Welcome to the Elder Millennial Leader Newsletter

My thoughts on leadership, organizations, business, and talent management have gotten too long for Twitter. So of course, when I realized that I tweeted it. Tonight, instead of going to bed, I started a list of ideas I could write about if I had an audience willing to read more than 200 characters at a time. Within twenty minutes, I had twenty ideas. It certainly seems like I’ll have enough content for a newsletter.

Thanks for being one of the first 55 people who signed up to receive The Elder Millennial Leader without knowing what it will be. I’m still figuring that out myself, but here are twenty of the topics I may write about in 2022.

Future Newsletter Topics

• Some of the most high-potential leaders (and future leaders) have imposter syndrome so strong, they could self-sabotage themselves before they have a chance to succeed. Someone needs to speak to them in a way they’re willing to hear.
• Leadership is essential, and it’s difficult. It needs to be valued, cultivated, and compensated at all levels of organizations.
• While age certainly can add wisdom, leadership acumen can emerge early in one’s career.
• There aren’t enough female leaders, particularly in business. Especially at the executive level.
• Creating a great place to work is a noble cause in and of itself.
• Equity and inclusion are not initiatives. They’re imperatives that need to be prioritized at a systemic level if you care about people. If you don’t care about people, you shouldn’t be in leadership.
• Lots of workplace rules, particularly the unwritten ones, need to be broken permanently.
• We all deserve to like our jobs. Work should be a welcome part of our life, but not the driving force in it.
• Workplaces should be human-centered.
• Profit without purpose is painful for someone.
• Lots of organizations could afford to pay their workers a lot more, and we need to critically examine why they’re not.
• Elder Millennials (those of us born in the early 80s) have been adapting our entire lives. We learned to use computers (and taught our parents). We learned to text the hard way - with a T9 keyboard, pre-emoji. We were adults when social media became mainstream. We’ve adapted to or caused immense change in society already, and we need to extend that to leadership in the workplace.
• All leaders will need to be courageous, some of us regularly.
• A job posting without a salary is not worth an applicant’s time.
• White supremacy is systemically embedded in our society and most organizations, and leaders (especially those of us who are white) need to proactively identify and dismantle it.
• Gen Z and young millennials see a workplace narrative on TikTok and Reddit that predisposes them to be hostile towards management and organizations. Leaders must know and understand this narrative before trying to change it.
• Transparency is easier for leaders than they may think, but more demanding of an employee than they may expect.
• As you grow in leadership experience and influence, the work you do may not fit any of your mental models of what work actually is.
• It’s never a bad time to ask “Why?”
• Self-reflection is one of the most underrated leadership development strategies.

This newsletter is coming to you directly from my personal email address. If you reply, I’ll read it. If you ask a question, I’ll try to answer it.

Which of these twenty topics are you most interested in reading? I honestly have no idea what’s coming your way next, or when.