Allison Harper

Two of my children qualify as “Millennials,” and that may make me a little biased, but it also puts me in a position to comment both from a perspective as a parent and as a person who hires and manages people from that infamous generation. Speaking from experience on both fronts, I don’t think Millennials deserve the bad rap they get.

Millennials are considered to be the generation born between (roughly) 1982 and 2004. While it’s true that some of them can be self-involved, overprotected and entitled, the same can be said of a fair number in my generation. I remember having delusions of entitlement myself when I graduated from business school at St. Louis University. I thought I’d immediately be handed a high paying job where I got to sit around and direct people at the ripe old age of twenty-one. It didn’t take long for reality to set in, as it usually does.

It is certainly the case that more Millennials are living at home (according to the Pew Research Center, “In the first third of 2015, 26% of Millennials lived with their parents“). However, though employment has rebounded since the recession, wages have not yet returned to 2008 levels. The economy they’ve come of age in has shaped many of their choices, including their understandable caution about getting into the housing market.

Millennials’ love of technology is undisputed, but in addition to their obsession with social media, there is an enormous upside to their being the first digital natives. They get tech, and the need for businesses to embrace technology has never been greater. According to a survey from Ernst and Young, more and more people believe Millennials are the right generation to lead businesses in the next ten years, and much of that has to do with their facility with tech.

We’ve all heard stories of helicopter parents and the resulting over-sensitivity of Millennials. There are plenty of reports in the news about college students (or their parents) complaining when professors don’t announce ‘trigger warnings’ before teaching a class with language that may be upsetting. The writer Bret Easton Ellis even called them “Generation Wuss.” But the Millennials I’ve hired have been very hard working, not wusses. And they have generally been more fair-minded, diversity-oriented environmentally conscious than many of my peers.

If Millennials are overly aware of the words and stimuli surrounding them, perhaps it’s because they have been exposed to far more input and feedback. In my generation, kids could leave most conflict and ‘drama’ at school, walk away from the phone (a landline, of course), and have eighteen hours to let tensions dissipate before going back into the fray. Millennials are never disconnected, and that may cause them to be overly responsive.

With virtually unlimited access to information and the rise of the sharing economy, Millennials do have different expectations. They prize access rather than ownership, and they take for granted the ability to connect with anyone, no matter how powerful, via Twitter and other platforms. That could lead some to trample protocols in business in ways that seem unorthodox or even disrespectful to chain of command. But it also means they don’t see the limits we used to. They are not bound by the same constricts, and that’s often what precedes innovation.

It’s true the managing different generations takes getting used to. But I would argue that that’s true of managing individuals. You have to find out what makes them tick.

Like it or not, Millennials are the biggest generation, larger than the Baby Boomers, and they are shaping the world. Let’s be quick to find similarities and help guide them on their paths. We’re not their parents, but we can certainly provide leadership. And leadership starts with understanding.