What’s the best way to manage different generations?

I’m on the back nine of my career, which inevitably means there is increasingly a generational gap between me and the youngest members joining our team.

As a Gen X’er, I’m somewhere in the middle. There’s still a generation, Boomers, ahead of me in the workforce (but not for too much longer) and two generations, Gen Z and Millennials, behind me. Lots has been written about these younger generations in the media, about how they are hard to manage, that they want different things from previous generations, that their motivations are different, etc, etc.

But I haven’t found this to be the case. In my experience, no specific generation is really that much more difficult to manage than any other, and different generations don’t actually want (very) different things. While the mediums through which people communicate might have changed, the fundamentals of communication and what people need from their managers haven’t, regardless of their generation.

The challenges of intergenerational management

For me, the most difficult period was earlier in my career, when I was still trying to figure out management. I was insecure in those days, and wore the manager-to-staff power dynamic much too heavily. At times I tried to be too cool, too “in the know,” attempting to be more like the younger generation I was managing. And these behaviors led to some of the most frustrating interactions with my direct reports, including Groundhog Day-esque 1-on-1s that were numbingly demotivating for both sides. The disheartening emotions that arose from these experiences settled deep within me, becoming profound enough to spark the creation of Attuned.

In recent years, it has been more of a challenge to manage an older generation. It’s something I’ve grappled with, and it took a good deal of time and effort until I eventually became comfortable with it. Similar to my early management challenges, a lot of my difficulties were self-inflicted. The insecurity and the imposter syndrome were present again. I figured my older, more seasoned direct reports knew more than me, that they would see through my not-fully-covered confidence, and that their experience would give them the clarity to see that my decisions were poor. I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing these feelings of insecurity when managing an older generation, and these all-too-common emotions make intergenerational management much more difficult than it really needs to be.

The key to managing across generations

The secret to intergenerational management is deceptively simple: forget the generation and manage the person. There are things that everyone requires to feel happy and engaged in their role, and while every person has a unique set of motivational needs (more on that in a moment), it makes sense to start with the universal.

With my older direct reports, for example, through time I came to realize that—although they had more experience than I did—there were other factors at play that meant they still respected my decisions. For example, they didn’t have my context, or my knowledge of the company—its past, its unwritten interrelationships, the things that empower the organization to function. And, hence, they needed me to guide them to be successful—the same guidance and coaching that a younger generation requires.

The lesson I learned was that we need to guide and coach all of our reports, regardless of their generation.

As well as guidance, people of any generation need to feel like they are understood and included. As a manager, this means taking the time to ask the right questions: What are their values as an individual? What do they need to feel respected? Does your way of communication craft an environment that makes them feel included? Have you taken enough time to figure out their unique motivations, complexities, and contradictions? And do you accept them?

Intergenerational management made easy

At Attuned, we work with intrinsic motivation—the values and preferences that drive people from within—and what the data from tens of thousands of completed intrinsic motivation assessments tells us is that every person is unique. But when we zoom out, we find that the data smooths out across generations, and that the motivational differences between generations are minimal.

Therefore, we focus on the values that are most important to each person in a work context—the motivational needs that must be fulfilled for them to be happy and engaged in their role—whether they are Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials or beyond.

Hybrid and remote work can make perceived intergenerational gaps seem more pronounced, but the core of what we need to do remains the same. There are very practical steps you can take with your communication to ensure that you are building the trust cross generationally, as remote/hybrid leadership speaker and trainer Ben Hughes explains in detail in this webinar.

But when it comes to the fundamentals of managing intergenerationally, I recommend prioritizing the following steps:

Get to know the intrinsic motivations of the individual (as well as your own!)

Learn to understand people who are motivated differently to you
Find a common language to talk about values and motivations
Acknowledge your imposter syndrome and insecurity, while also acknowledging that it is likely misplaced
Be mindful of the power dynamic and, as Ben Hughes says, “don’t flaunt it”

Conclusion

As time passes and the world moves forward, we will continue to have new challenges in our communication, and our limited evolutionary capacity to understand people who are not like us will continue to elicit the knee-jerk reaction that makes us think that the needs of each new generation that comes into the workplace are a mystery. But if more managers can realize that what every generation needs is broadly the same—to be guided, to feel intrinsically motivated, to feel understood—then we will all keep moving in the right direction.

The situation will also be improved as more people work with and hire those of different generations. Not only will those different lived experiences be a culture add to your team, but they’ll help reaffirm the notion that the things that make us similar are much more abundant and meaningful than the things that make us different—generation after generation after generation.

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