Whenever I tried to hide my genuine reactions, expectations, or thoughts at work, I could feel a little green fluffy creature bouncing up and down inside my head, making the most uncomfortable noises. I like to call it “Monsy.”

Monsy was a demon that never shut up, never took no for an answer, and never lowered its standards. Its teeth were sharp like a thousand swords and its roar as loud as a million lions. Monsy bounced around my head with the speed of light on its skinny limbs that could barely support its humungous body covered in bright green fur.
And before you think you would rather not take leadership advice from a person who imagines a vicious creature living in her head, I do have to note that I have been checked by a medical professional and they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. For now, that is.

Now, back to the story. Monsy, the monster, was driven and curious, so it kept pushing me to grow and learn more. Especially through books. Monsy loved to read and went overboard whenever I approached any bookstore. But it seemed as if there were no leadership books intended for us. Authors were focused on covering the older generation, who were well established, senior, and experienced. The books out there were literally written for my parents, so I reached out to them for advice on how to become a leader at my age and win the career game. They couldn’t give it to me. The world had changed so much in the last thirty years that none of the lessons my parents learned when they were starting off applied any more.

Our lives have been marked by the speedy development of technology, but also a lot of financial uncertainty, recessions, asset bubbles, wars, and a horrible global pandemic. Very rough times. No wonder we turned out to be monsters, right? I wished I had read a book about leadership written by someone I could relate to. I wished somebody could define a new leadership style that I could identify with. Unfortunately, it seemed like everybody thought the monsters were born with built-in software that helped them pivot their way through their professional lives.

So there we were, me and my pal Monsy, living out all the monster clichés imaginable: changing industries, moving jobs, demanding promotions, complaining, and taking stuff for granted. We lived the dream, recklessly terrorizing boomers in a King Kong fashion, because that is what millennials did.

Or was it? Let me tell you a few of those terrorizing stories.

As an associate overseeing large corporate-wide projects, I was once asked to get on a plane to meet with a senior executive in my organization. This required me to wake up at 4 a.m. (despite the fact I had a terrible cold) to fly for two hours to meet him. Sure enough, I cleared my schedule, packed my suitcase, took a handful of aspirin, and took off. But when I arrived at his office, he wasn’t there. He called a few hours later to tell me he had an important medical emergency and couldn’t make it to meet me that day. He offered to send his driver to take me back to the airport in the evening, which I accepted.

Tired and sick in the back of the largest Porsche SUV I’d seen in my entire life, I realized that I’d wasted my whole day and had been literally stood up by a senior executive. As his driver was trying to make small talk with me in the car, he mentioned that he’d driven that same executive to the golf course that morning, not to the doctor’s office. There hadn’t been any medical emergency.

May I dare to ask: Who is the monster here? Let me tell you another story. When I became chief of staff for the company’s CEO, I was over the moon. I googled chief of staff and the top ranking results were of the chief of staff to the president of the United States, an old white man oozing authority. Chief of staff was the most senior rank in the administration after the president. Hence, I would be the most senior ranking executive after my boss. I was to be his most trusted adviser, his proxy, his eyes and ears.

Do you know what senior staff in the organization called me? They called me “kind of a chief of staff.” They called me “the boss’s right hand,” or the “chief ’s assistant,” but never was I considered “chief ” of anything. Although I was expected to be an equal member of the team, the senior executives would come to me and ask: “Excuse me, do you know where the bathroom is?” And I would be like: “Susan, we shared the cab from the airport. I also just got here. I know as much as you do.”

Who is the monster here?

I received a few resentful looks after handing in my resignation letter. We invest all this money and time to train them, and then the youngsters just leave without warning. They aren’t loyal enough, they said. “ Well, Jerry, if you could have bothered giving me more challenging tasks, a career pro- gression, and even a portion of that raise I have been asking for, I probably wouldn’t have quit.”

So really, who is the monster here?

It seemed that the boomers weren’t as angelic, hard-working, and innocent as they thought they were. You might think they are the generation on the exit, but this is still far from true. The 2021 Mercer Talent Trends Study showed that boomers are delaying their retirement, with 73% saying they intend to work after their retirement age. In practice, this meant that they decided that they could stay at work doing only the tasks they enjoyed, delegating the rest to Gen X, which in turn cascaded to Gen Y (so-called millennials).

At the same time, Gen Y, the most overqualified generation at the workplace, ends up doing the low-level and low-impact tasks for longer than expected. Because of the boomers sticking around, Gen X is unable to progress, leaving the monsters at the bottom of the pyramid with increasing resentment and frustration. These inequalities resulted in more misunderstandings and created an ever-growing friction among the generations. The data show that more than half of the millennial employees feel that there is no supportive structure to go through a career change. The numbers are aligned with my experience: like most of my peers, I felt underestimated, undervalued, and frequently underappreciated at work.

I couldn’t be further from being a leader. And judging by some of the leaders around me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be like them. You feel the same? If you are reading this book, chances are, you are not happy with where you are career-wise. You probably feel as if you aren’t fulfilling your leadership potential. But don’t despair, there is a silver lining. And, no, the answer isn’t to squeeze the boomers out of the workforce into retirement, nor is it to declare a war on Gen Xers and their token efforts to make a positive change in the world. It is about realizing that the future of work lies in an intergenerational workforce and that each generation deserves a seat at the table. Because we monsters aren’t better or worse than the others. We are just different. And we are here to make a mark in the world. We are here to create change, but we also need to lead it. Leadership is the tool that will help us make our contribution, because we need change to happen. We need to be heard.

We are here to create change, but we also need to lead it.

I knew this. But the problem was, nobody was listening to me. In corporate life, people like me barely had a voice. Luckily, the tables turned for me. I became a leader and I called the shots.

So you are probably asking yourselves: How did it all change? What did I do? My success had much to do with how I acted. It wasn’t just one thing, but it was a combination of many parts moving together as one. It was like a puzzle. Numerous tiny pieces placed next to each other. It seemed chaotic and confusing at first, but made absolute sense at the end.
This is the base for my M.A.P framework: leading Mindset, leading Actions and People.

Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” When we connect the dots together, I believe we will create a revolution. Together, we are starting a meaningful conversation about what leadership needs to be in the new age.