Generations at Work

Managing the Clash of Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Yers in the Workplace

Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, Bob Filipczak

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780814432358
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Written for those struggling to manage a workforce with incompatible ethics, values, and working styles, this book looks at the root causes of professional conflict and offers practical guidelines for navigating multigenerational differences.

By exploring the most common causes of conflict--including the Me Generation’s frustration with Gen Yers’ constant desire for feedback and the challenges facing Gen Xers sandwiched between these polarities--Generations at Work offers practical, spot-on guidance for managing the differences with consideration to each generation’s unique needs.

Along with the authors’ insights for managing a workforce with different ways of working, communicating, and thinking, this invaluable resources offers:

• in-depth interviews with members of each generation,
• tips on best practices from companies successfully bridging the generation gap,
• and a mentorship field guide to help you support the youngest members of your team.

Generations at Work has the tools that are key to helping your workforce interact more positively with one another and thrive in today’s wildly divergent workplace culture.

PART 1

Dynamics of the Multigenerational Workplace

CHAPTER 1

A New Chapter in the Cross-Generational Workplace

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

—GEORGE ORWELL

There is a problem in the workplace—a problem of values, ambitions, views, mind sets, demographics, and generations in conflict. The workplace we inhabit today is awash with the conflicting voices and views of the most age- and value-diverse workforce the world has known since our great-great-grandparents abandoned field and farm for factory and office. At no time in our history have so many and such different generations with such diversity been asked to work together shoulder to shoulder, side by side, cubicle to cubicle.

Sure, there have been multiple generations employed in the same organization before. But, by and large, they were sequestered from each other by organizational stratification and the structural topography of a manufacturing-oriented economy. Senior (older) employees, who were mostly white and male, worked in the head office or were in command positions in the manufacturing chain. Middle-aged employees tended to be in middle management or high-skill, seniority-protected trade jobs. The youngest, greenest, and physically strongest were on the factory floor or were camped out in specific trainee slots that they more or less quietly endured for significant periods—junior accountant, sales representative, teller, assistant manager. Their contacts were primarily horizontal, with people like themselves or, at most, one level up or down the chain of command. Generational “mixing” was rare and then significantly influenced by formality and protocol. Senior employees did not share their reasoning or ask for input for their decision-making. Juniors, when they had complaints or doubts, kept to themselves or at least to those on their own level, and then usually discussed them only “off premises.”

In today’s postindustrial info-centered work world, social and physical separations are no longer powerful barriers to generational mixing. Frequently, senior employees are older than senior employees were “back then,” and the younger boss/older worker configuration is the new normal. The more horizontal, more spatially compact workplace has stirred the generations into a mix of much different proportions.

In this era when even the most profitable businesses are striving to run ever leaner and meaner, four very distinct generations are vying for position in a workplace of shrinking upward mobility. The old pecking order, hierarchy, and shorter work life spans that de facto kept a given generational cohort isolated from others no longer exist or they exist in a much less rigid, more permeable manner. Merit is overcoming time in grade, or any other variable, as the deciding factor in advancement. One outcome of this largely accidental generational blending is creativity, or at least it can be. People of different perspectives always have the potential to bring different thoughts and ideas to problem solving and future opportunity. An unfortunate outcome, one that mitigates against positive creative synergy, is intergenerational conflict: differences in values, views, and ways of working, talking, and thinking that set people in opposition to one another and challenge organizational best interests.

The sounds of generations in conflict are heard at the bar during after-work happy hours, across lunch tables, on Facebook walls, Tweets, and Tumblr blogs, and in text messages winging their way through every organization:

• “They have no work ethic. They just want everything handed to them.”

• “You scheduled a meeting for 3 p.m. on a Friday? Get a life.”

• “She wants to meet with senior managers regularly to get feedback on her performance. She just started.”

• “If he asks us to write one more vision statement, I’m out of here.”

• “You sent the meeting request by email? I check email once a week.”

• “HR just got clearance so we can use Facebook at work. I don’t have the heart to tell them we’ve been bouncing Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter off a proxy server for years.”

More importantly and ominously, the gripes, complaints, and underlying fundamental differences are not always heard across the conference table or discussed and dealt with in any constructive fashion or forum. Like death and taxes, they are assumed to be immutable and irreparable, and, consequently, are never openly addressed. In the “old,” rigid, highly regimented organization, they might not have mattered. In today’s “new” organization, they can be devastating. They fester, cause tension, and lead to unnecessary, at times disabling, personal, departmental, and organizational conflict.

