Millennials are our future workforce. By 2025 Millennials are expected to make up 75% of the global workforce and are packed with innovative ideas on how to enhance the workplace – from flexible working to a strong company culture. According to a survey, 91% of them expressed a desire to lead. However, this generation’s perception of leadership is different from traditional leadership values.
Research from The Duke of Edinburgh Award uncovered that only 10% of young people think discipline or dominance are desirable leadership traits. Alternatively, 58% of those young people say listening or empathy are the most important leadership traits. This shows there are clear expectations held by the young workforce surrounding leadership.
As a result of this, we will start to see a shift in leadership style in the future, moving away from an egocentric and hierarchical management style. It will become a more collaborative process, employees will be active and valued contributors. Instead of the leader telling their teams what they need, it will become more of an open dialogue between management and employees.
How Team Fit will help teamwork
Teamwork will become even more important, a study by IdeaPaint uncovered that 74% of Millennials prefer to collaborate in small groups and nearly 50% of Millennials believe that leadership is the empowerment of others. Our Team Fit tool will be able to help organisations with this larger emphasis on collaboration. The feature collates, maps and compares the skills of each member within a team via a user-friendly graph. It also allows an organisation to compare how collaborative each employee is. Using this tool helps businesses visually understand how a collaborative team and leader dynamic would work, as well as how collaborative their current employees are. With Millenials wanting a more collaborative leadership approach, this tool will help a leader to identify the strengths of each individual and encourage them to apply them on a regular basis to facilitate excellent overall performance.
It will be even more important for future leaders to listen to their teams and be aware of how they are feeling. This will require high emotional intelligence from these leaders, a key leadership skill according to Harvard Business Review and another attribute Team Fit measures.
Are Businesses prepared for this leadership change?
95% of businesses agreed that a new type of leadership is required to address the changes in organisational structures due to digitalisation. In the future, AI will automate a lot of menial tasks and there will be a greater focus on people and the unique abilities and soft skills they can contribute to the organisation. It will require high performing leaders to facilitate not only adopting this technology, but also assisting their employees in adapting to this new style of working.
Although it is acknowledged a new leadership style is needed by businesses and Millennials alike, only 37% of organisations believe they have a strong digital leader in place today. How will businesses recruit leaders who have the skills to lead collaboratively and will transport the organisation into the digital age?
What can organisations do to prepare?
At Cognisess aim to help successfully recruit future leaders in a variety of industries through their graduate schemes. Our clients include the world’s largest brewer, AB InBev to hotel giant, IHG. Our platform is designed to help identify those potential leaders who can transform organisations to operate more effectively in the digital age.
To achieve this we assess all the specific attributes an applicant will need in their industry, the job role and the culture and teams they will operate in. We also benchmark the successful factors that will be needed in the future by assessing the attributes of those current loyal and high performing leaders. This data includes career values, personality traits, emotional intelligence and cognitive abilities. Analysing current high performers not only helps to understand the qualities that make for a successful leader – but it also helps to inform which applicants to recruit to future proof a high performing future workforce.
Our expert team uses this data to construct a detailed job profile based on these collective characteristics. These become the benchmark to assess graduates and other diverse recruits on Cognisess Pro. Applicants complete a series of tailored cognitive, emotional and personality based assessments. The process results in targeted applicant recommendations, increasing the chance of successful hires. Recruiting the right talented graduates provides continuity and momentum for the organisation which can be confident it is future ready, with the right people coming through in those leadership roles.
For example, we accurately assess around 600 applicants a year for IHG’s Future Leaders graduate programme, with 90% of those hired retained over the past 2 years. Our analysis of the data over recent years has helped us observe how the previously hired graduates are successfully evolving and aligning to mirror this changing dynamic between a team and their leader, with a slight increase in the presence of collaborative skills with each annual cohort. Even the hires who saw themselves as less collaborative have a 75% chance of having more collaborative traits than they think, when we compare their self reported results with their assessment results. This shows conclusively that Millennials are naturally becoming more collaborative, regardless of whether they are aware of it – or not!
Using a People Analytics platform like Cognisess Pro allows businesses not only observe the change of skills within the workforce, but identify and recruit the kind of future leaders that have the skills set to allow their organisations to be future ready. Our Team Fit tool is becoming more vital in the changing leadership landscape – and with the line between how leaders and teams interact becoming increasingly blurred, it will be critical to recruit high performing and dynamic teams to underpin a successful organisation. If you would like to try Cognisess Pro, the most advanced People Analytics and Assessment Platform on the market today – contact us for a FREE demo today.
