The intergenerational imperative is the urgent need to address issues of workplace performance resulting from the interaction of people from different generations, whose values, culture and communication styles differ significantly.
If you’re doing the Twist while they’re into house (or vice versa), you’re probably not synchronising. This is only an issue though, if you’re both supposed to be doing the same dance at the same time. If you’re just supposed to be dancing, it may not matter what style you’re doing.
Intergenerational differences can lead to intergenerational incidents, where people of one generation misunderstand or show indifference to the values of colleagues – or customers - from another generation.
Does intergenerational difference really exist?
Yes. The table below shows some of the key differences between members of the four generations currently in the workforce.
| |
Veterans |
Boomers |
Gen X |
Gen Y |
Born |
1925-1944 |
1945-63 |
1964-1980 |
1981-2000 |
Age |
60+ |
41-57 |
24-40 |
3-23 |
Defining
events in formative
years: |
The Great Depression |
The postwar boom
|
The oil price shock, inflation |
Globalisation |
Economic
Conflict |
World War II, Korean War |
The Cold War, Vietnam war |
Hijacking, the first Gulf war |
Global terrorism, the second Gulf war |
Political |
Reds under beds – Petrov affair |
The Whitlam sacking |
The green movement |
Apolitical, globalisation |
Social |
Conformity |
Liberation movement – ‘Age of Aquarius’ |
Looking out for self |
Yet to come |
Experiences
of growing
up |
Early transition from childhood to adulthood, defined by entry to workforce |
First ever ‘teenagers’ with a gradual transition between child and adult |
‘Latchkey kids’ – self-resourced, self-caring, outwardly confident, ‘adult before their time’ |
‘Do it all’ kids – time filled with extra-curricular development activities; ‘young adults’ from an early age |
Information medium |
Radio |
TV |
Internet |
Text messaging |
Commun-
ication
medium |
Letter |
Telephone |
Internet chat site |
Mobile phone |
Music icons |
Frank Sinatra
Elvis |
Rolling Stones
Beatles |
Nirvana
Madonna |
Eminem
Britney Spears |
Gender role
gap |
Very wide – men as boss at work and home, woman as homemaker/unpaid worker |
Wide – women starting to combine paid employment with homemaker duty - women’s liberation beginning to close gap |
Narrowing – women filling a wide range of professional roles & making inroads into the boardroom |
Narrow, young women overtaking men at school and work |
Core values
|
Hard work |
Recognition |
Freedom |
Meaningful work |
| |
Respect for law, authority, rules |
Challenge law, authority & rules – directly & indirectly |
Ignore law, authority & rules |
Oblivious to law, authority & rules |
| |
Doing without – sacrifice, delayed gratification |
Saving some, having some now
|
Having it now
|
Having several things now, in parallel
|
| |
Paying cash |
Borrowing conservatively - hire purchase |
Borrowing as a way of life - credit card |
?The credit chip? |
Organis-
ational leadership
style |
Command-and-control |
Direction and consultation |
Collaboration |
Not yet tested |
Work loyalty |
Employing organisation and boss |
Employing organisation |
Own career |
Not yet tested |
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Asking the right questions about intergenerational difference
But instead of asking ‘Does intergenerational difference exist?’ it’s more important to ask ‘Does generational difference make a significant impact in the workplace?’, and if so, ‘How does it make a difference?’ Two stories, based on real people, show the impact of generational difference.
| Bruce’s story |
Jo’s story |
Bruce joined the public service in the 1960s (at 54, he’s an older Baby Boomer) and has worked his way up to being a senior manager. He doesn’t have a degree qualification.
The department Bruce works for is now targetting smart young graduates for fast-track development as managers. As a manager who values respect for authority and experience, Bruce doesn’t feel comfortable with the ‘just get on and do it’ approach that these young colleagues have.
Consequently, he also doesn’t offer the exciting developmental opportunities that these young go-getters thrive on. One of Bruce’s peers has a more strategic approach and actively recruits and develops such people, knowing that for the two or three years he has them, they will contribute enormously.
Bruce intends to stay in his job until he retires, provided he can live with an increasing stress level. He can expect to experience a higher workload (because he’ll have to carry the work that the young ‘rising stars’ could do for him, if he made it attractive to work there) and/or conflict with people whose work culture is different and who feel ‘held back’. |
Jo is a typical Gen X-er. At 27, she is in Sydney, where the bright lights are. She’s bored in her current job as a personal assistant/organiser in the finance sector because, well, finance isn’t exciting unless you’re involved in interesting projects and doing deals.
She’s been offered an analyst job there that could be more rewarding, but the bosses of that unit (older Gen Xers and younger Boomers) are so, like, stodgy.
She has her eye set on a career in events management, where the really exciting people are. She has already turned down one job offer because it didn’t provide the chance to learn new skills in an area that the business is involved in, that interests her.
None of these jobs provides an opportunity to use directly her professional training, an honours in Psychology.
She most certainly doesn’t want to spend two or more years as a junior psych working in the prison, welfare or education system, which is the usual way of getting started professionally. She wants to be able to start at least in the middle, with interesting assignments. She knows that she could handle such work easily. |
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What’s causing intergenerational inflexibility?
Generational differences are not new. Neither is the concern that one generation shows about another generation’s outlook and actions:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words
Hesiod, Greek poet, ca. 700 BC
People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
The Who, 1965
The intergenerational imperative arises because:
- Each generation is exposed to different formative influences – the defining events (marker events) and the general social, political and economic environments that surround the people of each generation as they grow up
- hese influences affect the beliefs, values and behaviours (actions) of members of that generation, and make them different from those of their parents
- These differences between the generations lead the members of each generation to look for, and magnify, differences, and to see the previous generation as representing the restrictions of the past, and the following generation as representing both an opportunity to fulfil their dreams and the generator of some unsought (and possibly challenging or threatening) change
- The differences also facilitate the natural need of all generations to rebel in some way against their parents’ generations, and challenge the values, strictures and norms of their parents
- These challenges to preceding generations’ beliefs, values and actions became more pronounced during the 20th century, fed by changes in finance, technology (particularly communications and computers) and worldview, that facilitated rapid and widespread connection with influences, and influencers, from all over the (wired) world
The need to see differences also makes people look for and focus on the differences, rather than on similarities, and leads to stereotyping, which in turn can lead to inflexibility, intolerance, disrespect and even hostility by the members of one group towards the members of another group.
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In the workplace, these differences are more noticeable than they were twenty or even 10 years ago, particularly in service organizations, because:
- The layering that used to exist in organisations was much more strongly correlated with age – ‘senior’ staff were often both older and higher up the organisational tree
- This layering kept members of different generations apart much of the time
- The layering also accompanied stronger expectations about ‘keeping in your place’.
Today, younger people can and do advance much more quickly, on merit, without having to ‘do their time’. This puts them in teams of very mixed ages and in roles where they may be supervising older staff.
And those older expectations about keeping your place, waiting your turn and biting your lip have been shoved aside by expectations about being able to use your capability regardless of age and role. This is leading to frustration especially for Gen X and Gen Y employees, who feel blocked. And it can be threatening for older employees, who can feel pushed aside or marginalised.
How will intergenerational indifference affect us?
There’s a lot of hype about generational difference.
Some people maintain that it is impacting strongly and negatively on most organisations, simply because they have a mix of employees from different generations.
We think that this is overstating its impact, and it is failing to see that generational difference is as much a force for improving performance as it is for diminishing performance.
What we do know is that in some organisations, generational difference is affecting employees’ performance, and hence affecting organisational performance, because it has not been harnessed.
For an example, see the case study at the end of this section.
We also know that the government’s response to the ageing of the workforce is likely to lead to more of our older employees – particularly Boomers – remaining in work, in part-time if not full-time roles. This will maintain the current three-generation or four-generation mix in workplaces for at least the next ten years.
Differences and similarities
You can see generational differences at work in:
- what people talk about around the coffee maker, and the language they use
- how people dress for work
- what tasks people prefer to work on, and how they prefer to work
- how people respond to authority figures and rules
- how long people stay in a job or with an employer before moving on.
But despite these outward differences, the underlying similarities are often stronger. Regardless of what people of different generations talk about when they’re around the coffee maker, they all want to connect with their colleagues. And despite the differences in the length of time that members of different generations spend with one employer, they all want some kind of meaning in their work, a sense that their contribution is valued and a fair reward for effort and achievement.
| A case study: |
Inspecting generational difference
In one organisation we’ve seen, ineffectively managed generational differences created management challenges that led to the organisation losing on two fronts.
The organisation has teams who inspect and accredit operators within the transport and distribution industry. Until recently, these teams were generally staffed by long-serving employees from the older end of the Baby Boomer and younger end of the Silent generations.
Because of their generational upbringing, which valued respect for authority, and their ‘command and control’ backgrounds such as the military and police, they preferred to operate in a ‘we tell, you do’ manner. This manner was becoming less effective with transport operators, particularly with younger drivers who were more prepared to challenge their authority.
Recently, the organisation set out to change the culture within the transport and distribution industry by changing the way the inspectors carry out their enforcing role and building up their educational role.
In order to shift the inspecting teams’ cultures, the organisation recruited some younger people with stronger relationship-building and customer service capabilities. Even though the younger inspectors had similar preferences for ‘command and control’ work as their older colleagues, as members of Gen X they were more customer service-savvy and more used to finding the best mix of applying the rules, rather than just applying the rules in a hard and fast manner.
The theory was that these younger people would be paired with older employees, and their different style of customer service would rub off onto their older colleagues. Not surprisingly, this didn’t happen. There was relatively little skills and attitude training to prepare and equip the older employees for the changed way of working, and no preparation for the younger employees as ‘change agents’.
In the end, many of the newer team members left within several years, frustrated with their older colleagues’ working styles.
What went wrong? The generational mix of the inspection team members wasn’t a problem by itself. Instead, the difficulties came because the outlooks and values of each generational group were different. These had been shaped, in different ways, by their upbringings which were 20 or 30 years apart.
The older group valued a stricter ‘enforcement’ approach to their duties and a ‘play it by the book’ adherence to more rigid standard work practices. The younger group valued more a collaborative ‘compliance plus education’ approach to their role and a more flexible ‘do what it takes to get it done’ approach to work practices.
Both sets of values and work practices can produce results, depending on the situation. But unless the workplace helps colleagues from different generations to understand how each sees the world differently, and helps them to come to a shared approach to working together, unproductive misunderstanding and conflict will continue. |
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The downsides
Generational difference as such is not the issue. What is important is that it can lead to:
- communication gaps between colleagues
- failure to respect, and hence to value, colleagues of a different generation
- missed opportunities to benefit from the very differences – in outlooks, skills, contacts, histories and hopes – that arise from generational differences.
Even more importantly, generational difference can affect the way employees relate to the organisation’s clients and customers. Sometimes this is deliberate, but more often it’s unintentional, based on the staff member’s use of stereotypes – for example, when the young GenX sales assistant in a department store thinks that the Boomer he is serving is ‘beyond it’ and therefore does not offer her a new high-margin fashion product, or the Veteran manager who thinks that the new Millennial is disrespectful for addressing her by her given name.
The upsides
Interestingly, generational difference doesn’t always produce underperformance.
When harnessed, this difference actually drives high performance. It can generate creative tension and help people from the different generations to see things in new ways. It can forge bonds based on respect for each others’ talents. It can lead to exchanges of knowledge that build everyone’s understanding and ability to work together.
This positive use of generational difference requires leadership at all levels. Our processes bring people from different generations together and help them to understand both their differences and their similarities.
Then we help people to recognise when the generational differences may become barriers, and when they can be sources of competitive strength.
Finally, we help people build on their differences and similarities.
Won't this challenge resolve itself?
Intergenerational difference is unlikely to 'fix itself', because the differences are deeply ingrained. They arise from very fundamental variations in the experiences that have shaped the members of different generations. So the Gen X-er has never experienced what it is like to have not to have mobile phone technology available to them as a matter of course, and the Boomer has never experienced what it is like to be a teenager growing up in the 90s.
Although each can understand something of what the other's experiences can do to affect their outlook, it usually takes a deliberate immersion to produce this understanding.
And sometimes the members of different generations have a vested interest in not understanding how members of the other generation 'tick'. Again, only a deliberate exposure to the other generation's outlook and behaviours is likely to bring about understanding and acceptance.
How we can help
Our solutions help people of different generations to work together more effectively. We help your people to see the world through each others’ eyes, and appreciate the value of such differences, in order to simultaneously promote working together and maximise the benefits of diversity.
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