least $5,000 per year—are more likely than those who do not to say they plan to leave their jobs within a year. Fully 40 percent of these financially privileged respondents present, that is, a flight risk. Intuitively, this statistic makes sense: these men and women may be more inclined to explore other options because they can afford to take risks. They have a safety net at the ready should they fail.
But only 9 percent of Millennials, we find, have such a safety net. The vast majority—91 percent—do not have such financial privilege.
In some ways, this divide should be patently obvious. As noted in Chapter One, the wealth gap is far more pronounced for Millennials than for any prior generation. The US Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality that shows where a country lies between zero (perfectly equal; everyone’s income is the same) and one (perfectly unequal; one individual receives all of the country’s income)—has been rising for decades, from 0.362 in 1967 to 0.464 in 2014.24 Put another way, the wealthy have gotten wealthier while the poor have gotten poorer: household income for the top 1 percent of households grew over twenty-four times as much as that of the bottom 20 percent between 1979 and 2007.25 And those dollars don’t stretch as far as they used to. Between 1978 and 2014, the cost of college tuition rose by over 1200 percent—as compared to a roughly 240 percent increase in prices for other consumer goods and services.26 With national student debt totals hitting $1.2 trillion in 2016, nearly 70 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients find themselves saddled with heavy financial burdens before they earn their first paychecks.27 Little wonder that, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump managed to exceed expectations in winning the votes of Millennials: they tapped into a deep well of frustration among Americans who felt disenfranchised and disempowered by the wealthy and well-established elites in Washington and on Wall Street. 28
Millennials are, in other words, navigating an economic landscape utterly unlike the one Boomers and Gen Xers faced upon their entry into the workforce—a landscape in which socioeconomic status is as much a deciding factor in career mobility as race and gender are.
The upshot of this uneven financial playing field? The “flighty bunch” stereotype that talent specialists cling to in order to justify stingy budget allocations is grossly misapplied. Failure to take into account socioeconomic realities also explains why so much of the existing research on Millennials serves to amplify the stereotypes. Seen without the filter we applied for financial privilege, Millennials appear not only flighty but downright insatiable in their workplace needs and wants. As we shall see, for the Ninety-One Percent who lack financial privilege, nothing could be further from the truth.
Our research aims to overturn existing false assumptions by answering two critical questions: What do the Ninety-One Percent really need and want from their employers? And why should employers give it to them?
PART TWO: The Other Ninety-One Percent
3
The Investment Imperative
As it turns out, Millennials without financial privilege stay at their jobs. Nine out of ten, we find, have no plans to leave within the next year. Interviews with some forty-five of these Millennials reveal them to be committed to their current employers and utterly willing to go the extra mile, investing prodigious amounts of time and energy in their work in the hopes that their employers will invest in them in return.
But because talent specialists, as we documented in Chapter One, tend to see all Millennials as a flight risk, they aren’t investing in any of them. We find that only 23 percent of Millennials without financial privilege have both rewarding relationships and intellectual growth in their careers—two key factors in determining employees’ abilities to succeed as contributors or leaders within their organizations.
That does not bode well for the success of those organizations.
Consider the effects, for example, of withholding international assignments from Millennials. Since exposure to other countries, cultures, and consumers helps give young professionals the knowledge they need to grow those markets and crack open new ones, denying them such exposure or field experience jeopardizes both corporate revenues and future expansion prospects. “Today’s globalized and technology-driven economy presents serious challenges,” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon points out in a recent Politico op-ed. “But it also offers opportunities and rewards skills,” he continues, as long as companies make a point of “investing in people [and] training them in the skills employers in their communities are looking for.”29 Stinting on management training likewise imposes a toll, specifically on team productivity and efficiency. Near-term, Millennials will replace Gen Xers as managers, from direct-line supervisors to department heads. If they are ill-prepared for these roles, then upon assuming them they will be consumed by playing catch-up, detracting from their ability to execute on their responsibilities, unlock innovative potential, and deploy talent effectively—to say nothing of the blunders and roadblocks they might encounter along the way.
If leadership development, typically reserved for high-potential talent, is also withheld from Millennials, then the imminent exodus of Boomers (upwards of 50 percent of whom will have exited the workforce by 2020) threatens to pull decades of institutional knowledge and market expertise out the door with them.30 Typically, talent specialists foment opportunities for cross-generational interaction by inviting high-potential Millennials to shadow directors, assigning them to work on business-critical projects, and matching them with or exposing them to potential sponsors. Such leadership development initiatives all help to ensure that Millennials acquire not only vital skill sets, but also networks of other up-and-coming leaders, and relationships with executives who will advocate for them. Yet with interaction between these cohorts limited to the occasional reverse mentoring initiative, explicit knowledge transfer—from seasoned executives to future change agents—isn’t likely to take place.
As new Millennial hires enter the workforce, well-developed critical-thinking skills are a necessity. Yet, accustomed to crowd-sourced feedback, some Millennials have yet to fully develop these rigorous problem-solving skills—an observation made by Lisa Westlake, CHRO at Moody’s and one of several talent specialists to point out this issue. “Millennials seem to solicit a lot of different opinions before moving forward,” agrees Novo Nordisk’s Barbara Keen. “In some ways, that’s one of their greatest strengths. But, the concern is that this could become an overreliance on consensus. As a leader, yes, you do need to be able to make sure that the decisions you make are based on robust data from multiple sources and channels. You also have to be able to synthesize all of that information in context of organizational dynamics, previous investments, and the perspectives of key stakeholders.”
Keen acknowledges that critical problem-solving and decision-making skills are a challenge for both new and seasoned leaders. Millennials have an advantage, given their seeming comfort with the vast amount of information at their fingertips, but we have to make it a priority to support their development in these areas. If we don’t, she worries about the consequences for the leadership pipeline. “We have to make time for their development. If we don’t intentionally help them learn and grow as we have in the past, we are being shortsighted.”
Losing Out on Diverse Leaders
Failure to invest in Millennials’ career development imperils more than just the leadership pipeline. More critically, because the investment deficit is particularly pronounced for Millennials of color, it undermines the long-term strategic goal of making leadership representative of the workforce and marketplace it serves.
Take Miguel,* for example. During his junior year of college, Miguel was recruited by a major consultancy in the Northeast to be part of its highly competitive internship program. Of Mexican heritage, Miguel was courted by several consultancies, each intent on diversifying not only their
