Read enough about the Millennial generation and its easy to become convinced that they’re all A.D.D., would prefer to go to yoga classes than put in time climbing the corporate ladder and have an overpowering sense of entitlement.

As with any stereotype there’s probably some truth in there, if by broad generalization only.  Milennials are often defined  as the generation that grew up playing baseball in leagues where every kid on every team got a trophy. This illustration is usually used to underscore their pampered adolescence. However, there might be a benefit to growing up in a world where everyone got a trophy just for playing on a team.

That benefit is an affinity for collaboration.

Growing up, Millennials were rewarded for team effort, even if that effort failed to win a game or land them on all-star teams. The message taught early on was that collaboration lead to rewards.

This is exactly what I have observed in the Millennials I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I should note here that I am turning 40 soon. That puts me squarely in Generation X. Not a far cry from Millennials but a gap nonetheness. In truth, Xer and Millennial profiles have some overlap. Both groups are noted for their comfort with technology. Both are also environmentally conscious as well as more likely to try and strike a balance between work and the rest of life. However, unlike my Gen X peers, I see a collaborative quality in Millennials which is nothing short of game changing should it survive into that generation’s senior executive years (meaning their later 40′s, 50′s and 60′s).

The Medium is the Millennial.
I suspect that the Millennial  preference for collaboration stems from having grown up with collaborative media.

For the Millennials that I have observed (and this is admittedly not a scientific perspective I am offering), collaboration seems to come as easily as switching on a laptop and tapping into Wikipedia. They are comfortable asking friends for help, crowdsourcing input and even talking to direct competitors in search of solutions. My superiors in business growing up, and my peers now, also collaborate, but it takes conscious effort and often has back room office politics attached to it. I’ve also noticed we old(er) folk are also not as intuitively adept at using collaborative technologies for our daily work routines. I might typify it this way (and again, these are very broad generalizations):

• Boomers grew up with printed documents and interoffice memos. They default to wanting to print their emails to review them and like having ‘hard copies’ in file cabinets.
• Xers are more comfortable marking up digital files, but they default to storing those files on a local hard drive.
• Millennials will take their documents on any device and keep the ‘original’ in the Cloud. They default to collaborative systems like Google Docs and Google Wave (and often are frustrated when their older co-workers are not opening embracing these platforms).

Cover Your Ass vs. I’ve Got Your Back.
Notoriously self-motivated, Gen Xers learned early on that corporations (and even parents) wouldn’t necessarily be there for us.  We learned to fend for ourselves after school while Mom and Dad worked and later in the professional world as corporations did their cyclical downsizing. A positive byproduct of this self reliance is entrepreneurialism. A drawback is a ‘Cover Your Ass’ mentality that  undermines collaboration by teaching self reliance above all else. Millennials don’t seem to carry this burden. They don’t seem to worry as much about Plan B. Instead, they cover each other’s backs, helping peers – often without compensation of any kind – purely because they seem to collectively believe that by making others smarter they will gain too.

The question is how much Milennial’s  current life stage figures into their open collaboration. As Millennials move into positions where they are running companies, will they continue to be as openly collaborative? The stakes get higher as they age – building successful businesses, getting promoted, growing their stock portfolios and building out a comfortable lifestyle for their families. As they get older  will competitive instinct kick in and trump collaboration?

To be decidedly Gen X about it; The Flower Children of the 60′s became the Yuppies of the 80′s, exchanging their youthful values and second-hand clothing for big homes, fancy cars, new gadgets and tailored suits. Yesterday’s Gen X ‘slackers’ who opted for ‘McJobs’ rather than a corporate gig are now moving to the helm of companies and making their mark in the Fortune 500. One might expect the collaborative Millennials of today’s young workforce will similarly yield to the pressure to compete, succeed and acquire that is a big part of our capitalist society.

But what if they didn’t? What if the social, communal culture of the Internet with its open-source platforms, free content and commitment to the wisdom of sharing informs how they do business when they’re running businesses?

This would be interesting to observe. I am eager to watch Millennials assume the mantel of companies and organizations. I will be curious how their early experiences on the social web mitigate the lessons of capitalism which are far more Machiavellian. Faced with competition vs. collaboration, what will Millennials do?

The tension between ‘share’ (as in between individuals) on the one side and ‘share’ (as in marketshare) on the other, is destabilizing the foundations of entire industries (think music, publishing, technology). If they are truly Generation Collaboration then this friction between the communal underpinnings of the Internet and the capitalist trappings of business will only increase. That has been and would continue to be something extraordinary to observe.

We live in interesting times.