Bridging the Gaps

In truth, generation gaps are neither new nor forever insurmountable. The “Archie Bunker-Meat Head” differences of the 1960s divided many a family and society in general. The rancor between hawks and doves, flower children and traditionalists seemed destined to shake apart the United States forever. In the 1920s, the “flapper” era symbolized and chronicled by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was yet another period when the gulf between old and young seemed forever unbridgeable. Earlier still, in the immediate pre-Civil War period, the United States was rife with generational conflict. The realignment of political loyalties and political parties in the 1850s—with younger, more progressive Americans flocking to the then brand-new Republican Party—planted the seeds for the bloody domestic strife that was to follow. Earlier still—as any history book will confirm—Socrates of ancient Greece was slipped that hemlock highball not because of his annoying habit of answering a question with a question, but for riling up the youth of Athens and driving a wedge between them and their elders.

What is new and different is that the new generation gap is a four-way divide. There are four generations at odds in the workplace. In addition, unlike other eras, the power relations are not a simple, straightforward matter of the older generation having all the marbles—resources, power, and position—and the younger generation in revolt and anxious over access to, and control of, those resources. The once “natural” flow of resources, power, and responsibilities from older to younger arms has been dislocated by changes in life expectancy, increases in longevity and health, and disruption of a century-old trend toward negative population growth, as well as changes in lifestyle, technology, and knowledge base. A world that once seemed linear is no longer. Life for every generation has become increasingly nonlinear, unpredictable, and uncharitable.

In times of uncertainty and anxiety, differences between groups and sets of people, even generations, become tension producing and potential flash points. We increasingly live and work in a world of high stakes, winners and losers, high tensions, diminishing commonalities in values, and changing social contracts. And, ironically, we increasingly live and work in a world where the sheer numbers of us and the interdependent and virtual nature of the work we do often depend on and demand collaboration and compromise, not just independence and virtuosity. It means an explicit need exists for overcoming and understanding generational and communication differences to create positive ends for the organization and the individuals who inhabit it.

Demographic Imperatives

The legions of Ancient Rome were composed of ten cohorts each; cohesive units of 300 to 600 men who trained, ate, slept, fought, won, lost, lived, and died together. Their strength was their ability to think, act and, more importantly, to react as a unit. Though composed of individuals, training and socialization equipped them to behave as if of a single mind when called upon to do battle. Social demographers, students of the effects of population on society, use the term “cohort” to refer to people born in the same general span of time and who share key life experiences—from setting out for school for the first time together through reaching puberty at the same time to entering the workforce or university or marriage or middle age or their dotage at the same time.

Demographers like David K. Foot of the University of Toronto see demographics as critically influential in how we see ourselves as individuals and judge ourselves to be: “Most of us think of ourselves as individuals and underestimate how much we have in common with fellow members of our cohort.”¹ To borrow an example from Foot, the 70-year old who is an avid rock climber is a unique individual. So is the 12-year-old opera lover. Just the same, says Foot, “The chances are good the young opera lover will rent his first apartment, buy his first car, get married at about the same age as his peers.”² Both the timing and texture of most life events are highly, though perhaps not obviously, influenced by the backdrop of demographics. Members of a cohort who come of age in lean times or war years think and act differently than those born and raised to their majority in peace and plenty. In fact, an individual will often have more in common with members of his or her cohort than with family members belonging to different generations.

“Demographics are the single most important factor that nobody pays attention to, and when they do pay attention, they miss the point.”

—Peter Drucker

A word about stereotypes. We are all individuals; there are a multitude of ways each of us differs from all others in our generation, or even in our own family group. To be effective with other human beings, we must know them as individuals—their unique background, personality, preferences, and style. Nevertheless, knowing generational information is also tremendously valuable; it often explains the baffling and confusing differences behind our unspoken assumptions underneath our attitudes. The 65-year-old webmaster who does rap and mashup music doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Boomer senior citizen, yet he was forever touched—along with all members of his cohort—growing up during the Summer of Love, Vietnam, and the 1960s counterculture.

How Generations Differ

In addition to the coincidence of birth, a generation is also defined by common tastes, attitudes, and experiences; a generational cohort is a product of its times and tastes. Those times encompass a myriad of circumstances—economic, social, sociological, and, of course, demographic. Particularly telling are a generation’s defining moments: events that capture the attention and emotions of thousands—if not millions—of individuals at a formative stage in their lives. An old adage holds that “people resemble their times more than they resemble their parents.” The first headlines to inspire and awe, to horrify and thrill, to send the imagination soaring or cause dark contemplation and heated conversation do much to shape the character of a generation. The music that members of a cohort hear, the heroes they respect and admire, the passions they agree or disagree about, and their common history shape and define a generation. And because generations share a place in history and have events, images, and experiences in common, they develop their own unique personalities. Not that every individual fits that generation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The New Economic Reality and the Cross-Generational Workplace
• Part 1: Dynamics of the Multigenerational Workplace
• Part 2: Where Mixed Generations Work Well Together
• Part 3: The Interviews
• Part 4: Articles
• Appendix
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors