Chasing Relevance: 6 Steps to Understand, Engage, and Maximize Next-Generation Leaders in the Workplace

August 22, 2016

“Chasing Relevance is not only about Millennials. It’s about all of us working to connect with each other and to bridge the gaps between the generations for the greater good. With bold language and a powerful model, Dan Negroni urges readers to genuinely care, communicate, and build relationships from the inside out. Because to serve others, we must first understand ourselves. Read Chasing Relevance and start connecting!”
— Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager and Collaboration Begins with You

“Every C-Suite executive should read this book. If you can’t speak ‘millennial’ you might as well start shutting down your business now!”
— Jeffrey Hayzlett, primetime television and radio host, chairman C-Suite Network

“Chasing Relevance by Dan Negroni is a great resource, not just on how best to coach and manage Millennials to bring about greater productivity, it’s a thoughtful examination of why we need to understand each other, cross-generationally, to strengthen not only our teams but ourselves. It’s this understanding that will make you a better manager and coach.”
— Keith Ferrazzi, bestselling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone

Millennials are here to stay. With their presence in the workplace expected to grow to 75 percent by 2025, this next generation of leaders is already surging into offices across the globe in massive numbers. But, having grown up differently, the largest living generation brings with them a unique set of millennial expectations, needs, desires, and values that has already had an undeniable effect on the business landscape—a huge and damaging generational gap.

Today, managers struggle to simultaneously inspire initiative and support the infamous flexibility millennials demand, older employees are known to halt collaboration and innovation by operating within the all too popular “millennials are the enemy” mindset, and millennials’ desire to work and make a difference is stifled by miscommunication and misunderstanding. Unfortunately, these problems and more are increasing and costing businesses in terms of engagement (Gallup estimates the total cost of disengagement is $450 billion) and strategies for attracting, training, and retaining this next generation of leaders (the cost to replace each millennial is $15,000-$25,000).

How, then, can organizations bridge the generational gap in order to drive sustained results and guarantee the growth and success of their businesses? In his new book, CHASING RELEVANCE: 6 Steps to Understand, Engage, and Maximize Next-Generation Leaders in the Workplace (launchbox; hardcover; August 22, 2016), CEO, consultant, and coach Dan Negroni argues business leaders and millennials alike should lean into the divide and embrace it as an opportunity. By creating powerful, authentic relationships, fostering accountability, and teaching real, practical skills, organizations can both adapt their existing leaders to the changing landscape of work and empower millennial employees to deliver authentic and impactful value.

Taking a critical and carefully researched and experiential-based look at the current (and future) cross-generational obstacles organizations face, Negroni offers a winning, actionable framework to find the healthy middle ground between generations. Called BRIDGE, this overlapping and integrated six-step plan compels individuals to understand their own strengths, perceptions, and actions from the inside out in order to address disconnects and become completely relevant as guides, mentors, and leaders with and to millennials:

• Bust Myths: Identify and breakthrough underlying myths and assumptions about employees that create barriers. Negroni shares what is and isn’t true about millennials and how to shift to a mindset that assumes positive intent and spurns judgment, quick opinions, and criticism.
• Real Deal: Create real-deal, authentic, caring relationships with your team. Open yourself up to others to form the relationships you need. Connect authentically, share yourself, and show gratitude.
• I Own It: Own personal responsibility and accountability to drive results. Negroni shows how great leaders must be personally responsible and accountable to drive the outcomes they want and need from others and themselves.
• Deliver Value: Serve and provide value to others every day. Make it about them 24/7 and deliver value through those relationships. Use your strengths, values, skills, passions, and stories to make it about others. Be a mentor.
• Goals in Mind: Create alignment around shared goals and priorities to increase engagement and trust. You must make others’ goals a central part of your world, particularly through how you engage and align individual goals with the team’s and company’s goals to show that you care.
• Empower Success: Empower your culture and employees to drive results. Focus on individual members’ growth, make future advancement opportunities transparent, give feedback, and recognize and celebrate your culture.

In straight-forward and no-holds-barred language, CHASING RELEVANCE empowers readers of all ages to view this generational gap as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. The key? Good old-fashioned and yet disruptively innovative genuine caring, relationship-building, and connection from both sides.