By 2030, millennials will make up 75% of the American workforce. If you, as a company leader, want your company’s legacy to continue, helping us become effective can only work in your favor. And, the most effective way to do this is to turn every single one of your millennial employees into a Visible Leader ™.
Millennials often hear derogatory remarks about how entitled we are, and that we don’t know the value of hard work. It’s true, we are not content with a 9 to 5 job in a less than ideal environment as long as it pays the bills. Our mental wellbeing is important to us. We also grew up in the age of technology and Internet; we thrive in it.
We have redefined diversity categories because the inclusion of our identities and sense of Self is important to our purposes and causes. The majority of us won’t identify as “White,” something that has never happened in the American workforce until now. We weigh our ability to work within and toward our purpose while thriving and maintaining our mental wellbeing when evaluating our professional environments. Since most training modules and business models depend on an old setups that don’t take into account this generational evolution, it is no wonder 67% of us are looking for a new job, and 91% stay with our companies for less than three years.
Seventy-nine percent of employees quit due to a lack of appreciation. Sixty-three percent of millennials say our leadership skills are not being developed, and gender equity is still low. To change these statistics, and keep your company in business, you must address factors such as:
- a massive leadership skills and personnel gap
- lack of succession and knowledge transfer
- workplaces that don’t accommodate or include all employees
- low employee engagement
- high attrition
- lack of loyalty
- rehiring and retraining
- the costs associated with surviving these trends
How do you do that? By turning every individual contributor into a Visible Leader ™.
According to Kevin Sheridan, and the Association for Talent Development, developing leaders increases operational efficiency by 42%. More leaders also means 90% lower absences, 77% less turnover, 48% better work and product quality, and 36% higher productivity, among other gains. Yet, while more money is spent on leadership development than other area of learning and talent development in an organization, about 71% of organizations don’t feel that their leaders are able to lead their organization into the future.
A large part of this is because most current leadership development programs aren’t implemented across all levels. While 83% of businesses say leadership development should happen across all levels of their organization, only 5% of businesses are implementing it. The majority of leadership development programs in organizations right now are being implemented in silos. They are limited to on-the-job leadership trainings that treat the employee’s work life as being separate from the rest of their lives. In doing so, they do a disservice to the interconnected reality of all of our lives. These trainings are also primarily informational in nature, even while being marketed as “applied knowledge” programs. They rarely have mechanisms for the trainees and participants to reflect on or internalize the information they are given after the completion of the program. This makes the knowledge gained in such trainings temporary and disconnected to the every day lives of the leaders. In addition, such trainings don’t happen regularly and consistently. Instead, they are treated as annual or bi-annual “checkbox requirements” that do little more than exacerbating the existing workload of the employees, and employees are expected to practice the leadership principles that they learn, on their own.
This is what makes the Visible Leader ™ training program unique in many ways:
- it treats an individual’s leadership development as a process that is inherently tied into all the interconnected parts of their life
- it is intentionally designed to be informational, reflective, and transformational for all participants
- it is an 8-week transformational experience that allows for leadership behaviors to turn into habits
- it can be implemented at a fraction of a cost of other training programs on the market
- it creates an immediate community of peers that can continue to learn and grow from each other using the language and communications skills they gain from the training
- it underpins inclusion as a mindset that can be modeled in every leadership behavior and action
- it allows for individuals to take back control over their mental wellbeing and have complete agency over their growth and development
The Visible Leader ™ training program aligns participants’ wellbeing with their identities, values, purposes, passions, etc. so that their communities can feel the maximum impact of their good deeds. The Visible Leader ™ model addresses the differences between workforces of previous generations, and, the current and future generations. It is rooted in organizational behavior, social psychology, business management, positive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and other sciences.
It was conceived and made by a millennial who saw the gaps previous models failed to address. This program fills those spaces while avoiding total structural failure.
“The Best Workplaces for Millennials” report on Managing Millennials shows that when companies create a culture of trust, millennials are 22 times more likely to stay. Organizations with sincere interests in their millennial employees, reported an eight-fold increase in agility, and a seven-fold increase in innovation.
When companies care for their millennials by sponsoring them in The Visible Leader ™ training program, they will gain greater trust, engagement, work quality, loyalty, and retention. Thus, cutting costs of rehiring and retraining, and increasing revenues and profit margins.
Click here to schedule a call to discuss your organization’s needs and find out how the Visible Leader™ training program can help your employees and your organization thrive.