Megan W. Gerhardt, Ph.D. is a Professor of Management and Leadership at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, where she also serves as Director of Leadership Development for the Farmer School and the Robert D. Johnson Co-Director of the Isaac & Oxley Center for Business Leadership. Megan has published widely on generational differences in the workplace and is author of the book Gentelligence: A Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce. Her Gentelligence work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, NBCNews.com, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, MarketWatch, The Houston Chronicle, and Inc. Magazine, among others. In 2017, her TEDx talk “Why I Love Millennials...and You Should, Too” was released. Dr. Gerhardt’s work (www.profgerhardt.com) focuses on leveraging differences to achieve impact and extraordinary levels of performance.
Key Takeaways:
Just 6% of organizations feel their leadership is well-equipped to deal with this multi-generational workforce.
Every generation has learned the norms they needed to build the tools to help them be successful in their own time.
Gentelligence is about recognizing that we have four generations in our workforce, who have extensive diversity of perspective, thought, expertise, and experience that is valuable in its own right.
What is Gentelligence?
I became passionate about this work because I began my career as a professor in really a very young time in my life. I had just turned 26. So I had a great deal to learn. I learned from my older colleagues. But I was in a unique position where I was actually closer in age to many of my students than I was to the people that I worked with. So I found myself really naturally turning to my students for advice, for input, feedback, and really learned quite a bit from them as well. Very quickly, I discovered that we had inherent in our organization a type of diversity that I had never recognized before: generational and age diversity. And what really struck me was that the learning I had was significant in both directions, both across the younger and the older generation gap. But it was very different.
I was learning different things, different kinds of expertise.I became fascinated, from both a research and a consulting standpoint, on how other professionals were learning from these kinds of generational differences. And as I went out, I realized that unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of learning or positive excitement about generational differences in the workplace. It was the time in which our millennials had first entered the workplace. And so, really, we were seeing more frustration and aggravation than excitement at that time.
I began to focus my work on how we could change this lens and change the conversation we were having about generational differences in the workplace.
How do we shift from it being just simple frustration or a threat to one of opportunity?
The reality is that almost every organization has this multi-generational workforce. I do speaking and consulting with industries all over the world, everything from health care, to sports, to education, IT, and entertainment, you name it, we've probably had this discussion. But the data is telling us that despite the fact that it is everywhere, very few organizations really feel like their leaders know what to do with this multi-generational workforce. It's not being leveraged, and often it's creating tension and conflict. So take a look at that number.
Just 6% of organizations feel their leadership is well-equipped to deal with this multi-generational workforce.
And that is a really low number. That means, from our perspective, that there's a lot of opportunity on the table here.
How do we take this from being a sore spot to maybe actually a source of growth and opportunity?
Let's take a look at where generational identity comes from. Research wise, we've dug in quite a bit as to where this comes from. Why is generation a category that would even want to identify, or why would it matter. And it comes from this concept of formative experiences. So if you think about your most formative years, which are roughly age 5 to age 20, those are the times in which your brain is the most flexible, where you're still building your values, your personality, your attitudes, and where your norms about life and work are being set. We know that if you go through any type of experience during that most formative stage, it's going to have a deeper and more profound effect on you than if you went through it later in life.
If we think about the pandemic, for example, while we're all going through that experience, research would suggest that people going through that experience in their formative years, so that would be for the most part Gen Z, although a little bit of Gen Alpha, the generation after that, they will actually experience more significant impact from it in terms of their attitudes, their norms and their resulting behaviors. So that's why when we think about formative experiences that matter to a generation, you do tend to see those slides or those lists that say, the baby boomers went through the following things and this is the result. Now, yes, that is often a frequent set of experiences that people in that generation went through. But what I like to say, and hopefully this will set the stage for us today, is when we talk about generations as a group, we're talking about the backdrop, right.
What is the backdrop of growing up as a Gen X or a Millennial or a Gen Z? And how does that paint a picture for us to help us better understand, what did it mean to grow up in a certain period of time? What things were happening socially, politically, economically, in terms of child rearing, that were different than what was the norm a generation before or after?
