Why Millennials Leave and How to Retain Them by Teaching the Gift of Failing

There’s been a lot of buzz around Simon Sinek’s Millennials in the Workplace video this week. He talked about Millennials and hit on one of the key things we work with leaders on – why Millennials leave companies, and how you can help retain them by teaching them the gift of failure.

First, let’s define failure. For most older generations, failure is full-on, catastrophic failure, because we generally didn’t get, nor do we give, feedback until the end of the process, when the whole project fails. For Millennials, catastrophic failure is the end – the worst thing that could happen. For their whole lives, we’ve course-corrected their projects and actions, with little small tweaks and turns. The result – most have never faced catastrophic failure.

There’s two pieces to this conversation that are important:

1)      As a leader, isn’t it best to course correct before there’s catastrophic failure? Most of the time yes, especially when it’s a huge impact to the bottom-line of the company. However, there are times when it’s okay to let something fail. In fact, the real problem source isn’t often detected until there’s a full failure of something.

 2)      The second important piece is that catastrophic failure is beneficial. It’s humbling. It creates a need to surround yourself with people of varied gifts and talents. You learn from failure. By giving constant feedback and coaching to Millennials, we haven’t allowed them to fail. When it happens for the first time in the workplace, they are devastated. They are embarrassed and assume it’s something wrong with them – and they leave our workplaces after short amounts of time.

What can we do to promote failure?

• First, we need to give Millennials permission to fail, and tell them what will happen when they do fail. We need to let them know we’ll stand behind them and help them figure out what went wrong and what to do next time.
• Second, we need to tell our stories of failure. We need to show them our own weaknesses and how we’ve learned from our mistakes.
• Last, we need to celebrate failures, because failures mean you tried something new. You were doing innovative work and innovation starts with failure.

Failure is a gift. We need to think about it that way and treat it differently. We need to understand how our generations look at failure differently, and then help one another see it as a gift.

 

Keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant, Sarah Gibson, helps organizations leverage the power of communication, teamwork and diversity to improve engagement and transform teams. To buy her book or inquire about her speaking programs, please visit www.sarahjgibson.com.