Want to Feel Old in a Hurry? Try Managing Millennials

There comes a time in every manager's life when you realize that you are no longer one of the younger generation. No matter how hip you are, this can cause some headaches. You might have been something of a wunderkind back in the day, but now you have people on your team who were born in the 90s. I have concert T shirts older than that. How do you manage the so-called "Millennials"?

I turned for answers to someone much smarter, richer and considerably younger, than I. Aaron Levie is the founder and CEO of Box.net, a collaboration and file sharing tool you may have seen on many people's LinkedIn pages, including my own. He's also only 25 years old.

Aaron, we hear all the time that managing the Millennial generation is different,but then we've heard that about every generation since Cain and Abel (who had some real issues to work out). What are we missing?
There's certainly a lot of conversation and controversy about this new generation of workers, "the millennials." Like any new generation entering the workforce, we bring different attitudes and styles to the way we expect to get things done, communicate, and share. This is a generation that literally grew up with real-time communication from IM and email, access to the world's knowledge instantly via the web, and connections to hundreds or thousands of people through social networking. Suffice it to say, many of us have ADD and high expectations. When it comes to our jobs, we want to be able to move incredibly quickly; we have little patience for bureaucracy; we (naturally) want our ideas heard and evaluated fairly; and, while we're at it, we want to change the world.

That's quite a lot to ask any manager or business owner to keep up with, but a lot of it is ultimately fairly sound and logical. Why not empower everyone in your company equally? Why not make decisions more quickly, with a little room for error? (Author's note: maybe because you don't know what you're doing yet. Does that make me sound like a cranky old man?) Why not connect all of your employees through technology? And sure, why not change the world with your business? I think the millennial generation will bring out these same qualities and aspirations in other generations, resulting in a pretty major impact on the way we work. (Okay, good point.)

As a millennial yourself, do you have any challenges or good war stories about managing people older than yourself?
In the early days of Box, this was more of a challenge than it is today. As the first four employees of Box were all on leave from college, ( I can't even tell you what I was doing on leave from college,but it sure wasn't founding a company!) invariably anyone we hired would be older and more experienced than ourselves.

We have a pretty interesting culture at Box. Because we're growing rapidly, there are always more problems to solve than there is time in the day â€" so we're extremely oriented toward speed, action, collaboration, and openness. This is reflective of our culture and overall management styles; we've mitigated a lot of traditional "management" problems and challenges by collectively making decisions more often based on data, friendly debate and gut instinct rather than previous experience from our resumes. This means everyone comes to the table with an equal opportunity to make something happen, with the management structure intended to keep the organization aligned and focused on the strategy â€" not about blocking ideas, trumping one another, or creating politics.

At this point, it sounds like there might be as many assumptions about "old school" managers as there are about punk kid workers. Just because you're young and not technophobic doesn't mean people use the technology tools you want them to use. Give me 3-4 tips for getting people onboard with tech.

• Empower employees to try out and adopt new technologies for themselves

• Foster a culture of sharing, collaboration, and communication through technology; don't use technology as a crutch to disable openness
• Rigid processes will nearly always lose to organic workflows, so find ways to promote this more often than not
• When possible, let people work from anywhere!

Read more

• Cross Generation Mentoring: Getting Codgers and Kids to Work Together
• Telecommuting: Why Men and Women Work Differently