So we're going to look at those group levels, with the realization that within those generations are individual people who have very complex identities. Your identity as a person, of course, has multiple layers, generation is one, age is one, which is different than generation, obviously connected, gender, socioeconomic status. I like to say when you start thinking about someone's generation, it ends with a comma, not a period. I stole that from a friend of mine so I can't take credit for it. But it's the start of understanding why they may view the world differently than you rather than the end of it.
Another thing I love to say is that every generation has learned the norms they needed to build the tools to help them be successful in their own time. So what do you need today as a Gen Z growing up and beginning your life and your career that we didn't need 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 60 years ago? And that's what we're interested in today.
Alright, so I do want to put out, and I'm acknowledging these are US based generations, they also are relatively accurate in Canada, Australia, the UK, parts of northern and western Europe. But there are other places in the world, of course, where they do not identify with these generations. So depending on where you're sitting today, please acknowledge and know that we know these generations may look a little bit different, but the concept of generational differences is universal. So Dee opened by saying we have five generations in the workplace today. We're getting a lot closer to four. So I have six up here right now. These would be the six adult generations we have in the US. But really, in terms of the workplace, we don't have very many in the silent generation that are still working. We have, really I would argue, probably none of the greatest generation, maybe a few exceptions. Queen Elizabeth was the last world leader of the greatest generation, for example. Predominantly, we have baby boomers through Gen Z as our working adults.
Every generation has what we call a narrative. And the narrative is a little different than stereotypes.
It's simply saying, what's the story of a baby boomer compared to the story of growing up as part of Gen X?
I'm going to connect the dots between some things about boomers, Gen X, millennials, and then I'll sample a little bit in Gen Z. So if you think about the narrative of a generation and how it might affect what we're seeing at work right now, our baby boomers grew up the children largely of the greatest generation and the silent generation. And they grew up with parents who didn't have access to the economic opportunities that the boomers did. So the baby boomers had a lot of expectation as well as optimism on their shoulders about going out and creating opportunities for themselves and their families that weren't available to their parents and grandparents because of things like World War II, the Depression, those formative events we see on those slides. But rather than just the events, it's the cause and effect of the baby boomers as a generation took that challenge to really work hard to build successful lives and careers. And many were able to do so by really defining success as status, position on the corporate ladder.
We saw the baby boomers popularize the term workaholic. So things like 60-hour work weeks became more of the norm, and we hadn't ever seen that before. So of course, we know the baby boomers for many other things, but for our purposes today, I want to talk about that definition of success as, put your head down, work hard, create wealth, opportunity, and make sure that you take advantage of what's in front of you because other generations didn't have that. Now, the oldest baby boomers had children and to some extent, the younger silent generation had children in Generation X, that's my generation, born 1965 to 1980. So when the population growth dipped for the first time since the end of World War II, that is when we began Gen X. So those are the kinds of things we look at when we're trying to decide when to end one generation and start another.
So Gen Xers grew up the children of baby boomers who, for the most part because of women's rights and civil rights, we had a generation in Gen X where we had dual career families for the first time, really. Mom potentially working outside the home for the first time. Divorce rates went up because of women's rights and many single parent families emerged. And that mattered for Gen X because it meant we were a very independent generation, left to our own devices more so than the baby boomers had been. We were the first generation, maybe the only generation, of what was known as latchkey kids. So if you're from that generation, you will recognize that term, and if you are younger than that, you probably won't. And that's a great example of what we're talking about. So that latchkey, having a couple hours to yourself between school and when mom or dad got home from work led to a generation of kids who were independent. This was still an era where kids were allowed to roam. The world was perceived as pretty safe. And that level of independence soaked into how Gen X really wanted to run their careers.
So unlike mom and dad working 60 to 70 hours, we Gen Xers as a unit, not by person, pushed back and said, I think I want more balance. We are the ones who really pushed work-family balance. We didn't see maybe the wisdom or need to work 60-70 hours a week. And because of that, Gen X most famously earn their slacker nickname.
So I'm going to jump to millennials, the most talked about generation of all time. Much larger in size than Gen X, so millennials and boomers really dwarf Gen X as a generation. The millennial generation was actually started, I get this question a lot, why is it called millennials if they don't include the year 2000 in their birth year?, which is a great question. And Millennials actually began as a generation because we wanted to mark the first of a generation that would quote "come of age" at the new millennium. So 1981 was chosen as the date. And then 1996 is the cut date because of 9/11 in the US, so that was seen as such a significant formative event. They wanted to make sure everyone who was a millennial was someone who had a memory of 9/11. And it was decided you would have to have been at least five years old to remember 9/11.
