3 ways millennial leaders can maximize their advantage 

Companies worldwide are swelling with younger employees, giving rising leaders a greater voice and potential impact. While boomers are generally retiring, with diminishing influence, a handful are enforcing traditional work policies to assert power and control workers’ locations. Millennial leaders can catalyze updated workforce dynamics, bridging conventions and generations.

Millennial leaders benefit from early digital education enabling adaptability to highly digitalized business operations. You have sufficient pre-pandemic experience to appreciate historical frameworks and routines. You are open to new AI-augmented processes and evolving talent needs. You understand, connect with, as well as reject aspects of both older and younger generations’ attitudes and approaches.

By 2025, 55% of the U.S. workforce will be under 45, and 41% of the high-tech workforce will be 25 to 39 years old compared to 33% overall. While more than 11,000 U.S. boomers are reaching retirement age daily from 2024 through 2027, millennial leaders are rising to fill in their shoes, joining Gen X executives and growing cohorts of Gen Z managers. The younger age of influential leaders is accelerating the general adoption of modern work practices.

Younger leaders’ mindsets and approaches are better aligned with and accustomed to evolving marketplace conditions. You are used to adapting to changing, tech-driven business needs that require operational flexibility. Combining your work and family life often needs flexibility to permit some balance. It’s no wonder you are comfortable integrating workplace flexibility for your teams. More than 87% of 30- to 44-year-olds have a positive or neutral response to remote working options compared with 80% or lower for those over 50.

Having one foot in each era, you can build and drive momentum from the middle. Adopting and applying specific new approaches and methods is necessary to affect and accelerate progress and ensure success. Proactive interventions are necessary to adapt to multigenerational modern work dynamics with four or more generations destined to be coworking for years to come.

Three core areas require attention for millennial leaders who are intent on propelling and guiding the transformation for multiple generations in a rapidly evolving world of work:

Evolving from commander to coach

As the nature of work has evolved, so has the role of leaders. Technology continues to automate employees’ previously predominantly routine work. As Peter Drucker put it in 1969, “What’s left is creativity, decision-making, and complex problem-solving” often done in projects bringing together cross-functional teams. “Management by walking around” was a weak substitute for clear direction. It also can’t apply when your team is distributed, projects are more complex, and outcomes depend on participation from others outside your team.

Millennial leaders understand the benefits of coaching as employees must respond rapidly to customers’ new demands, innovate on the fly, and master new AI skills. Younger managers are comfortable with flatter hierarchies, continuous knowledge gathering, and ongoing course correction. You can raise team results by improving individual performance and nurturing trust and collaboration. As leaders, you recognize the importance of aligning around purpose, creating clarity around goals, and defining how your team measures success.

Practicing curiosity and empathy

Curiosity is key when cultivating healthier and more collaborative cultures at work. Curiosity activates people’s desire to understand one another. How and where do your team members work best? What support do they need? Curiosity is also engaged when solving complex problems to discover the components and drivers of new issues challenging the business and your team. Out of curiosity comes innovation and actionable solutions.

Leaders need curiosity and empathy as they encourage dialogue among coworkers, inviting contributions while ensuring people feel safe to open up and tackle difficult issues. Millennials were raised to be more comfortable showing vulnerability than prior generations. Empathy builds upon your curiosity to better understand colleagues’ perspectives and connect with their experiences as they work across locations. Empathy helps you refrain from judging or making assumptions that can derail productive intergenerational communication. Using empathy to develop trusting relationships, you can more easily recognize how, where, and when your team works best.

Agreeing on team norms

At many organizations, it can take one to two years for a new employee to understand how their team, let alone the whole company, really works. Unwritten rules determine behaviors, from how decisions are made to how to communicate to what tech or tools are expected to be used (also assuming a stable workplace). In a fast-evolving environment, influential leaders can steer their teams successfully by establishing norms with their teams to identify and articulate these important rules of engagement.

The starting point is defining and stating the vision and goals: Why does our team exist, and what are we trying to accomplish? Talking through norms of how a team works is increasingly essential in today’s GenAI-accelerated, flexible work environment. Why, not just when, do we come together? How do we set boundaries to prevent burnout? What channels do we use for what? What is the acceptable use of GenAI tools, and what is off-limits? Being consistent with rules and protocols reduces misunderstandings, boosts trust, and accelerates the adoption of new ways of working.

As some boomer leaders rescind control; reinstate analog-era, non-inclusive policies; and fall back on outdated command-and-control forms of leadership, the time is now for millennial leaders to step up. You can maximize your advantages. You can bridge generations to foster deeper understanding, connection, and trust. Momentum is with you to chart and drive new—and better—ways forward. Rally your distributed teams, seize the opportunity, and go for it.