Power And Millennials

What happens when a generation that does not have ‘power’ as a drive gets managed and led by those who are driven by power?

- Gurucharan Singh Gandhi

Recently, I wrote about the hype around millennials – and called it over sensationalization of what essentially was an inter generational shift. My intent was to restore a sense of normalcy into a phenomenon which was to my mind becoming a cacophony of semantics rather than a realistic study of the changes underway into the minds of the new generation just like any other inter generational shift.

As I think more on the subject and try to fathom the differences in what the millennials think and want, there are many that spring to mind. The most obvious one would be their comfort with the digital world, both as a tool to work upon as well as a vehicle to relate to fellow human beings and as a dominant vehicle to socialize. The extent of the world that they have created on their screens is enormous in scale and quite shocking to the previous generations for whom ‘the real world still involved people. A resulting inability to have meaningful conversations, negotiate, confront, and engage with people different from them while ‘looking into the eyes’ is difficult to miss. What it means to the world of supervisory behavior and leadership of the ‘men and women’ is anybody’s guess. I am not sure that the supervisory effectiveness development processes beginning at the early stages of careers in organizations have fully comprehended, leave aside addressed, this reality. I think most such development journeys still ‘assume’ a certain degree of ‘human interaction ability’ which might have been truer for earlier generation, but is increasingly under question.