Edward D. Miller is a newsroom leadership coach and management consultant to newspapers around the world. He is a former director of ASNE and a founder of the Society for News Design. Reach him at miller@newsroomleadership.com.

NEWS IS EXCITING, BUT NEWS organizations tend to be rigid, hierarchical and inflexible. Why does this matter? Two important groups will demand increasing flexibility from your organization: Boomers and Millennials. The Boomers are approaching retirement, but many will keep working longer. Their skills and institutional memory are important, but to maintain those assets, editors will have to be more flexible in assignments and scheduling. The Millennials (born after 1980) are a different breed altogether; 70 million of them are coming into the workplace with expectations of involvement and job flexibility. They will not perform well in traditional hierarchies.

Here are two ways to loosen things up:

Portfolios: Each individual should have a "portfolio" of tasks, not just a two- or three-word job description. At the top of that portfolio would be a basic craft (reporting, illustrating, photography, news research) and a set of specialties within that craft. Beyond craft, however, a portfolio should include a regular teaching or coaching assignment that would expand the individual's competence and the organization's training capacity in an era when training has been almost eliminated in most newsrooms. Finally, everyone should have a management role, perhaps in helping to select short-term goals and monitor progress, or to study and recommend changes to newsroom policy and practices. Portfolios help journalists extend their professional wingspan, thereby increasing organizational flexibility.

Flextime: Most newsrooms endorse the one-size-fits-all philosophy of "What you do for one you must do for all." That's a mistake. People have different abilities and needs, and smart editors learn to accommodate the differences. Uniformity means that no one is happy except the HR staff that dictates the practice. Flextime is a good way to accommodate working mothers, single fathers and all the other people with a life outside the newsroom.

Here are additional ideas on building flexibility:

Know what you can do. Talk to HR and get a clear understanding of what you can do. It's easy to focus on what can't be done; learn what can be.

Use the 24/7 nature of a newsroom as an asset. You may be surprised to learn who is willing to work non-traditional hours. In one newsroom, a senior manager worked three 12-hour days - Friday, Saturday, Sunday - in order to return to graduate school. A new mother in another newsroom worked a similar shift on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday - the busiest days in her features department - in order to have four days off each week to be with her children. In another, a lifestyle reporter worked from 3 p.m. to midnight while his wife worked 6 a.m.-2 p.m. in order to keep their three young children out of day care. A female assistant metro editor gladly worked the Sunday night shift in order to get a weekday to herself while her husband was at work and children were in school. With a little effort you can harmonize individual and organizational needs.

Use your newspaper's geographical diversity to offer jobs close to home. Offer to put nontraditional jobs in the bureaus. For many, the opportunity to work closer to home is a huge benefit.

Create part-time jobs of substance. Part-time hours are appealing to many, especially Boomers. But part-time work has to be substantive, not second-tier.

Be performance based, not schedule based. Do you really have to see people at their desk to know they are working hard? Actively look for work that can (and should) be done outside of the newsroom. Send a reporter home to write the long piece, outline a project or craft a story proposal. Push a manager out of the office to do performance evaluations, long-range planning or staff development. The results will speak for themselves.

When you ask people what they expect from leaders, they often cite autonomy and support. These requirements may appear contradictory ("Get off my back, but give me a hand"), but in fact they are a common blend of the basic human needs for both independence and interdependence. People want to stand on their own, but they want to be assured they will have help to do that. An editor who is flexible enough to balance autonomy and support for staff can do almost anything. *