A Conversation With...

Danita Bye
Beyond stereotypes: How to manage & motivate millennials
Danita Bye is founder of Sales Growth
Specialists, a leadership consulting and
sales development firm, and author of
the new book, Millennials Matter.
The HR Specialist: What’s the hardest
part of managing millennials?
Bye: When I ask older managers
about millennials, they say millennials
are lazy, narcissistic know-it-alls who
don’t show up on time. It’s a litany
of stereotypes.
How do you respond?
I’ll tell these managers that 80 per-
cent of the millennials that I know
personally do not fit that mold.
They’re amazing. They have high
character, high ethics. They know
they have Internet confidence
but they also know they need to
develop a broader confidence from
experience.
What about the other 20%?
As a leader, you need to step up and
figure out how to help that 20%.
How? Any suggestions?
Give them regular feedback and
encouragement. Identify their tal-
ents and strengths and the things
they’re passionate about. Then try
to align the job to fit their passion.
Millennials are looking for a manager
who’s more of a coach and a collabo-
rator who will support their career
path.
Millennials are
looking for a
manager who’s
more of a coach
and a collaborator
who will support
their career path.
But what happens if you have nega-
tive feedback or need to criticize
their performance?
Millennials won’t put up with a
highly critical manager. But they do
want on-the-spot feedback rather
than waiting for annual or quarterly
performance reviews. So give them
regular feedback. If you’re being
critical, then don’t talk about it in
terms of failure. It’s better to say,
“Let’s extract some lessons learned
from your behavior at last Friday’s
meeting” than “Your behavior needs
to improve.”
What’s the best way to motivate
millennials?
We’re finding that millennials are
intrinsically motivated rather than
extrinsically motivated. They’re more
driven by the push to attain personal
growth than the plaque on the wall
or the new car. They are also altruis-
tically motivated. They want to make
the world better.
So managers can motivate millen-
nials by focusing on their leadership
skills—by identifying those skills they
want to improve and then helping
them develop those skills.
Some managers think millennials
lack loyalty and will quit as soon as
something better comes along. Is that
true?
There is a belief that they will only
be with you a short time and then
take all the training you’ve provided.
The solution is to engage them so
that they want to stay with you for
more than 12 or 24 months. You
need to understand their career aspi-
rations, to ask them, “What do you
want to give back to the world?” Then
connect their answer to what your
organization needs.
That sounds tough.
In 1995, I was national sales man-
ager at a medical device company.
A young job candidate told me he
wanted to learn what he could from
us about sales and move on in two
years. I thanked him for his candor
and declared, “I’ll do everything I
can so that you stay here for 10 years.”
I created a career path for him with
milestones along the way. I kept giv-
ing him growth opportunities. He
wound up staying with us for 10
years!

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