I recently had a conversation with a friend who was struggling with managing a millennial. She asked me for thoughts on how to best manage her younger staff. As we talked, I realized that millennials take a bad rap for being needy for things that we as leaders and managers should be doing anyway.

I had an epiphany when my friend asked, “What have you seen or heard is the best way to motivate millennials?” Here’s what I told her.

The power of EOS^® is that it gives your company a single way of doing business that's simple and proven. Over 40,000 organizations around the world are running on EOS and getting their business under control. By addressing the Six Key Components™ of your business and providing a model for solving your company's issues for good, EOS helps you grow to achieve your vision and goals more effectively.

But some leadership teams that are running on EOS aren't gaining the traction they'd expected to see when they started using the system. As a leadership team, they're getting more done, solving more issues, and working together better than ever. But the business as a whole isn't improving, and the operations side of the company is still out of control. What's going on?

I have a client with two brothers on the leadership team, who disagreed about how to handle employee-challenge situations. The company has three locations with multiple shifts. Frustrations among midlevel managers were brewing when one of the leaders came across as harsh and cold over something that others considered to be a small issue. The trouble was that the leader didn't have an awareness of how his actions affected the midlevel managers. They were frustrated, hurt, and demotivated by this repetitive behavior.

Disengaged employees cost companies as much as $550 billion every year in lost productivity. As a result, frustrated companies are looking for better ways to increase employee accountability. But increased accountability on its own creates a culture of micromanagement that leads to unhappy workers. This, in turn, has a negative impact on employee productivity.

When I was a leader in one of my own businesses early in my career, I had the misfortune to discover that my employees had nicknamed me “Hurricane.” It was NOT a compliment! 

Part of what earned me that nickname was the rage I felt when I had to repeat myself several times with my employees. I thought telling people something once should be enough! I hired really smart people, so when they didn’t seem to remember things I’d told them, I thought they just weren’t paying enough attention to what I said, and that made me furious.