That's just an example for you of, it's not really a science so much as an art sometimes, of how these decisions are made. So lots of things we know about the millennials, but the one I want to emphasize is the shift between Gen X and millennials in terms of the role of kids in the family. When millennials were born, they were largely the children of our baby boomers, who remember worked really hard for opportunities and for recognition and success. And because of that, they really invested that in their children. So millennials were really the product of this question of, what would be possible for our young people, if we gave them development opportunities from a very young age? What would be possible if we, for example, gave them itty bitty soccer at age 3, or Spanish lessons earlier, Mommy and Me, and really just scheduled and created opportunities for them, which was really what the boomers had been working towards. We also became really concerned about their self esteem, right? That's where that phrase, "the trophy generation", comes from. Building them up, making sure that they felt like they had a strong voice, and they took what was available to them in terms of opportunity. And the reason I tell that narrative is that it was really the first time that children were moved to the center of the family in terms of importance.
So even Gen X children should be seen, but not heard, was the mantra. Whereas for millennials, it's flipped. Children became the center of many families, not all, and grew up really having the resources and the schedule of the family revolve largely around them. So then when they hit the workplace, they continue to want to have that voice that we had raised them with, and we didn't like it. We thought that was entitled. We didn't think that they had the right to be asking for things so early in their career that none of the rest of us had asked for. But we raised them that way. We raised them to be proactive. And really, the difference between proactive and entitled depends on where you're standing. And so here was a generation that did have more development and education than any generation had ever had by the time they got to the workplace. And yet, we wanted them to go sort of sit down and start where we all started. So there's a little bit of bait and switch on millennials. And I think, very much, they were blamed and scapegoats for the fact that the world was changing. And ironically, a lot of the talks I did in the early part of my career on this were at the request of baby boomers who had millennial children, but were really struggling with the millennial employees they had. Even though they taught many of their kids those same lessons about being proactive, it was very frustrating for them to deal with it in the workplace.
So just a quick word on Gen Z, they're anywhere from age 10 to 25 right now. So we've got a very, very long continueum there. So the working Gen Z, the working adults, some of them have never stepped foot in a workplace or met colleagues in person. So I'm sure you've heard about the quiet quitting. A lot of that is coming from the fact that they have not ever experienced work the way it was before the pandemic. So they grew up era of fake news, of being in an environment where risk and safety were in question, whether that was with the great recession, the pandemic, now inflation, what's going on in the government. There's all kinds of things that have led Gen Zs to really have a pretty chaotic, early formative experience. And we're seeing their norms and their behavior already shift. I freelance for NBC as a writer and just recently did a piece on how Gen Z is saving for retirement at higher levels than any other generation right now in terms of percentage of their salary. So we're already seeing them take lessons. And of course, we're seeing them develop a similar attitude to work life balance that we saw from Gen X. So that's generations 101. And in the quickest nutshell I can give it to you. But as I said in the book, there's quite a bit more. Alright, so onward.
What is going on in terms of dynamics?
All you have to do is scroll your newsfeed and you will find that generations are, at least on paper, pitted against each other in some sort of war. Our book starts with a chapter called "Blame 60 Minutes." And it's about a horrible segment that was done in the early 2000s, called the "The Millennials Are Coming." So this narrative is not new. It's gone on for a long time. But certainly the millennials, being so large of a generation and being so different of a generation, really created a level of tension that we hadn't seen in quite a while. And so we have somehow green-lighted this narrative that generations should be in conflict, and really allowed to be considered competitors, rather than collaborators. So if you don't believe me, I collect bad generational headlines.
You can see here how we've really made the millennials scapegoats, blaming them for anything that we don't like or things that are changing. But it's not just the millennials. Sometimes the rest of our generations get hit as well with this blame game. I guarantee your phone is probably listening, and we'll show you many similar headlines moving forward. A couple more. So this is an actual Time Magazine cover, "Millennials are Lazy, Entitled Narcissists Who Still Live with their Parents." The bottom of that cover said "Why They Will Save Us All." So really starting to recognize that we were, for some reason, deciding that, while we would never I hope use other kinds of diversity or difference in this very negative blaming way, you know, imagine that said women are lazy, entitled narcissists, who still would live with their parents. There would be a riot.
