American Express report shows that millennials in leadership will shake up their boards
According to a recently-released report from American Express, Millennials leadership have a different take on how CEOs and c-suite colleagues should be conducting business. 'Redefining the C-Suite: Business the Millennial Way' is a report that was researched and written by Kantar Futures, which surveyed over 2,300 global leaders and Millennial managers and found that the Millennial CEO of the future will need to navigate tensions and opportunities created by their values and behaviours when managing their companies.
Millenials will shift the business focus towards both profit and purpose, promoting a much flatter structure as Millennials think that teamwork is a more important quality in leaders than Gen X do. In the eyes of Millennial leaders, a future leader succeeds globally through adeptness at the interpersonal and interaction facets of leadership. CEOs see an ideal future leader as one who focuses more on efficient decision-making and business know-how.
Employee wellbeing also appeared to be a top priority, with Millennial leaders saying that biggest challenges to businesses of the future was paying employees fairly (49%), followed by retention of talent (40%).
Millennials also ranked passion as an important quality in leaders (30%) much more highly than their Gen X counterparts (19%). Whilst over half of Millennials say that a C-Suite role is attractive, 75% of Millennials think that successful businesses of the future will see management look beyond the usual models of doing business and be more open to collaborating with new partners. The research finds that the CEO of the future will, therefore, be more likely to turn to support from all levels of their business.
Furthermore, there are some areas where Millennials clearly felt that Gen X has not yet made sufficient progress. Taking the whole sample, Millennials felt more strongly than Gen X that career progression should be based on meritocracy (55% vs. 51%) -
“Millennials are demanding more from the businesses they work for – and will come to lead. This is setting the stage for an evolution of the C-Suite, where they will seek to put both profit and purpose at the heart of their businesses whilst also structuring them in a way to ensure tight cost management and efficient processes,” said Jose Carvalho, senior VP and general manager at American Express Global Commercial Payments Europe.
