Seven Keys to Coaching Today's Millennial Generation Athlete--Jeff Janssen

You might be familiar with Beloit College's annual Mindset List linked below. The list shows how this year's incoming class of freshmen, most of them born in 1990, have a vastly different world experience than that of their 30, 40, 50, and 60 year old coaches.
http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2012.php

This article is designed to help you better understand what motivates today's Millennial generation of athletes (those born from roughly 1982 to the present), how they are different, and what you can do as a Gen Xer (born 1961 to 1981) or Boomer (born 1943-1960) coach to continually adapt and stay connected and relevant to your team.

Heres how this group differs from past groups:

1. Special 
-They have been taught they are special and vital to the success of the family, team, and community.
-They have recieved far more focus and attention from adults so they feel entitled.


2. Sheltered
-Most Millennials have been protected and sheltered from birth.
-They have always had laws and gadgets to protect them.
-This has prevented them from experiencing, learning from, adapting to, and overcoming the important and inevitable hard knocks of life.
-Because of this sheltering, many are crushed when they receive less than an "A" for a grade, get cut from teams, and receive negative feedback.

3. Confident
- Millennials tend to be a more confident generation when it comes to their ability to achieve the American dream.
-they sometimes forget that success is not going to come instantly but must be worked at consistently and is anything but a linear journey.

4. Team-oriented
-Millennials are the most interconnected generation yet.
-Between emailing, texting, and staying connected through Facebook, peer networks are a huge part of their daily experience.
-They have strong team instincts and like to stay connected with their social group on a regular basis.

5. Conventional
- Millennials tend to embrace the more traditional values of their parents.
-They are much less likely to use alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana than the generations before them.
-"Millennials describe closer ties with their parents than in teens in the history of postwar polling." Many are in continual contact with their parents and share tastes in clothes, music, and other entertainment.


6. Pressured
- Millennials are feeling much more pressure to succeed than generations before them. They believe the stakes are high and the price of mistakes and missteps are more consequential than in the past.
-Many are overscheduled and overwhelmed (Private lessons, camps, tutors)

7. Achieving
-With higher standards, Millennials are highly focused on achievement
-They "are on track to becoming the smartest, best-educated adults in U.S. history"

- Millennials are much more influenced by their parents. And many Millennials have extremely short-attention spans if you not physically or mentally engaging them in some type of activity.

ADVICE FOR COACHING MILLENNIALS

1. Help your Millennials understand that adversity is inevitable, temporary, and helpful in the long-term.
2. Help your Millennials understand that getting better is a long-term process.
3. Understand that there are dozens of things that compete for your Millennials' attention and time.
4. Don't lecture - Edu-tain.
5. Provide opportunities for young Millenials to engage in free athletic play.
6. Develop your parents into allies, not adversaries.
7. Help kids fight their own battles.
8. Remember that people are people.

Strategies For Leading Generation Y

Here is an article I found on Ken Blanchards twitter.  The article itself was written by Sarah Caverhill & Marta Brooks.  Here is a link to the full article:
http://www.diversity-executive.com/article.php?in=916

Before I get into the article itself here are some facts and characteristics of Generation Y.
-Although their are no official dates mostly this is a group that have birth date ranging from the mid 1970's to the year 2000
-That they have an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies.   Especially with instant communication (IMS, TEXTS, ETC)
-Also called Trophy Kids,Which is a term that reflects the trend in competitive sports, as well as many other aspects of life, where "no one loses" and everyone gets a "Thanks for Participating" trophy and symbolizing a perceived sense of entitlement
-Multitasking and not focusing (IE Driving, while talking on the cell phone, and drinking a soda)
-Personalities are mostly strong-willed, passionate, and optimistic
-The average Gen Y changes jobs an average of 29 times and the average time in one job is 1.1 years.

Now here are the 3 strategies for Leading Gen Y.
1. Align Gen Y employees’ goals with company goals.

• Many older workers assume Gen Y has a weak work ethic, but this generilzation is not always true
• Gen Y understands technoly and they know that technology is running all the time(so they can work on it, whenever it fits.)
• Gen Y does not work the way their managers work, they have different ways of doing things.
•  Most Gen Y professionals want to give their jobs their best efforts. But they have to see how their work fits with their own goals.

As a leader you should be aligning goals that helps them fit work to their personal development. Managers must paint vivid pictures of how the desired results will help them. If the boss does that, Gen Y will work relentlessly to achieve set goals.

2. Tap into Gen Y’s gifts.

• Gen Y hates it when their managers under appreciate their gifts. 
• Without appreciation and praise, they become unchallenged and bored, and their productivity will suffer accordingly. 
•  they call in sick, come in late or find unauthorized ways to entertain themselves on the job.

To cure this problem, managers need to talk with them to uncover their strengths, capabilities and ideas. These conversations can ignite interest, inspire passion and help the manager figure out how to tap into their gifts. Further, using their ideas compliments the Gen Y professional. They feel appreciated, and everyone wins.


3. Enhance leadership practices. 

• Gen Y employees will not put up with poor leadership. Instead, they will stand up to it. 
• This means they can expose costly leadership practices and they will demand correction. 
• Frustrations with poor leadership may end up on the Internet. These new grapevines can cause serious problems for companies, making it risky business to allow poor leadership — such as micromanaging, withholding praise, yelling and sabotaging employee efforts — to go unchecked.

Companies must uncover poor management practices, then fix them and create an environment that supports better practices. This does not mean conducting some sort of managerial witch hunt. Most managers try hard to manage well. When they fail, they often don’t know what they did wrong. Leadership development can help correct the problem. Also, managers are understandably reluctant to let newer people perform critical tasks unsupervised. And Gen Y employees may be too green to accurately self-assess their skill sets. Good managers help Gen Yers get the direction they need without micromanaging.