The 3 Questions That Will Up Your Millennial Career Coaching Game

With employee retention being a top concern for business leaders, HR, and recruiting departments alike, there is no better time to learn how to ensure employees have internal growth opportunities.

If a bright, hard-working Millennial joins your team, your instinct as a manager may be to keep the star player right where she is. You want the strongest team and best players, but great managers support an individual’s growth — even if that means they pave the way for a strong performer to join another group within the company. 

Developing talent and taking a big picture company view can put your organization much further ahead, especially when it comes to Millennials.

By 2025, Millennials will constitute 75% of the global workforce. Members of this generation (born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s) will have to increasingly fill critical leadership positions left vacant by retiring boomers. 

Your organization needs Millennials to develop the scarce and critical skills they get from a variety of job experiences, and, fortunately, this cohort also has a strong appetite for career movement. According to data gathered from an aggregated database of 1.5 Million US-based employees from over 60 companies (a subset of the overall Visier Insights database), Millennials change jobs within a company almost twice as often as non-Millennials (22 percent compared to 12 percent). 

The only aspect of retention (the ability of an organization to keep its employees from jumping ship) that “separates Millennials’ needs from those of non-Millennials” are opportunities to learn and grow, according to Gallup.

At a time when retention is a top concern of executives, making sure good people have growth opportunities is important, and managers shoulder much of this responsibility. When Google’s statisticians mined the company’s workforce data to determine what makes great bosses, they found that helping with career development was one of eight key managerial competencies. It even ranked higher than having a clear vision for the team or possessing key technical skills. 

It’s not surprising, then, that companies like Adobe have ditched the annual performance review process in favor of coaching cultures that incorporate career development as a focus.  Managers who thrive in these environments can become known as talent catalysts, and can grow their own careers as a result. So when you build your career coaching skills, not only does it positively impact your team, it can also create more opportunities for you.

Learn More: 

A Career in Learning and Development: 10 Must-Have Skills to Make It Big in 2020Opens a new window

The Millennial Career Planning Fallacy

The prevailing wisdom of modern career coaching experts is that, neither you, nor the coachee, needs to come to the table with all the answers. “Open-ended questions, not answers, are the tools of coaching,” writes executive coach and management professor Monique Valcour in this HBR post. 

Indeed, as Google found, employees value managers who help people solve problems by asking questions, not prescribing answers. In a career coaching context, open-ended questions such as “what problems excite you?” can help uncover hidden skills that can be used in a variety of roles. This is crucial information to have at a time when the next rung on the career ladder is becoming increasingly harder to define.

But this doesn’t mean the conversation should stop there. Millennials are more eager, and impatient, than previous generations to make an impact at work. According to Northeastern University professor Alicia Modestino, an expert in the youth labor market, “ambition — and the impatience to see results — is a quality of the Millennial workforce.” The biggest challenge for many Millennials is not coming up with the big goals, but understanding the level of commitment it will take to get there.  

To be good at career coaching, and coaching Millennials in particular, you need to become skilled at shepherding your team members along realistic paths. This can’t be achieved with gut feel: When it comes to estimating how much work is really involved in achieving a goal, humans tend to be overly optimistic. 

This psychological phenomenon, called the planning fallacy, was first proposed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. It explains why, when psychology students participating in a study were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish their senior theses, the average estimate was 33.9 days, but the average actual completion time was 55.5 days.

It is possible that social media, with its emphasis on showing the end result, and not the hard work involved, only exacerbates the effects of the planning fallacy. When modern career planning is solely intuition-based, the results can fall short of expectations, which leads to anxiety and frustration. 

So go ahead: ask the big questions, explore the future possibilities. However, the seeds of vision need to be planted in fertile soil, and this soil needs to be nourished with some historical data. When you know how people moved from job-to-job within your organization and how quickly they did this in the past, you have the structure you need to discuss real career options, assess timelines, and identify mentors for your teams.

At the end of the day, being more fact-based can help you become a successful manager who demonstrates that you value other people’s growth. Follow up with your human resources team and ask these three questions to get the information you need:

Question #1. “What types of transitions have other employees in similar roles made in the past?” 

The point of asking this question is to uncover some compelling paths that perhaps you and the employee haven’t thought about. Let’s say that you have an ambitious team member who is currently a graphic designer, and wants to eventually move into a senior leadership position. You probably already know that the transition likelihood into a senior graphic designer role is quite high. 

But if your HR department has access to the movement history of your workforce, they can tell you what other paths employees have taken from this role. Perhaps some graphic designers eventually move into project management or learning and development, which can then lead to even more senior positions within the company. 

By uncovering some non-obvious career paths that others have taken, you can explore avenues that may be a closer match with the individual’s passions and strengths. And if you know this role is going to be hard to fill in the future, getting the support you need from the top to build the individual’s skills will be that much easier.

Question #2. “How long is it going to take the employee to reach their goal?”

It is likely that once your Millennial team member has identified a career goal, she will want to reach it quickly. To get an accurate understanding of how long it typically takes to move into a particular position, ask what the average time is for someone to get into that role. If there are multiple steps involved, this can be calculated by adding up the average time in each step. 

The goal isn’t to go back to your coachee with an “I told you so” attitude towards their desire for accelerated results. But saying that it typically takes 36 months to transition into a particular position may actually be a stronger sign of your genuine commitment to career growth than a vague “these things take time” — and Millennials value authenticityOpens a new window . The employee can either use this information to reevaluate his goals or gain a realistic understanding of how much work is involved.

Question #3. “Who are the best mentors for this person?”

It is quite possible that your star team member has identified a role in her career path that you don’t have any experience with. You may not actually be the best person to continually mentor this individual, and according to global research firm Gartner, that’s okay.

Recent research released by the firm identified that “Always On” managers — those who commit to constant employee coaching and development — do not always perform the best. Instead, those who improve employee performance the most are “connector” managers who “guide their direct reports to people and resources beyond their own sphere and expose employees to the best opportunities to acquire experience, skills, and capabilities at the time they are needed,” states this Gartner post.Opens a new window

Once you understand the career growth goals, get the names of at least three employees who have gone through the same transition. They can act as “micro-coaches” who provide specific guidance, which can help ease your coaching time burden.

Present-Focused With an Eye to the Future

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” The jury is still out on whether this can be attributed to Mark Twain or not, but the adage is true.  Armed with information about the past, you and your team members will be able to plan with realistic goals in mind. When you put career dreams into a structured plan that employees can start chipping away at immediately, they will have the tools to turn vision into action, while gaining more enthusiasm for day-to-day tasks.