Millenials love to collaborate! They will show up, expect a seat at the table, and, if included, work hard. Therefore, openness to a variety of work processes will be more critical than ever.

My son Adam is a Millennial. Born in 1990, raised with the internet, he is successful in school despite evenings chatting with friends while doing homework, watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on TV, surfing Craig’s list for cars and listening to and downloading music on his i-POD….

ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

This makes me crazy.

A few months ago, before he got his drivers license*, he asked me to drive him to his friend Amy’s house in Redwood Shores. I said, "Sure. Where in Redwood Shores?" He answered, "It’s a pink house." Now Adam is a smart kid, very competent, a kid living in the age of MapQuest and GPS Systems. Yet, with all those resources at his fingertips, we are going to drive around and look for a pink house! I picked up his friend, Pedro. I say, "Hey Pedro, where does Amy live?" He tells me, "In a pink house."

*By the way, Adam and his friends didn’t successfully obtain their drivers licenses by reading the handbook that the Department of Motor Vehicles distributes. They did it by reading the dog-eared packet of the 12 different DMV tests they passed around.

This makes me more crazy.

Now, we could deduce that these young men are clueless, but that’s not it. Really, they are mavericks. They just want to go and figure it out from the road. And this is typical of Millenials. Standard and structured isn’t their thing. Their process is innovative and creative. They were born with the Internet and can they multi task! Moreover, they MUST multi task. If you have read any articles about the Millenials, you know that many have grown up multinational. Religion and race are not a big deal, or even a small deal, to them. Their families, schools and neighborhoods are integrated. Millenials are global thinkers, yet 80% of them live at home. Their desire to have an impact on the world and do a great job eclipses their need for immediate independence from the home they were raised in.

I don’t know yet if this makes me crazy.

Boomers vs. Millenials
Millenials are entering the workforce and bumping up against Boomers, the generation who birthed many of them. Boomers like structure. We created the structure in most workplaces. Elliott Masie, the guru of e-learning, tells a great story about hiring a young woman to do programming for his company. He walks into her cubicle to personally do orientation with his new hire. He wants to get her onboard, give her the tools she needs to do her job and make a good first connection. When he arrives, she’s I-Ming friends from China, India, and Pennsylvania. He asks her what she’s doing. "Talking to my tech posse," she tells him and proceeds to tell him about their great skill. He lets her know that they have plenty of tech support on site. She replies, "I trust my posse."

Masie starts the orientation. He gets a few minutes into it when she interrupts, "Do you have this on a DVD?" A stunned Masie asks, "Why?" to which the young woman replies, "I could fast forward over some parts and then go back and listen when I want to. That way, I could get the orientation done while I’m working."

Millenials start conversations right where they are and explore organic creation with no deadlines. They trust that process to yield creative results. Boomers generally require guidelines and timelines. Millenials were educated in classrooms that focused on learning groups, team skills, and dialogue. Baby boomers were raised largely being rewarded for individually having the right answer at the right time. Millenials learned how to negotiate with their parents, their teachers, their coaches. For the last two years, Adam has spent finals week doing two things. 1) Studying for his tests and 2) Going from teacher to teacher negotiating for a higher grade. I don’t know a baby boomer who systematically negotiated grades with teachers. Do you?

Ok, this also makes me crazy.

In our work with groups and leaders at Interaction Associates, we are starting to see the impact of these generations working together and we are beginning to build hypotheses about how to best support this intergenerational collaboration.

This potential mine field of opposites will only be avoided if we find some common language and tools to maximize their complementary skills. Here are a few emerging beliefs: