As members of Generations X and Y face a workplace dominated by boomers, they are all starting to chafe. Some colleges are having trouble attracting, managing, and sometimes retaining people younger than Members of the younger generations grew up watching their parents sacrifice for their careers, and they want something different: balance and freedom and autonomy. Okay, Paul said decisively as he brought his seat into the locked and upright position in preparation for landing, how do we make this problem go away?
They will carry their generational personalities with them throughout their lives. In fact, when hard times hit, the generations are likely to entrench themselves even more deeply into the attitudes and behaviors that have been ingrained in them. Well, Paul said gruffly, breaking the silence. I guess we have to stop trying to figure out which generation is right and which one is wrong, and instead figure out how to manage them appropriately.
He paused. The plane touched down. Paul grabbed Forbes and Fortune from the seat pocket in front of him. David hid his People magazine under his coat. Lynne picked up her untouched copy of American Demographics. After all, it was way more fun to connect with the generations than to read about them, anyway.
Paul thrust out a hand holding his business card. We might just have the need for another conversation. We thanked Paul in unison, and he exited through the forward door with a wave. Now we all felt like a million bucks. A good conversation resulting in a multigenerational connection—what more could you ask for?
Not too long ago, David phoned Lynne, sounding really ticked off. When she asked him what was wrong, he admitted that he had just been reprimanded by one of our biggest clients.
Lynne was amazed. What on earth could you have done to have earned yourself a reprimand? And David explained that in order to kick off a new project, he had typed up a memo outlining the process, put the names of all the recipients at the top of the page, and sent it out to everyone. David was stupefied. Spelling and grammar in a formal memo he could understand, but alphabetizing? So he immediately called Lynne, hoping that as a Baby Boomer she could explain this confusing outburst.
The first words out of her mouth were, David! After she calmed down, she explained that the client team in this large, multinational company was a competitive group of high-achieving Boomers and Traditionalists who had had to fight and claw their way into the positions they held, and to them it was extremely significant where the names appeared at the top of the memo. A few days later, just as Lynne was feeling really good about having explained a bit of intergenerational business etiquette to a Generation Xer, she received a voice mail from our extreme Generation X video producer.
It sounded exactly like this:. He relished every time he had to replay it so he could actually translate some of the words for her. Meanwhile, all she could say was, "How much money are we paying this loser!
So now David was feeling really good about having decoded Generation X language for a Baby Boomer, until he found himself a couple of weeks later driving a fifteen-year-old Millennial baby-sitter home. She asked him where he and Sharon had gone for dinner that evening. David replied. She then explained very slowly and patiently to David that she had said phat, which to the Millennials means cool, at which point he realized he definitely was not. What just happened here? Clearly the Traditionalists at our client company just assumed David, a Generation Xer, understood their rules of etiquette.
Lynne, a Boomer, just assumed that Video Dude would know how to speak her language. And David, our ohso-hip-and-cool Generation Xer, just assumed he knew how to connect with any Millennial! These types of generational misunderstandings happen all the time on the personal level, and they can be extremely painful. But think for a moment about how costly they can be at the institutional level when companies have to set policies, develop procedures, and create everything from corporate cultures to compensation and benefit plans.
And think how challenging these collisions can be for managers who are charged with recruiting, retaining, managing, and motivating up to four generations in the workplace at once. From the public to the private sector, from the large, multinational corporation to the corner mom-and-pop shop, a conflict of earth-shattering proportions is unfolding right before our eyes.
The American business scene is being rocked by a series of generational collisions at every turn. The ramifications of these generational collisions at work include everything from reduced profitability to the loss of valuable employees, higher payroll costs, poor customer service, derailed careers, wasted human potential, and even potentially serious health problems caused by stress. Corporate cultures are being shaken to the very core as the cost of human capital spirals ever upward.
For years people have analyzed factors like age, life stage, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, educational background, thinking styles, Myers-Briggs profiles, and even signs of the zodiac to find ways to understand each other better. For the first time in our history, we have four separate and distinct generations working shoulder-to-shoulder and face-to-face in a stressful, competitive workplace.
The Traditionalists, born between the turn of the last century and the end of World War II — , combine two generations who tend to believe and behave similarly and who number about seventy-five million people. The Baby Boomers — are the largest population ever born in this country and number about eighty million. The Generation Xers — are a smaller but very influential population at forty-six million.
And the Millennials — represent the next great demographic boom at seventy-six million. While many generational experts have laid out age ranges to define the members of the generations, we believe these are just guidelines. There really is no magic birth date that makes you a part of a particular generation.
Generational personalities go much deeper. To understand who the generations really are and what makes them tick, one needs to adopt an ageless thinking attitude and look at how each generation shares a common history. The events and conditions each of us experiences during our formative years determine who we are and how we see the world. As a result of these events and conditions, each generation has adopted its own generational personality.
Icons can be people, places, or things that become reference points for a generation. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. Icons can also be actual events, such as the assassination of a president, D-Day, or the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Conditions are the forces at work in the environment as each generation comes of age. The cold war was a condition that permeated the youth of many Boomers, while Millennials born after will never know a world in which there were two different cities called East and West Berlin.
Economic upheavals are conditions that profoundly affect the wealth and health of our citizens and permanently shape our way of looking at the world. Those who lived through the Great Depression, or who were raised by parents who did, were changed forever by the fear of not being able to put food on the table. As these icons and conditions play out in the lives of each of the generations, they shape the attitudes, values, and work styles that the generations bring with them when they come to work every day.
These differences create the generation gaps that companies of all sizes across all industries are struggling to bridge. Too many employers and employees ignore these differences because they assume that since we all experience the same life stages, we are bound to see them the same way. The answer is yes, and no.
Yes, we all have certain life stages in common, but no, the different generations do not approach them the same way. According to the BridgeWorks Generations Survey, for example, the majority of Boomers plan never to retire.
They intend to keep working in some form or another for as long as they can be productive. The majority of Traditionalists, on the other hand, view retirement as a well-earned reward and look forward to the days when they never have to punch the time clock again.
Lancaster and David Stillman shed much-needed light on how to bridge generational gaps at work by understanding the differences that drive generations apart. Traditionalist employees with their "heads down, onward and upward" attitude live out a work ethic that was shaped during the dark days of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the eighty million Baby Boomers are at a crossroads, trying to balance their overwhelming need to succeed with their desire to slow down and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
They alternate between admiration and abhorrence for the chutzpah demonstrated by Generation Xers , who, in addition to feeling as if they have to prove themselves constantly, are chafing under the image of being overly ambitious, disrespectful, and irreverent.
Nipping at everyone's heels are the new kids on the block, the Millennials -- with their unique mix of savvy and social conscience, they promise to change yet again the landscape of the workplace. Whether you're a manager, an employee, an entrepreneur, or a skilled professional, you'll derive hands-on, take-home business benefits from understanding this vital form of diversity affecting today's high-performance workplace.
Diversity in the workplace -- United States. Intergenerational relations -- United States. Supervision of employees. More Details. Similar Series From NoveList.
Similar Titles From NoveList. Similar Authors From NoveList. Librarian Reviews. Published Reviews. Staff View. Grouped Work ID:. M5 b L36 0 0 a
0コメント