeed, by requiring that an employee who makes a request answer these questions, you are in effect helping that person prepare a simple proposal. I have seen this technique work wonders for managers of Millennials in organizations of all shapes and sizes. When managers require Millennials to put requests in the form of a simple proposal, Millennials tend to make fewer requests, make more reasonable requests, and make their requests in a much more professional manner. No matter how simple the process is, the very act of stopping to put their requests into a proposal format causes Millennials to consider those requests more carefully. “Don’t make requests lightly, and they won’t be taken lightly,” is how an enlisted leader in the U.S. Marine Corps put it. This genuine war hero told me, “If my Marines ask me for something, I’m going to break my back to get it for them. So don’t make requests lightly, please. Requests are serious business.”

A great sage in the financial services industry told me: “Young analysts are always in my office asking me for this or that. I have a simple rule now: Give me a proposal. You want a paper clip? Give me a proposal. That one could be a very short proposal. But that’s my response to everything, and it has trickled right back down. Ask your team leader for a paper clip in my division, and your team leader is going to say, ‘Give me a proposal!’” I asked her if she was creating needless red tape—her own little internal bureaucracy. “No, no, no,” she insisted. “There’s no red tape. There’s no bureaucracy. We want them to stop and think before they ask for this or that. It could be a sentence, a paragraph, a page. Just make a persuasive case.”

She added, “It’s great training for them, anyway. You have to be able to make a persuasive business case to make things happen. When it comes to getting resources out of administration, or getting resources out of people in other divisions, my analysts are light-years ahead because they know how to make a persuasive business case. They actually bring resources into our division most of the time rather than soaking up my resources. They go forth into the firm and gather up resources, one proposal after another.”

I’ve seen the proposal technique used by managers formally, informally, and inadvertently. It works like a charm. I’ve seen managers use it to help Millennials obtain more resources for their own work or the work of their team; greater financial rewards for themselves or their subordinates; greater access to perks; credit for results achieved; new tasks, responsibilities, or projects; special assignments; training opportunities; exposure to decision-makers; the chance to work in a choice location; scheduling flexibility; and the quirkiest personal accommodations you can imagine.

Even while managers are helping Millennials get more of what they need and want, the proposal technique also helps managers ensure that Millennials are paying a fair market value—in time and hard work—for whatever it is they are receiving. “Maybe they are getting more than their fair share,” says the wise sage. “Good for them! This is business. We are trying to turn a profit. So are they!”

For years in my seminars, I’ve been teaching managers to use one version or another of the proposal technique with Millennials, especially when it comes to using rewards—great and small—to drive performance. It’s not enough to define expectations clearly and tie concrete rewards directly to the fulfillment of those expectations. The more open and transparent the process for earning rewards of any kind, the more the rewards will drive performance. That’s why the proposal technique works so well. In effect, it turns Millennials’ requests and demands upside down so they become opportunities for Millennials to earn performance-based rewards.

I should point out that there is one more huge advantage to helping Millennials manage themselves and get more of what they need/want from you: If they get more of what they want/need from you, they will be much less likely to leave.