Millennials have no issue. Managers have! Leaders are needed.

Roberto Barbosa
7 min readJan 6, 2019

Recently I saw a job advert from Monzo for an Engineering Manager, and that sparked in me a topic that I’ve been handling and puzzling on my own for some time now.

I have more than 20 years on the IT industry, so I am not a millennial. I did classical education in Physics, where I completed an Engineer degree. I consider myself a Systemic Thinker that loves to deconstruct Complex Systems, bring IT or any other complex system to me. But, I have discretely hide my degree on my resume till very recently when Physics became sexy again with the revolution of Data Science, to the point to be considered The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. Feels good to become sexy again.

from @http://channelingerik.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/bruce-lee-quotes1-600x352.jpg

Some years ago, when I moved away from the solid, well paid but outdated Finance Industry, I experienced several hard moments, not just for me but for the World, such catastrophic market conditions that drove me to rebuild datacenters in Europe after 9/11, failover systems due to bombing in Liverpool Street subway in London where I maintained high available IT infrastructure for a large Bank (which successfully failed over in 3 minutes to another city), and some other world crisis from 2000 till 2013.

After that, and trying not to become obsolete, I moved to the world of startups taking my high availability, large-scale and mission-critical experience to this new world. I started to lead some young developers team, learned all about their dreams, their fancy desktop setups and headphones, fancy Zen tools to focus like Spotify, Test Driven operating culture and all other perks that they loved, like receiving iPhones at Company's Christmas party and stay another year to get an iPad (if the startup did not go down or fired him). I also found that they were mostly very, very fragile when the things got a bit rough. They had no mental resilience under high pressure, they had no leaders to create a support system, and they cracked and left with severe psychological wounds. To be honest, in the Finance sector, that was my bread and butter, especially if you’re dealing with trading systems. If you failed, “Upper Manager wanted to see blood on the floor”, and I saw some colleagues, actually friends of mine, to have their badge taken and escorted to the door.

So, what kind of resilience is required from the talent force nowadays?

I myself feel always like a teenager, with a fresh curious mind (with Shoshin — a word from Zen Buddhism meaning “beginner’s mind."). I resonate with Millenials, show me the latest cool wa-fu-tech in the market. I’m always looking into the latest trends not only to solve annoying past solutions but a discover simpler and more elegant approaches to the same evergoing issues on IT. Oh, good, thanks for the cloud I don’t ever need to deal with Bare Metal (shit, spoke too soon, I am recently back to it). With the mix of my experience and new technologies exposure, I actually became a very good Architect that can help bridge the two worlds.

I try to reinvent myself every day, at every challenge. I do Infrastructure as Code, I try to develop in Golang as much as possible (I hate to need to have a specific version runtime environments to run java, perl or python), I adopted early on Terraform almost 3 years ago, I use git workflow, but I stick always with my old pals of vim and shell command line kung-fu.

Millennials, in my humble opinion, today have a much higher probability to be happier than I actually had in the past, because there has never been so much mooore opportunities as now to follow dreams, from working locally to global markets. Today I would be dedicating my life to my passion of calligraphy, ending up working with fonts, typography or even UX Design.

DISCLAIMER: I have raised two amazing talented daughters, that I encouraged to follow creative professions, and both of them now are having now higher educations in Arts in London and Amsterdam. So, I have some in-house experience dealing with Millenials.

When Millenials are hired, I definitely see more issues on the management side than on the millennial side, to be honest. Why do I say that? Because as any new generation, this is a generation that is equally eager to succeed and much more resourceful and creative than any generation before.

The problem is not on the Millenials, why not blame the education system that needs to be fixed. Because the outdated education system failed them, industry now needs to complete the job.

Onboarding and career development is still the responsibility of a good employer and in particular the ones eager to build a powerful workforce.

See this amazing and inspiring Handbook for New Employees from Valve Software on this link.

Time for some ancient knowledge…

Ikigai

Like any person, I mean any, not only Millenials the goals for life are very similar: achieve happiness (on its personal definition).

So how to achieve it? Let’s have a look at how an ancient Japanese practice sees the fulfillment of life, la raison d’être (“reason for being”). For more details on this see this excellent post from Hamza Khan, Ikigai: The Perfect Career Diagnostic, An Iterative Approach To Discovering Your True Purpose.

If you look at the diagram and the 4 main dimensions:

  • What do you love?
  • What you’re good at?
  • What can you be paid for?
  • What does the world need?

if one of this dimension fails, issues will arise sooner or later, employee engagement will decay without no doubt, it will be only a matter of speed.

Back where the education failed the millennial and its failed education…

The Learner Profile

Standard education systems are failing today’s generation, but one Education System in particular already approached this matter in a very well structured and smarter way in my opinion. I had the privileged to learn about it through my wife’s sister, she teaches the International Baccalaureate® (IB) programme. She told me many years ago about her passionate new job and the IB methodology, and two things stroke me in particular:

  • The IB Learner Profile — with 10 profiles that are cultivated at every year of schooling.
  • The Teachers Methodology — “All teachers transform theory into practice, but IB teachers go beyond. Grounded in a global mindset, IB teachers are catalysts for infusing higher-order thinking skills into a new generation of learners.” —( it seems adequate for millennials, no?)

The IB Learners should strive to be:

  • Inquirers — “We nurture our curiosity, developing skills for inquiry and research. We know how to learn independently and with others. We learn with enthusiasm and sustain our love of learning throughout life.”
  • Knowledgeable —”We develop and use conceptual understanding, exploring knowledge across a range of disciplines. We engage with issues and ideas that have local and global significance.”
  • Thinkers — “We use critical and creative thinking skills to analyze and take responsible action on complex problems. We exercise initiative in making reasoned, ethical decisions.”
  • Communicators — “We express ourselves confidently and creatively in more than one language and in many ways. We collaborate effectively, listening carefully to the perspectives of other individuals and groups.”
  • Principled — “We act with integrity and honesty, with a strong sense of fairness and justice, and with respect for the dignity and rights of people everywhere. We take responsibility for our actions and their consequences.”
  • Open Minded — “We critically appreciate our own cultures and personal histories, as well as the values and traditions of others. We seek and evaluate a range of points of view, and we are willing to grow from the experience.”
  • Caring — “We show empathy, compassion, and respect. We have a commitment to service, and we act to make a positive difference in the lives of others and in the world around us.”
  • Risk Takers — “We approach uncertainty with forethought and determination; we work independently and cooperatively to explore new ideas and innovative strategies. We are resourceful and resilient in the face of challenges and change.”
  • Balanced — “We understand the importance of balancing different aspects of our lives — intellectual, physical, and emotional — to achieve well-being for ourselves and others. We recognize our interdependence with other people and with the world in which we live.”
  • Reflective — “We thoughtfully consider the world and our own ideas and experience. We work to understand our strengths and weaknesses in order to support our learning and personal development.”

Now, regarding the company finish the job of education…

Summary

The role of the Teacher has been passed to the Managers. Sorry, that will NEVER happen. Let me put this another way…

The roles of the Teacher has been passed to Leaders inside of the companies.

So, if Millenials are failing the market, arent’ Leaders, more experienced adults, not failing even more responsibly?

As the father of management Peter Drucker wrote in 1966 on “The Effective Executive”:

The Knowledgeable worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped.

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Roberto Barbosa

Physics Engineer by Education, Architecture and Data Engineer by trade, entrepreneur at heart.