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May 9th, 2011

As Millennials take on increased responsibility at the office, they need to build management skills that allow them to work effectively with senior colleagues

by Jodi Glickman
Posted on Harvard Business Review: April 5, 2011 8:03 AM

The litany of leaders who’ve founded and built their companies in their twenties and thirties is long and storied. It’s hard to read much of anything in the news these days without Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone, or Andrew Mason weighing in. But more and more today, even the average young professional, the Millenial, is taking on increased responsibility at work, and managing and leading others far older than themselves.

Being a leader is tough enough when you look and sound the part, when you’ve got the war stories to prove you’ve toiled in the trenches and earned your way to the top. But leading without that authority, managing employees ten and twenty years older than you, receiving a mandate from the top but lacking the backing of the troops in the middle and at the bottom of the organization—that is a real challenge.

How does one lead without power? What do you do if you’ve got the title but not the experience? What if you’ve got the experience but your baby face betrays you? What do you do when your boss supports and respects you but you suspect your colleagues simply don’t?

The challenge is not uncommon and it’s not insurmountable. It takes just the right mix of thoughtfulness, tact and strategy on your part. When you’re young and you’re tasked with leading, the three most important things to keep in mind are as follows:

1. Be Confident

2. Be Open Minded

3. Solicit Feedback Regularly
Be Confident

Let’s assume that you’ve found yourself in the position of leading or managing older employees for a valid reason—you’re competent and capable. You’re smart, energetic, full of ideas and ready to take initiative. No matter that you yourself may doubt whether you’re really up for the challenge (who doesn’t?), those doubts need to remain your own, not be shared with your team.

Your first task is to come from a place of strength when talking to your employees or your team. Start with what you know. Speak with conviction. Give those you manage a clear sense of where you’re headed with any new project or client. Assume that your ideas are good ones until you hear otherwise. You’ll give people an opportunity to weigh in later, but don’t start off by qualifying or undermining your statements with defeating statements like: “This might be wrong, but…” Or, “I’m not sure if you’ll agree, however…” Or, worse yet, “I know I haven’t been here very long, but I think we should…” Those statements are completely and utterly damning.

Instead, communicate your confidence by sharing your ideas, initiatives and strategies openly. “Here’s how we’re planning to move forward with the James account.” Or, “I want to get you up to speed on the Schiller project and fill you in on next steps.” Sound like you know what you’re talking about and people will come to believe that you do.
Be Open Minded

Balance your confidence and poise with an open mind. Don’t ask for outright guidance or direction, instead, put forward your positions, opinions or strategic direction and then gather feedback. Be receptive to your teams’ thoughts and insights. Solicit their opinions and ideas, but use your phrasing to gather confirmatory evidence (“does that sound like the approach you had in mind?” Or, “Is that in line with your thinking on this?”) as opposed to asking outright if something is right or good. Your baseline is one of competence, not ignorance or inexperience.

Give your colleagues or subordinates a voice and get them vested in the process by sharing ideas and stress-testing strategy. But be sure you’re the one setting the agenda and leading the charge. Asking for input, advice or feedback is different than asking for permission or guidance.
Solicit Feedback

Finally, make it your business to seek out feedback from colleagues regularly—superiors and subordinates—about your performance. Irrespective of specific deals or projects; let people know that you care about continuous improvement. If you message that you’re open to receiving feedback, people will be more likely to give it.

While it’s okay to acknowledge that you’re in learning mode or listening mode, you can’t live there forever and you certainly don’t want to start there. Start strong, keep an open mind and bring people on board to keep you moving in the right direction. Just don’t ask what direction you should be moving in or you’ll wind up losing your team’s respect before you’ve had a chance to win it.

Five ways to Hold the Right Kind of Attention

May 6th, 2011

To accomplish anything, chances are you need the help of others. Here’s how to engage and motivate them

By John Hagel and John Seely Brown

Posted on Harvard Business Review: April 5, 2011 8:26 AM
No matter how talented or accomplished you are, you cannot always count on attracting and retaining the attention of others. Too many options compete for everyone’s attention, and they multiply with each passing day. It will be more and more challenging to rise above the noise and hold onto the attention of those who matter to you.

Attention provides leverage. The more people we can attract and motivate to join us on a challenging quest or initiative, the more impact we are likely to achieve. So, what are effective ways to attract and retain the kind of attention that helps us to address the challenges we face? Here are five steps that build on each other.

1. Embrace mystery – Frame really gnarly problems that are relevant to you and need to be solved. Help people to understand why these are such significant problems and why so many people have stumbled in trying to solve these problems. It probably will not attract the people looking for easy answers or silver bullets, but it can attract those who are naturally curious and looking for stimulating challenges.

2. Focus inquiry – Don’t try to suggest answers. Frame interesting questions instead. Help people gain a foothold by posing questions that intrigue and motivate them to start investigating the mysteries that lie ahead.

3. Excite the imagination – Provide some “what if?” scenarios to illustrate the possibilities that await those who manage to come up with creative answers. Paint the pictures but make it clear these are only pictures. Stimulate people to pursue the questions with a lot of energy and creativity.

4. Limit availability – Lots of people will seek you out if you are successful in exciting the imagination. If you try to connect with everyone, the conversations can spread you way too thin. Be more selective in your availability – you will often provide even greater incentive to tackle the problems, rather than simply engaging in conversations.

5. Be authentic – If you try to game this, you will be found out and the backlash will be significant. So, here is the catch—if you are not genuinely engaged in addressing these problems yourself, you will not be able to sustain the attention and effort of others to come up with creative solutions. On the other hand, if you are on a quest yourself, leading by example, you could have a contagious effect and the encounters you have can help both sides to learn from each other.

Do these techniques actually work? Well, think of how Martin Luther King excited and mobilized a broad group of people to tackle some very challenging social problems. On a completely different level, one leading tech company in Silicon Valley regularly attracts the attention of the venture capital community by sharing its most difficult technology problems and suggesting that they would buy the start-ups that come up with creative solutions to these problems. Or look at the way professional astronomers have mobilized a global network of passionately engaged amateurs to learn more about the vast universe beyond this one planet.

This kind of attention is priceless and powerful. We will all need to find ways to generate it and harness it. This is not just an opportunity, but increasingly an imperative. We are all experiencing increasing economic pressure as individuals and institutions. In this kind of environment, we not only need leverage, we also need to more rapidly improve our performance. We all get better faster by working with others. To do this, we first need to attract the attention of others. If we fail to attract that attention, we will not get better faster in an increasingly competitive global economy, and we could be marginalized. That is why attention is becoming more valuable at the same time that it is becoming scarcer.

Leading Older Employees

As Millennials take on increased responsibility at the office, they need to build management skills that allow them to work effectively with senior colleagues

Five ways to Hold the Right Kind of Attention

To accomplish anything, chances are you need the help of others. Here’s how to engage and motivate them

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