But somehow generational category has gotten a pass that socially, it's considered acceptable to use someone's generation as an insult and never was that more true than with "OK Boomer." So a phrase heard almost around the world, even places that don't use the term baby boomer. I did interviews in Korea and Sweden and in places where they had heard OK Boomer as a viral term, but didn't use baby boomer as a generation and wanted to know what that was about. OK Boomer was Gen Z's retort, and there was their response to not being talked down to by older people the way they perceived we had done with the millennials. I saw this one coming. I wrote an article about a year before this came out and said, we cannot treat Gen Z the way we treated millennials. Every generation has their own identity and to blame them for being different when they grew up in a different world is not, it's kind of ignorant. And it's not really how we help create collaboration and learning. So what gets in our way? Why do we do this? I think there's a lot of reasons. There's a lot to dig into here. You've heard the generational shaming and stereotyping. Age bias, both towards older and younger people, is very prevalent. And that's because in our workplaces, we tend to have what's called age polarization. So what that means is, we don't tend to work closely with people who are a lot older or younger than us, because often they don't join the organization about the same time we do. So if you don't know someone or work closely with someone who's older or younger, we tend to use broad brushes and generalize based on stereotypes because we just don't have personal close relationships with people of different age groups.
There's also a lot of myths about value differences that older and younger generations don't share any of the same values. That's actually not true. It's not supported by research. And then often, this almost elbowing for knowledge relevance. So for example, growing up as a Gen X, there are certain things I know and I've learned growing up in that generation. There's experience, of course, that I've gained in my 20 years of my career. So if my organization is excited about and valuing and promoting a more digital kind of knowledge that maybe my millennial or Gen Z colleagues have more so than me, although I can learn it, it's not a native talent or expertise I came in with, I might find that threatening. If what they know is seen as so valuable, perhaps what I know, does that mean it's not valuable anymore? And we kind of operate from a place of concern and threat, and that makes it really hard to collaborate. But today, we're going to try to change our mindset on this with what I call Gentelligence.
Gentelligence is a term I came up with about 5 years ago. I hope when you hear it, it makes sense and you know right away what it means. That was the idea. But really, it's about getting smarter about how we use this kind of difference and stepping away from the stereotypes and the blaming. And instead, recognizing if we have four generations in our workforce, we have extensive diversity of perspective, thought, expertise, experience that is valuable in its own right. But imagine if we could combine it. Imagine if I could work and combine my experience as a 45 year old with the innovation and new perspective of a 25 year old. If we could see that as a chemistry, if we can see that as the way to come up with solutions for a lot of these hard future of work problems, what would be possible? What kind of opportunity could we see rather than just banging our heads against the wall that it's difficult to work with people a lot older or younger than we are. So that's what Gentelligence is. And that is really what we hope to move towards today with some key tools and practices I'm going to bring to you.
Research shows that multi-generational teams, if just left to their own devices will experience conflict for a lot of the reasons we talked about. We have different norms, we have different preferences, we have different ways of looking at the world, and even the places we have commonalities might get misinterpreted or missed without a strategy.
So how about a better headline. We suggest four practices. These are rooted really deeply in best practices and things like diversity and inclusion, as well as cross cultural management. If you think about it, generations really are a form of culture. We're going to go through these, and I'm going to give you a quick tool for each one that I hope you can leave here today and try tonight at home or tomorrow in the workplace, and see how they work for you. So the first one here might seem obvious, but I'm going to try to give it a bit of a twist, maybe in a way you haven't thought about it. So the first practice is what we call identifying assumptions.
