Today’s managers are stretched to capacity—navigating new ways of working, riding an economic rollercoaster, racing to catch their teams up to quickly advancing technology. Underlying all of this change is a reality adding even more complexity: the most age-diverse workforce in American history.
At a time when effective teamwork is becoming increasingly critical to business success—with recent Deloitte research finding that collaboration drives significant gains in performance and innovation—managers are stymied by building and leading diverse teams. Deloitte found that just 6% of organizations believe their leaders and managers are effective at bringing together workers across generations.
It’s a reality leadership development coach Stefanie Adams knows firsthand. Adams, chief empowerment officer of WNY People Development, says that when post-COVID regrouping collided with the entrance of Gen Z into the workforce, clients started coming to her “completely bamboozled.”
“They were saying, ‘How can we fix Gen Z? What’s wrong with them?’ ”
While Gen Z—typically considered those born between 1997 and 2013—often is the target of headlines decrying generational conflict in the workplace, the reality is, Adams says, each generation has faced similar criticism when its members entered the workforce.
“There’s always been pushback, always been a fear of people doing things differently than had been done,” she says.
To reduce friction from the next stage of this evolution, HR has a critical role to play—in part, by educating their workforces about where differences among generations actually originate from: individual upbringings that are largely influenced by societal shifts.
Adams points to Baby Boomers: Most were raised in households where military experience was common, leading to a generation accustomed to a top-down, “command-and-control” style of leadership, which they brought with them into the workforce. Over time, family-rearing approaches shifted, and parents began encouraging more freedom of thought within the household—leading to millennials who often question the “why” in a workplace and, successively, Gen Zers who want to know both “why” and how they can challenge decisions and norms.
Older employees may criticize Gen Z for their higher expectations about the employee experience, but Adams says, it’s important to understand their upbringing: When three Gen Z friends want to order food, one can have McDonald’s, another Arby’s and another Wendy’s—all delivered with the touch of a button.
“They have lived a fully customizable life,” she says. “When they come into the workplace, they want to customize how they spend their time, and even what they do—marketing one week and IT the next.”
While that may seem aberrant to some workers, managers and leaders need to show their workforces that “just because somebody is doing something different doesn’t mean they’re doing it incorrectly.”
A heightened need for listening
This “historical context” each generation brings to the workforce should be a critical component of manager training, which Adams says likely needs a refresh to ensure it addresses modern generational differences.
Active listening skills, in particular, will be key to leading age-diverse teams.
“It’s important managers can dive into what they don’t understand by being active listeners,” she says. “They have to hear what someone needs, why they need it and understand how their experiences may be contributing to that need.”
Cyril Boisard, director of people at employee experience platform Workleap, notes that often managers may be promoted to those roles because of their high performance and technical expertise. But that doesn’t mean they’re always equipped with the “social intelligence” required to manage and lead an intergenerational team effectively.
HR can help people leaders understand “they aren’t always going to have all the answers, they don’t need to react to every conversation, they need to listen in order to respond.”
It’s an approach that should be mirrored in organizational strategy, adds Tina Bennett, chief people officer at on-demand video platform Panopto. HR should guide their organization to “consistently ask and consistently action on the feedback given,” she says.
HR-led internal listening tours, employee pulse surveys, focus groups and more, Bennett says, can all help the organization stay in close touch with employee sentiment across age divides.
“Take on a spirit of curiosity,” she recommends.
Breaking generational labels
Such a mindset can help mitigate pervasive age bias, though people leaders may naturally, to some extent, project their own life experiences as they seek to lead intergenerational teams.
“My own mom calls me probably three times a week for something related to tech that’s freaking her out,” Adams notes. “People think that if you’re over 70, you don’t understand tech. That’s my life experience, but there are plenty of people this age who are awesome at tech.”
Managers and leaders, guided by HR and formal training, she says, need to be coached to “check the age biases that we all have.”
Boisard notes that generational labels aren’t only potentially incorrect—they’re also usually negative.
“Each time we look at a generation as a monolith,” Boisard says, “we’re focusing on everything bad about that generation.”
Soft skills: key to leading diverse teams
Yet, manager training must walk a fine line: showing people leaders that stereotypes aren’t always legitimate while still highlighting the differences that may exist among some employees of different generations.
“There are components of our generational differences that are creating conflict,” Adams says, particularly when it comes to technology, communication and leadership styles.
Helping workforces confront those, she notes, hinges on teaching managers, leaders and employees to see differences as strengths.
That may involve encouraging vulnerability. For instance, Adams says, when she launched a campaign for public office a few years ago, she enlisted the help of a tech-savvy millennial to show her how to leverage tools like Facebook Live and Canva. HR should emphasize the need for a growth mindset and guide managers and leaders to help their teams become more comfortable with “what they don’t know.”
This focus on improved soft skills for managers and leaders may not immediately soar with the rest of the C-suite and board—Adams notes that HR leaders are accustomed to pushback for investment in “the gushy stuff.” Yet, she says, teaching people leaders to more effectively manage the multigenerational workforce is a business imperative.
“We know that when our people feel seen and valued,” she says, “and when they’re supported by quality leaders who were trained to be leaders—not task masters—people have more meaning in their jobs, they stay longer, they’re happier and they’re more productive.”
Approaching intergenerational connection with intentionality
The effectiveness of working relationships among team members is also a predictor of retention and other positive business outcomes. That highlights why managers need to be equipped with the skills to bring employees closer together, Adams says.
“That’s how our teams become more effective,” she says.
Without an understanding of colleagues’ unique life experiences and generational influences, employees are likely to make assumptions: The 30-year company veteran is likely an inflexible “stick in the mud,” while the purple-haired new hire isn’t professional. And, Adams says, “familiarity bias” keeps employees largely sticking with colleagues who look like them.
“As leaders, we have to encourage people to sit in different spaces at the conference table, because otherwise, they’re going to be creatures of habit,” she says.
Adams recommends that HR guide managers and leaders to be more intentional about building connections among employees from different generations. Dedicate the first few minutes of a team meeting, for instance, to “pairing people up” across generations and prompting them to answer questions like “What was your first job? Who inspires you? What’s your guilty pleasure?”
“You may find out the Boomer and the millennial both love ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ ” Adams says. “Once we know basic things about who each other is, we are better able to take off those generational labels.”
The challenge of leading remote teams
The prevalence of remote and hybrid work is making connections among colleagues more challenging. By and large, employees are “losing their ability to communicate with one another,” she says, as the water cooler chat and small talk at the start of meetings has largely fallen by the wayside—even though it was critical to building connection.
“Those five minutes at the start of the meeting, where you chit chat around the table, doesn’t happen on Zoom: You pop in and go right to the agenda,” she says.
It’s going to take stronger leadership from managers, leaders and HR to set the standard, Adams says. For instance, open online meetings early and encourage employees to log on ahead of time to “recreate those casual conversations.” It’s in those simple “mini moments,” she notes, that employees can see what they have in common with other employees—versus what sets them apart—and recognize who they are instead of just what they do.
“We’ve got to learn to work together,” Adams says, “and that starts by breeding understanding, creating spaces for honest, authentic dialogue, and working to understand our differences.”
This is the third in a series about HR’s role in managing a multigenerational workforce. Read them all here, and make sure you’re receiving our newsletters so you don’t miss the next installment.
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