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The Investment Imperative

As it turns out, Millennials without financial privilege stay at their jobs. Nine out of ten, we find, have no plans to leave within the next year. Interviews with some forty-five of these Millennials reveal them to be committed to their current employers and utterly willing to go the extra mile, investing prodigious amounts of time and energy in their work in the hopes that their employers will invest in them in return.

But because talent specialists, as we documented in Chapter One, tend to see all Millennials as a flight risk, they aren’t investing in any of them. We find that only 23 percent of Millennials without financial privilege have both rewarding relationships and intellectual growth in their careers—two key factors in determining employees’ abilities to succeed as contributors or leaders within their organizations.

That does not bode well for the success of those organizations.

Consider the effects, for example, of withholding international assignments from Millennials. Since exposure to other countries, cultures, and consumers helps give young professionals the knowledge they need to grow those markets and crack open new ones, denying them such exposure or field experience jeopardizes both corporate revenues and future expansion prospects. “Today’s globalized and technology-driven economy presents serious challenges,” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon points out in a recent Politico op-ed. “But it also offers opportunities and rewards skills,” he continues, as long as companies make a point of “investing in people [and] training them in the skills employers in their communities are looking for.”29 Stinting on management training likewise imposes a toll, specifically on team productivity and efficiency. Near-term, Millennials will replace Gen Xers as managers, from direct-line supervisors to department heads. If they are ill-prepared for these roles, then upon assuming them they will be consumed by playing catch-up, detracting from their ability to execute on their responsibilities, unlock innovative potential, and deploy talent effectively—to say nothing of the blunders and roadblocks they might encounter along the way.

If leadership development, typically reserved for high-potential talent, is also withheld from Millennials, then the imminent exodus of Boomers (upwards of 50 percent of whom will have exited the workforce by 2020) threatens to pull decades of institutional knowledge and market expertise out the door with them.30 Typically, talent specialists foment opportunities for cross-generational interaction by inviting high-potential Millennials to shadow directors, assigning them to work on business-critical projects, and matching them with or exposing them to potential sponsors. Such leadership development initiatives all help to ensure that Millennials acquire not only vital skill sets, but also networks of other up-and-coming leaders, and relationships with executives who will advocate for them. Yet with interaction between these cohorts limited to the occasional reverse mentoring initiative, explicit knowledge transfer—from seasoned executives to future change agents—isn’t likely to take place.

As new Millennial hires enter the workforce, well-developed critical-thinking skills are a necessity. Yet, accustomed to crowd-sourced feedback, some Millennials have yet to fully develop these rigorous problem-solving skills—an observation made by Lisa Westlake, CHRO at Moody’s and one of several talent specialists to point out this issue. “Millennials seem to solicit a lot of different opinions before moving forward,” agrees Novo Nordisk’s Barbara Keen. “In some ways, that’s one of their greatest strengths. But, the concern is that this could become an overreliance on consensus. As a leader, yes, you do need to be able to make sure that the decisions you make are based on robust data from multiple sources and channels. You also have to be able to synthesize all of that information in context of organizational dynamics, previous investments, and the perspectives of key stakeholders.”

Keen acknowledges that critical problem-solving and decision-making skills are a challenge for both new and seasoned leaders. Millennials have an advantage, given their seeming comfort with the vast amount of information at their fingertips, but we have to make it a priority to support their development in these areas. If we don’t, she worries about the consequences for the leadership pipeline. “We have to make time for their development. If we don’t intentionally help them learn and grow as we have in the past, we are being shortsighted.”

Losing Out on Diverse Leaders

Failure to invest in Millennials’ career development imperils more than just the leadership pipeline. More critically, because the investment deficit is particularly pronounced for Millennials of color, it undermines the long-term strategic goal of making leadership representative of the workforce and marketplace it serves.

Take Miguel,* for example. During his junior year of college, Miguel was recruited by a major consultancy in the Northeast to be part of its highly competitive internship program. Of Mexican heritage, Miguel was courted by several consultancies, each intent on diversifying not only their slates of high-potential new hires but also their future leadership pipelines. Upon graduation, Miguel accepted the northeastern firm’s offer of full-time employment over other offers. He was impressed by the financial investment it had made in recruiting candidates of color, because it seemed to signal commitment to diversifying the top of the house. “My starting cohort was extremely diverse,” he says. “I took it as a positive sign that I could have a real career here.”

To Miguel’s dismay, however, the firm’s commitment to diversity began and ended with its recruitment effort. He and his cohort of minority recruits did spend a day at a “strategy college” that introduced them to various types of projects and the skills they would need to become good strategic managers. But over the course of the first year, he says, “our managers simply did not extend a hand to show us the ropes. They seemed to forget that they were once in our same shoes. I’m not saying we needed our hands held, but if a manager would have just shown us how to conduct a client interview, or run a program, that would have been very valuable.”

He adds, “If senior leaders were really invested in the future of this company as a diverse organization, you’d think they’d want to do their best to invest in Millennials of color.”

We find that a mere 6 percent of black, 9 percent of Hispanic, and 13 percent of Asian Millennials without financial privilege feel they’re experiencing rewarding relationships and intellectual growth and challenge at work, as compared to 25 percent of whites. These figures suggest that the diversification of leadership—a project nearly two decades in the making—is an outcome we will not realize anytime soon, despite the fact that as a generation, Millennials are the most diverse to date.31 The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) research shows that employees of color are already less likely than their white counterparts to obtain sponsorship, the backing of senior leaders so critical to advancement into the highest echelons of management.32 An absence of crucial skill development and managerial training can only serve to compound minority talent’s invisibility to leaders looking to choose their successors. Given that, as mentioned in Chapter One, close to half of Millennials in the US identify with an ethnic or racial group other than non-Hispanic white, denying this cohort access to growth opportunities and sponsorship is tantamount to ensuring that leadership remains largely white.33

Bottom-Line Implications

Failing to capitalize on the inherent diversity of the Millennial generation isn’t just a failure for diversity-and-inclusion crusaders. Homogeneous leadership is something companies can ill afford—as a raft of CTI research shows—for two strategic reasons.

First, global growth depends on attracting top talent. And, increasingly, top talent will come from “non-majority” backgrounds. A glance at who has earned tertiary degrees country by country reveals a startling development: 90 percent of the world’s white-collar talent pool today is female and/or multicultural.34 As Miguel explains, this diverse talent tends to favor working for companies that demonstrate not only a commitment to workforce diversity, but also show that talent like themselves can rise to the top. A dearth of diverse role models dooms a global firm to the dregs of the talent pool.

The second reason has to do with innovative potential: our research shows that the firms that are best poised to unlock innovation—and profit from it—are those whose senior leadership is characterized by two-dimensional diversity—that is, leadership that has both inherent diversity (such as age, gender, race, or sexual orientation) and acquired diversity (such as cross-cultural fluency, generational savvy, tech literacy, language skills, or military experience). When leaders both embody difference and embrace it in others, it has a trickle-down effect on corporate culture: at companies where executives have both inherent and acquired diversity, team leaders are 74 percent more likely than leaders at companies lacking this diversity to unlock the innovative potential of team members by fostering a speak-up culture. This boost in innovation has a measureable impact, as such companies are significantly more likely to grow their shares in existing markets and crack open new ones.35

To avert the looming crisis in corporate leadership, companies need to see Millennials for the committed cohort they are, and invest in their skill development, innovative potential, and knowledge of other cultures. They also need to foment the relationships critical to their engagement and advancement. In the next two chapters, we’ll unpack just what this investment looks like.