You already know that members of Generation Y, the cohort born between 1981 and 2000, are tech-savvy, hierarchy-averse, self-interested and commitment-phobic. They were once described in the Financial Times as “every employer’s nightmare” by a London Business School professor. But as they enter their thirties and aspire to assume the reins of senior management in our organisations, how will these young leaders conduct themselves?
Over the past few months I’ve been lucky to have met many of the ‘top of the curve’ of the world’s Gen Y business leaders, at MBA competitions in London and New York, at a conference of student leaders from the world’s top 50 business-schools in Barcelona and while undertaking a consulting project in Beijing and Shanghai.
There is largely cause for optimism about Gen Y’s leadership style. Here are four ways that these CEOs of Tomorrow differ from their predecessors.
The first difference in Tomorrow’s CEOs is their pragmatic sense of social responsibility. Their coming of age coincided with the zenith of the anti-globalisation movement in the mid-1990s. Many read books such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a self-proclaimed ‘manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide’.
Tales of the greed, incompetence and lack of oversight that led to the financial crisis of 2008 form a prominent narrative in management education, and are embedded into their psyche. ‘Socially responsible leadership’ was the theme of three of four of the MBA conferences I attended recently.
Yet Tomorrow’s CEOs are not naive idealists, but responsible pragmatists. Instead of protesting against corporations, they are engaging with them to create sustainable solutions to global problems. For example, a team of Cambridge MBAs recently won the world’s largest b-school competition by developing a business model that partners mobile network providers with NGOs in a mutually beneficial partnership to bring clean water to the world’s slums.
Increasing economic uncertainty paired with the rapid pace of technological advances leads to the second distinctive feature of Tomorrow’s CEOs: their awareness of how critical it is to carefully manage the human element of organisational change.
‘Change management’ is now devoted similar attention in b-school curricula as basic accounting is. MBAs are taught that gaining the ‘buy-in’ of one’s team may be just as important in achieving business success as a cash flow analysis.
However the emphasis on stakeholder involvement in change processes comes with a significant caveat. Tomorrow’s CEOs have been taught that if such an approach is unlikely to lead to a necessary business outcome, there are ways to create the illusion of a consultative approach. I recently heard a marketing professor sincerely praise the actions of change managers in an investment bank he had studied, including positioning changes as smaller than they were eventually intended to become and even using a ‘stalking horse’ dummy alternative in a vote to draw support away from an undesired option.
Tomorrow’s CEOs third difference from their predecessors is their almost innate knowledge of the importance of managing their professional profile. ‘Personal branding’, treating one’s career as a package to be promoted, is commonplace.
Ask any MBA student for their elevator pitch and they’re guaranteed to be able to summarise their profile in thirty seconds or less. It doesn’t stop when the job hunt is over either. LinkedIn, Twitter and self-googling are tools used daily by Tomorrow’s CEOs.
In fact, as the global battle for talent resurges, executive personal brands may play a more significant role in the overall brand identity of organisations. Just as football club brands have come to rely on the ingredient brands of their star players, we might see star executives’ personal brands play a similar role in their organisations.
The final way that Tomorrow’s CEOs will lead differently stems from their remarkable insight into their own psychologies.
It was recently reported in Accountancy Age that over 85% of the top 100 FTSE companies use psychometric profiling for recruitment and development of employees. Thanks to this pervasive practice (started, incidentally by the boomers, and perfected by Gen X), Tomorrow’s CEOs are equipped with a deep understanding of their personality types, natural strengths and weaknesses as well as the roles that they best occupy when working in teams.
Such self-insight can seem comical at times. I recently asked the president of a top business school’s student association how he was going to apply an idea he’d described to me. He replied in earnest that he’d obviously need to find someone to take ownership of it as he was “an ideator not an implementer”.
So take heed baby boomers and Gen Xers. Gen Y’s recession-forged social conscience, understanding of the importance of buy-in (real or perceived), effortless ability to self-promote and deep self-knowledge make them a formidable force as they graduate into the role of Tomorrow’s CEOs.
