Celebrating Diversity: Millennials' Strengths

By 2025, millennials will comprise up to 25% of the workforce according to a 2015 Thompson Reuters study. Many institutions, including law firms, may fear this rising percentage due to some of the negative stereotypes that are associated with millennials. While any generation may be characterized by negative stereotypes, we can choose to adopt a different perspective. A perspective that celebrates the differences millennials present as a strength, uses them as an opportunity for dialogue and leverages their views to enrich the way we practice in order to better serve our clients.

Millennials are raised with an enormous amount of self-confidence, which came from the hard work, dedication and sacrifice of their parents. Parents who were increasingly aware of the science surrounding brain development, early childhood education and raising mentally, emotionally and physically healthy children. This child-centric upbringing combined with youthful enthusiasm results in a confidence that makes a challenge more inviting and greater comfort with risk. This is a strength. Millennials are comfortable speaking up and stretching beyond traditional comfort zones. A willingness to speak up can yield powerful results that would have never come from quietly accepting the status quo.

Millennials are also exposed to much more criticism and frank feedback, which comes from living on social media. Millennials have thicker skin because social media gives them the opportunity to feel and see the real-world effects of how people react to them and what they are thinking. Millennials are comfortable with continuous feedback and are committed to learning new things. Growing up with constant access to technology, millennials are also tech savvy and are interested in finding ways of solving problems using technology.

Millennials—men and women alike—are no longer thinking about work-life balance but work-life integration and how to live a whole life. Millennials are redefining how and where they work. In today’s always-on, technology-saturated work environment, millennials understand that there are many ways they can accomplish what needs to be done by juggling posting Instagram pictures of leisure pursuits alongside building their brand by tweeting about interesting legal wins.

Millennials’ confidence, tech savvy and willingness to establish new work patterns will play an important role in establishing the future of legal services. Moreover, the strengths that millennials display in the workplace are increasingly becoming client preferences such as constant communication or updates, greater use of technology-based solutions and quicker adoption of client feedback.

To address the biases and stereotypes against millennials and to build an inclusive and diverse workplace the time to act is now—a good start would be to engage in dialogue with someone from a different generation with an intention to understand each other’s strengths and needs. As eloquently stated by His Highness the Aga Khan in a lecture at Harvard University, “diversity is not a burden to be endured, but an opportunity to be welcomed.” He further states that “a cosmopolitan society is a society which not only accepts difference, but actively seeks to understand it and to learn from it. In this perspective, a cosmopolitan society regards the distinctive threads of our particular identities as elements that bring beauty to the larger social fabric.” In a nutshell, that is what millennials bring to the current work force.


Noren Hirani practices intellectual property law with Bennett Jones LLP in Calgary, where she advises clients in IP-related corporate commercial agreements. Noren is currently a board member of the Association of Women Lawyers Calgary as well as the Chair of the CBA Alberta Equality Committee.