Millennial Activities

The speaker suggests using a whiteboard to coach Millennials. The whiteboard has three columns: present state, ideal state, and what needs to be done to reach the ideal state. By asking questions and prompting reflection, the coach helps Millennials understand their strengths, weaknesses, and goals. The whiteboard serves as a mirror for self-reflection. Visualizing the path to their goals helps Millennials stay motivated. This coaching method is called whiteboard coaching. Now, like anything, I think one of the greatest things that we can do and one of the most common things that we'll use as a parallel to coaching Millennials is a lot of them want to get to a certain place within a certain time that can seem very, very quick. One of the greatest activities you can do, again, with any generation, we'll use Millennials because this is the Millennials section. One of the greatest things that you can do is to use a whiteboard and draw three lines, two lines, and you're going to have three columns, column one, column two, column three. Column one is the present state. Ask them, as you sit here today, where are you in terms of your strengths and where do you see yourself having opportunities to improve? You're going to get answers or potentially you're not going to get answers. What that's going to teach you is how they see themselves. Then you go to column three, not column two. This is called the psychological interrupt. You go to column three and you say, what's your ideal state? Where do you want to end up? What would you be doing? Then you come back to column two and say, what do we need to do to get there? What have you been doing to move in the direction of column three? Here's the cool thing. When they're looking at the whiteboard, they're actually looking at themselves. The whiteboard serves as your mirror for the person that you're coaching. When they say things like, jeez, I can't think of any strengths right now, then you have to coach to assumptions, maybe arrogance, maybe self-righteousness, it could be a whole plethora of things. If they get to the third column and they say they want to be the director of the company within the next two weeks, normally we say, well, wait, wait, wait, you're not ready. Then they start to let their mind wander and think about leaving the organization versus saying, well, what's your understanding of that job? Lisa heads up that division. What's your understanding of how she manages? Her expectation is day one. When you're creating activities, use whiteboard. People, especially younger people, are visual creatures. What they're visualizing is where they're at and where they want to go and, more importantly, the path to get there. This is called whiteboard coaching.