Entitled. Greedy. Disloyal. The perceptions surrounding today’s millennial generation aren’t always flattering.
But we don’t get why this group so often gets a bad rap.
In fact, we think the crop of twenty somethings breaking into the business world right now is about as energized and exciting a group of “kids” as we’ve ever seen. And we’ve seen them a lot over the past several years, visiting dozens of campuses, launching our own MBA program and teaching in two more, consulting for companies that employ thousands of millennials, and raising four of our own.
Overwhelmingly, we’ve found millennials to be hardworking, startlingly authentic, refreshingly candid, and wonderfully upbeat. Basically, not to get all mushy or anything, we love them — and we see them transforming business for the better.
One of the best things about millennials is that, because of the world that they’ve come up in, they have very entrepreneurial mindsets. They’re excited about starting their own thing or working for smaller companies. They don’t have corporate lockstep in their brains. They seem to really care about how their work affects the world. On virtually every campus visit, millennials have asked us about corporate ethics and social responsibility. Many have shown a thoughtful concern about how to strike a meaningful balance between work and life. Some of them have challenged us about the whole notion of winning, asking: “Does success only have to be about money?” When we’ve answered no—that success is about setting personal goals and achieving them—the reaction has been invariably positive. It’s important to millennials to really feel that their work means something.
Now, by that same token, millennials today are also much more ready to pick up and leave, wherever they are, if they’re not getting the opportunities they seek or the challenges, the excitement and the inspiration behind the work. While the market is tough, they’re certainly not chained to a job, waiting for a pension, like workers of years gone by. In fact, perhaps millennials’ reputation for entitlement derives from one quality that they seem to possess in spades: impatience.