When you are working with someone of a different age or generation, what implicit bias are you holding? I myself, even though I do this for a living, I was traveling a few weeks ago, I was in an airport lounge with a lot of people around my age who were working and doing things. And a woman came in who was a lot younger, probably 18 or 19, wearing big headphones and a tracksuit and talking loudly on her phone. And I immediately thought, "what is she doing in here? She's not old enough to be in here." And when I came home, I shared that with my 17 year old son, and he said, "Mom, that is not Gentelligence. She could own a company, she could be an influencer, she has every right to be there, just as you do." And so he called me out. You know, it's what happens when you teach them things, I guess. So what assumptions are you holding? We found all these assumptions that exist in organizations, for example, about older people not being able to learn or use technology well. There's no research to back that up at all. But yet, we tend to hold that stereotype. And is that impacting who gets invited to certain opportunities? I had a client who was talking about some upskilling they wanted to do on some new tech, and they said, "Well, we're going to invite everybody, but probably not our baby boomers." And it wasn't a Gentelligence job, but I immediately, of course, raised the flag and said, "Now hold on, that's potentially ageist. It's biased, and why wouldn't we want our older individuals to receive the same development and training?" So where do you see yourself or colleagues potentially making age-based assumptions without realizing it? The second part of this, which might be a little bit of a twist, is I'm uncovering a lot in the work that I do that we tend to have maybe even more dangerous assumptions about similarities.
If you've recently been trying to figure out your return to the office policy, which who hasn't, you're using the phrase flexibility, for example, in a lot of your conversations, are you assuming that flexibility means the same thing across generations? When you say flexibility to someone who's 60 versus somebody who's 36 or 26 or 46, have you explored what does that mean to you, at this stage in your life, at your stage of your career, at your age? What does it mean to have a flexible work schedule? And how might those differences be getting missed because an assumption we make that of course everybody sees that the same way?
So an assumption audit is the tool I'm going to give you, which is simply to be hyper aware and joining this today, you've already taken that step towards awareness in starting to dig into things like, what does that mean for you, rather than assuming we know. The second practice, adjust the lens, is my favorite one. And this is simply, if we think about generations as culture, think about the last time you traveled abroad or traveled to a different culture. You had an awareness that you were going to be interacting with people who had different norms and different upbringing than you. And because of that, I'm guessing you worked harder to make sure that you weren't misunderstanding what was going on around you, or that you weren't being misunderstood. And that's the level of work and concentration that we need to put into working across generations effectively.
What is the intent or interest behind what we see going on?
I did a workshop in a health care organization where I had a woman who was a nurse, and she was a baby boomer, and she shared with me that she wanted to know how to stop young people from bringing their phones into the exam room. She said, "They're bringing their phones, and they're not paying attention, and it's rude." And so she was very upset and frustrated about the frequency of this. It was affecting her work. And so I deployed these first two practices. I said, this is a great opportunity to first identify assumptions. So she's saying, the phones out and they're not paying attention, right? So the phone is out. That's the reality. The assumption, they're not paying attention. Right away. And it makes sense why she might think that because when many of us entered the workplace, a phone was not a work relevant tool. It is now, and we all use our phones, doesn't matter how old we are. But it takes a moment. Same thing with a laptop at a meeting, right? When you see a laptop, do you sort of stop and say, why do they have a laptop out, we're having a meeting? And then in the next moment, you might say, "oh right, they're probably using it for looking things up or taking notes." But with the phone, I asked her colleagues, "Is there another way to interpret what's going on that might adjust her lens? What could that phone be used for that wouldn't be rude, that wouldn't be not paying attention." And immediately her colleagues said, "Well, they couldn't be taking notes on it, or they could be looking up a term you're using to make sure they understand it. They could be looking up the pharmacy hours, etc. etc." So it was a little thing, but it was a big thing. It was a nudge for them to think about the fact that maybe this ax that was so concerning and upsetting to them meant something totally different to the people doing it. And that is exactly what we mean by adjust the lens. So the tool here is to get curious rather than judgmental when you're hit with the behavior in the workplace you don't understand. So rather than immediately assuming it's rude or counterproductive or off-task or whatever it might be, asking, can you help me understand? Can you help me understand why the computers are out? And then maybe there's a great answer and you're satisfied with it? Or maybe you think, no. Or as a younger person, your boss asks you to do something a certain way, come into the office for something you think can be done a different way or call someone on the phone when you think an email or a text would be just as effective, instead of frustration, stepping back and saying, can you help me understand why you think that would be the most effective way to do it? Because you're likely to learn something and regardless, you're not judging, you're trying to approach that in a more collaborative way. So that leads us to practice three, which is all about, we've hopefully broken down some of that tension, but now how do we tap into the benefit, the growth, the opportunity. Building trust is our third practice. Many of you are probably familiar with the term psychological safety. So psychological safety in the workplace is what we're talking about here. You've got to create a culture and norms where everyone, regardless of age, can focus on shared interests and goals, and that they're pointed towards the same vision. But we open up the opportunity for people to realize there's probably a lot of different ways to reach that vision, in that there's a lot of growth and learning possible. We want everybody in that environment to feel safe asking for help, and also contributing ideas. So that's a great question for you to think about.
