Leading Your Parents

Young professionals entering the workforce today need to be prepared to lead not just their peers, but cross-generational teams consisting of everyone from Gen Zers to Baby Boomers. And the reality is college doesn’t teach the soft skills necessary to do it.

This book does.

In Leading Your Parents, Raven Solomon, an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and former executive manager who has dedicated her life to building and leading diverse teams, addresses those Millennial and Gen Z professionals and arms them with the leadership skills they need to hit the ground running.

Raven decodes complex workforce communication techniques, leadership styles, and management practices and breaks them down into 25 simple rules every young leader should follow. Each chapter focuses on requisite soft skills, including emotional intelligence, personal accountability, performance management, and presence, and gives readers specific, actionable next steps to make them better leaders now and in the future. She speaks honestly to her readers, meeting them where they are and sharing the highs, lows, and learnings of her near-decade career as a star leader (and one of the youngest-ever executive-level managers) of a Fortune 50 company. Each rule in Leading Your Parents is grounded in Raven’s real-life experience of a difference-making habit between those who get promoted and those who don’t.

Email management, team building, personal branding, establishing accountability—Raven covers every aspect of the professional responsibility set. She combines motivational advice with practical guidelines and draws on industry statistics, published research, and case studies to illustrate her rules for effective multigenerational leadership. Her stories will resonate with readers and help them see that they, too, can overcome the obstacles they will face in a multigenerational environment and thrive as young leaders.

Leading Your Parents: 25 Rules to Effective Multigenerational Leadership for Millennials and Gen Z is the must-have guide for today’s young leader looking to make an impact in an ever-more-diverse environment that demands not just IQ and dedication, but EQ and understanding.

Preface..... 1

Introduction..... 11

Understanding the Generations..... 23

Part One

Before the Job: Rules of Preparing to Lead Your Multigenerational Team..... 41

Rule #1: Don't Fall for the HR Pickup Line..... 43

Rule #2: Value their Values..... 49

Rule #3: Communicate Their Way..... 73

Part Two

On the Job: Rules for Leading Your Multigenerational Team.....  87

Rule #4:  Know U DK..... 89

Rule #5: Give a Proper Introduction..... 97

Rule #6: Work Hard..... 113

Rule #7: Display Confidence..... 121

Rule #8: Go by the Book..... 129

Rule #9: Be Consistently Consistent..... 135

Rule #10: Do the Little Things..... 143

Rule #11: Don't Talk about It, Be about It..... 153

Rule #12: Get the Respect of Those They Respect..... 165

Rule #13: Lose the Followers..... 173

Rule #14: Put Down the Phone..... 185

Rule #15: Pass the Credit..... 193

Part Three:

Around the Job: Rules for Leading Effectively Outside of Your Team..... 199

Rule #16: Make it Clean or Make it Private..... 201

Rule #17: Demonstrate Presence..... 211

Rule #18: Limit Two..... 223

Rule #19: Be Bigger than Your Boss..... 229

Rule #20: Worry 'bout Yoself..... 235

Rule #21: Email with Etiquette, Text with Caution..... 241

Rule #22: Learn the Business & the Company..... 253

Rule #23: Network… Genuinely..... 265

Rule #24: Get Involved, Give Back..... 279

Rule #25: Don’t' be so Sorry..... 295

See It Through.....  303

Acknowledgments.....  309

Notes.....  313

Index.....  319

About the Author.....  323