The Generation Gap

Recording with Captions:

Transcript:

[00:00:00] About a month ago, I saw a post on LinkedIn and it was about what employees want in a company based on their generation. Now on the surface, this might seem like a good idea. And you might think, well, it's really important that we understand what baby boomers want versus what millennials want.

[00:00:26] And in this infographic, which was done by Antonio Grasso, it talks about the best work traits of baby boomers, gen X, millennials, and gen Z. And then it discussed what they want from work. Now, why do I think this is not necessarily a good infographic to have? And why am I writing about it?

[00:00:50] Well, first of all, we're making some really, really grand assumptions about each one of these generations. And as someone who fits into the gen X group, I find that quite often, these stereotypes are inaccurate and misleading especially when they described me. And if we pigeonhole people based on their generation, and then we make statements like, "well, baby boomers want this and it's no wonder they don't understand millennials," then we start having the us versus them mentality in the office place.

[00:01:29] Now. It is important to understand that everyone comes from a different place. People have different cultural backgrounds. They have different ways that they grow up. They have different ethnic backgrounds. The differences are huge. And it's important to understand that in any organization and on any team, we can have quite a mix of personalities, of backgrounds, of places from which people are beginning their journey.

[00:02:02] And that is critical because as leaders we need to understand this concept. But what we cannot do is allow ourselves to get into a trap where based on someone's age we have made a decision about how they are going to show up and behave.

[00:02:21] So then I did the thing that I always say don't do I read the comments? And it was really interesting what impacted people based on this infographic and that the comments may actually prove my point about how dangerous these kinds of things can be. The comments ranged anywhere from "this is great," "something to think about," "something to keep in mind," to one comment that said, "this looks like a horoscope," and someone else who immediately jumped into correcting the ages for the different generations on the infographic.

[00:03:00] So you can see already just from this one post that had hundreds of comments where people were coming from, then you had people that were jumping in on, "but I'm millennial and I don't respond this way" or "I'm gen X and I don't respond this way." And it just created quite a profusion of mistrust in the information, because it was presented as if this is the way it is and that's the end of it. It was also quite difficult to track down the data source for this information that was used to create the infographic. And as you all know, I am big on citing our sources when we provide information.

[00:03:48] So let's dig into this idea of what do people want from work? Some of the things that came up were a loyal employer, a trustworthy employer an empathetic employer, and a culturally competent employer. Now all four of those were listed under different generations. But in reality, wouldn't we all want that in our employer? -Someone who was loyal, trustworthy, empathetic, and culturally competent. We may not know those words, or we may not describe it that way, but of course we want people that are running a company to be trustworthy and to understand that we're all coming from different places.

[00:04:33] It went on then to talk about different things about mentoring, and competency, autonomy and flexibility, and quite frankly, I didn't see anything in what they want from work that everyone doesn't want. Maybe if we ranked the list, some people would put other things at the top over others, but I think we all want respect and autonomy and flexibility and stability.

[00:04:59] And we all want to know that we're valued. We've talked about this quite a bit. So I think again, it's important to recognize that people come with differences, but I think it's really important that we don't use those generation labels to create generation gaps. They're already gaps. There are always gaps when you have people working together with a diverse age range. Those already exist. What we don't want to do is start putting labels on things because of someone's age and making assumptions that they are going to behave or show up a certain way just because they were born in that year.

[00:05:42] This is going to be a short blog for today because that is my input on that subject. We did put out a poll to find out what you want from our blogs in 2023, and I'm collecting all of that information and it looks like we want to hear more about the culture of work. So if you do have something specific that you want to hear about from us, please let us know by either sending me a message or participating in our poll.

[00:06:07] And if you fancy that you want to write, but you don't want to have your own blog that you have to keep up because it is a lot of work, we would love to hear from those of you that want to be a contributor to our blog. We allow for a contributor every month so that is 12 opportunities to participate with our blog series.

[00:06:27] With that this will be our last blog for 2022. We'll be taking a break the week of the new year. And we will be back here with new content from all of our contributors and from yours truly in 2023.

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INDRA A. BOOKS