Does everybody on your team feel welcome doing both, regardless of age? Do older people feel comfortable asking for help? And not just with things like technology, but that's a pretty easy one to think about. Or do they feel like younger people will judge them for being outdated if they ask for help?
This happened to us at our university when we all went remote on Zoom. We had people who absolutely needed help. I asked my students for help because I'm very comfortable doing that. But a lot of people I work with were not. And then how about sharing ideas. Older people are often very confident in sharing ideas. Maybe younger people feel like they're going to be perceived as entitled if they do because of the culture we've set up, and what are we missing because of it? So it's really all about fostering that environment where we understand that people have things to contribute, and also just getting interested in maybe the different ways in which we all could solve a problem or help us reach our goals. And that leads us to our final practice, which is called expand the pie. We snagged that from negotiations. It's not a generational competition. And in fact, what we hope you can do, that probably many other people are not, is proactively think about what might be possible if we were welcoming different ways and strategies for getting to the finish line. If we were interested in learning how people a lot older and younger than us would approach a task. In the book, we share a story of a lab where a part broke, and the leader said, "I don't care how you do it, but we need to get this part replaced no later than tomorrow." And one of the older lab techs went in and kind of MacGyvered up and created apart from different parts, because that was his mentality, like a make do mentality he had learned growing up, and somebody else on the team rush-ordered one from Amazon that showed up that afternoon. So both solve the problem, but they were different. And it's not right or wrong. It's just different. So trying to really seek out ways, whether this is through mutual mentoring, whether this is through, we have lots of tools and suggestions in the book around creating Lunch and Learns where people will teach on skills that other people might love to learn but were afraid to ask or didn't know if anyone could help them with. And those things exist in every generation.
How do the expertise from different ages and generations combine to create learning opportunities?
This is the mantra of Gentelligence, that every generation has something to both learn and teach, and how do we normalize that in our teams and organizations? How do you make it absolutely comfortable for a leader who is older to stick their head out the door and say, "Anybody know how to use this particular software? Because I would love to learn, or we need someone who will do it?" Or how do you make it acceptable for a younger person to say, "My way of doing this isn't working. I would love to see how someone else would approach it." And that's my key tool for these last practices is that question, how would you do it? Imagine the power of a younger person asking an older person, "I have this challenge. How would you do it?" Imagine what happens, right? The older person feels respected. They feel their experiences being valued and leveraged. They're in a position to mentor and give advice. And the younger person, of course, is learning but also building respect and connection as someone who's interested in learning from someone older than them. And imagine an older person asking a younger person.
There's a tough challenge we have, what should our return to the office policy be, and what if you asked a younger Gen Z or millennial. Millennials are at the oldest 40 this year, 41. So not always, depending on the age of the millennial, what if you said, "How would you craft a return to the office policy?" You're not telling them they get to do it necessarily, but you're asking for that input. And what I've seen happen over and over again is that simple question. People feel heard. And they feel valued. And they feel like someone's interested in their point of view, which is, of course, leadership 101. And then this great thing happens where once your input is asked for, you're much more interested in listening to that other person, their feedback, their advice, their questions, their guidance, and that's where that intergenerational learning and collaboration comes from. And that's where the opportunities of Gentelligence sit.
How do you make sure your job postings don't contain age bias? How do you tap into all generations as potential talent pipelines? The teaming questions, how do we create effective multigenerational teams? How do you lead as a younger person leading someone older?
That's about 40% of the population has a boss who is younger than them right now. And vice versa, as an older person, how do you lead a generation and your team that you may not completely understand or feel you're effectively leading? And then these things about culture and all of the trends in that nebulous future of work that generations are an important part of.
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