20 points on leading young adults
Brad Lomenick has this great list of pointers for people working through the challenge of leading young adults (or Millenials - the generation who came of age around the millennium).
Lessons for Younger Leaders
Have been thinking for a short while about doing a series of posts on being a young leader - being one myself. The Willow Creek blog (not one I normally visit) has a really good series of posts on young leaders from lots of great leaders much older and wiser than me.
You can read them here.
Social Networking at Work
Thought-provoking post on Q about using Facebook and other social media sites at work. It asks these questions:
- Is it fair to our employers to engage in social media when we’re “on the clock”?
- For those of us who have flexible work schedules (or even work at home), does social media compromise our attention span and mental capacity?
- Are we sitting behind our computers so much that we miss out on opportunities to develop relationships with our co-workers?
- If we are always preoccupied with blogging and social media sites, do we give an appearance of impropriety, or even laziness at work?
Read the whole thing here.
Self-promote to survive
There’s a real danger in today’s culture, especially if you’re a young person in some kind of creative industry - I even feel this as a church leader - that in order to survive and become successful, you need to end up becoming obsessed with promoting yourself.
I don’t like it.
I really don’t like the person it turns me into, the way it encourages me to relate to other people, the way it feels sometimes like it could take over my life.
Three dangers of pursuing a lifestyle of self-promotion:
1. You become firmly rooted as the centre of your world.
Everyone else becomes a supporting character in the play of your life.
2. You end up with fans rather than friends.
The art of relating is forgotten, replaced with endless networking.
3. You rob yourself of the chance to be content with who you are.
Our identity becomes rooted in showreels and portfolios, rather than in who we are and what we mean to the people we care about.
Young Adults: Change or Conservation?
A couple of different things (books, emails…) have come together over the last few weeks that have caused me to think more about young adults and change. Ages 18-25 is a stage which we so often relate to the concepts of transition and change - leaving home, developing independence, starting work etc.
Recently, though, I’ve been wondering just how true that is - and whether young adults are as up for change as they have been historically.
Is today’s emerging adulthood about change - or is it actually about conserving a sense of stability in a world of change?
That’s the surprising conclusion that Christian Smith and Patricia Snell seem to reach in their book (Souls in Transition) about the spirituality of emerging adults. Their research suggests that, contrary to popular thought, young adults are more interested in maintaining and conserving whatever worldview/spirituality they have rather than in broadening their horizons and adopting new beliefs.
What do you think? Do today’s young adults thrive on change, or are they desperate for stability?
Have young adults lost their revolutionary edge?
