Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg is 30. Tech entrepreneur and investor Sean Parker is 35. With that in mind, how old is your next boss — or for that matter, your current boss?
Baby boomers are retiring in droves, and Generation X isn’t far behind. Next up in the Csuite: the generation that gave us Zuckerberg and Parker. Millennials, the fresh wave of workers born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. And they’re already in leadership roles.
Yet some companies are unprepared to deal with this rapidly unfolding generational shift in leadership. It’s all too easy to believe that current approaches for developing leaders will work for millennials — they won’t. A focus on leadership development as usual will leave you vulnerable to losing the best and brightest of your youthful workforce. You can embrace the challenge of doing what it really takes to develop millennial leaders or watch them walk out the door to head up a competitor’s operation.
Read the full article, co-authored with Michael Watkins, in Workforce.