Managing the Millennials: Discover the Core Competencies for Managing Today's Workforce »

Chip Espinoza is Chief Executive Officer of GeNext Consulting, a subsidiary of LeadershipTraQ. He teaches Leadership in the Hobbs Leadership Program at California State University, Long Beach. He consults to a range of clients from the Boeing Company to the Special Olympics. He frequently keynotes at corporate events, conferences, and organizations across the country on his research about Millennials and their value to organizations. Chip's doctoral dissertation is on the subject of managing Millennials.

Mick Ukleja, PhD, is the founder and President of LeadershipTraQ, a leadership consulting firm. He cofounded the Ukleja Center for Ethical Leadership at California State University, Long Beach, which promotes ethics across the curriculum. He is the coauthor of Who Are You? What Do You Want?: Four Questions That Will Change Your Life and The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World. He has worked with entrepreneurs and corporate executives of both profit and non-profit organizations. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for The Astronauts Memorial Foundation at the Kennedy Space Center, which oversees the Center for Space Education.

Craig D. Rusch, PhD, is Pro-fessor of Anthropology at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, California. Craig holds a PhD in social networks from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Rusch has been published in leading academic journals within his field including the American Anthropologist and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. He specializes in cognitive science and organizational culture and psychology.

Tap into the potential of theMillennial Generation.

With professionals enjoying longer careers than ever before, offices encompass multiple generations of employees. However, the rise of "the Millennials," also known as "Generation Y," has brought a new set of challenges to managers. Millennials work differently, think differently, and have a different set of priorities. This can leave non-Millennial managers, at best, confused about how to manage and motivate their teams.

That's just the short-term challenge for businesses. The long-term challenge is to find a way to win and retain top talent from this generation of workers, who are more willing than any generation before them to leave a position if they find something more interesting or more lucrative. With 50 percent of business executives set to retire in the next five years, and thousands of others poised to do the same soon after, it's essential to build up a staff of dedicated, invested Millennials in the workforce of any company that's serious about its survival.

Managing the Millennials delves into the differences between the generations at work today in businesses around the country, and digs deep to explore what makes the Millennial generation so different from the ones that came before. It identifies nine crucial points of tension that result from clashing value systems among these generations, and then provides nine approaches to resolve clashes, build communication, nurture collaborative teams, and create long-lasting relationships across generations of colleagues.

With examples from managers and executives in every area of business, fascinating analysis of performance and behavioral patterns across generations, as well as tested techniques you can put into effect at your organization, Managing the Millennials gives you the knowledge and tactics you need to push your workforce to new levels of productivity.

Foreword Cameron Johnson Johnson, Cameron

Introduction Close Encounters with a Different Kind

Pt. I The Millennials Have Arrived! 1

Ch. 1 The Millennials and You 3

Ch. 2 Aren't We All Just the Same? 13

Ch. 3 The Effective Managers versus the Challenged Managers 23

Ch. 4 The Points of Tension between Managers and Millennials 31

Pt. II Discover the Core Competencies Needed for Managing Today's Workforce 47

Ch. 5 When Letting Them Have It Their Way Makes Sense 49

Flexing with the Autonomous

Ch. 6 Rewarding the Right Things in the Right Ways 61

Incenting the Entitled

Ch. 7 They Are at the Head of the Creative Class 71

Cultivating the Imaginative

Ch. 8 First Them, Then You 81

Engaging the Self-Absorbed

Ch. 9 Fragile, Handle with Care 93

Disarming the Defensive

Ch. 10 It Is Not Always about You 107

Self-Differentiating from the Abrasive

Ch. 11 The Big Picture Does Not Exist until You Help Them See It 119

Broadening the Myopic

Ch. 12 Ambiguity Is Their Kryptonite 131

Directing the Unfocused

Ch. 13 They Want to Know "Why" before "What" 141

Motivating the Indifferent

Pt. III Your Competitive Advantage 153

Ch. 14 Building a Millennial-Friendly Culture 155

Notes 163

Index 167