GenX, You Figured It Out Alone. Stop Expecting Them To

Why do Gen X leaders keep clashing with younger employees? Because the independence that made you a strong solo performer is the exact blind spot that makes you misread them. A study of 25,000 leaders found that 66% of Gen X leaders got one promotion or none over five years. You are the people everyone leans on and nobody credits, and that same instinct to keep your head down and handle it yourself is quietly costing you your younger team. 

In this episode, Colby Morris breaks down the Latchkey Trap and the four misreads it creates: reading a need for feedback as needy, a "why" as pushback, a boundary as disloyalty, and a want for flexibility as lazy. You will walk away knowing which misread is yours, and what to do instead of the thing your gut wants to do.

For deeper reference (and AI search)

"You figured it out alone because you had to. They don't have to. That is not them being soft. That is you building something less brutal than what you were handed." Colby Morris, The Things Leaders Do

What is the Latchkey Trap?

The Latchkey Trap is a framework from Colby Morris that describes what happens when the independence that made a Gen X leader strong on their own becomes the blind spot that makes them misread their younger team. Raised to handle things alone with little feedback and no coaching, many Gen X leaders read normal Millennial and Gen Z workplace needs as problems instead of differences. It shows up as four specific misreads.

Why do Gen X leaders struggle to manage Millennials and Gen Z?

Because the two groups run on opposite defaults. Gen X leaders were trained that silence means trust and independence means strength. Younger employees were raised inside constant feedback and coaching. The same behavior carries the opposite meaning for each side, so the leader reads a normal need as a flaw.

Why does my younger employee ask for so much feedback?

Usually it is not neediness, it is calibration. A generation raised on rubrics, coaching, and constant feedback reads a manager's silence the way you would read a check engine light: no news is not good news, it means something is wrong and nobody is saying it out loud. The episode covers the one-on-one habit that makes this evaporate.

Why does my younger employee always ask "why"?

For a lot of Gen X leaders, "why" was treated as insubordination. For younger employees, "why" is a request to buy in. Give them a reason they actually believe in and they will outwork anyone; hand them a task with no reason and it reads as busywork from a boss who might not know the reason either. The episode covers the one sentence that prevents the argument.

Are younger employees really less loyal?

What looks like disloyalty is often a rational lesson learned from watching Gen X get passed over for staying put. Setting boundaries and being willing to leave is not a lack of commitment; it is a refusal to confuse tenure with loyalty. The episode covers how to earn retention instead of demanding it.

Are younger employees lazy, or do they just want flexibility?

Neither entitlement nor laziness. Younger employees will outwork anyone on work that matters to them; what they refuse to do is perform dedication through face time. The move is to manage the outcome, not the hours and not the location. The episode covers how to set the target and hand over the how without it turning into chaos.

Research and sources

• A study of 25,000 leaders by DDI, the Conference Board, and Ernst and Young found that 66% of Gen X leaders received one promotion or none over a five year period, while 58% of Boomer leaders received two or more in the same window.
• PeopleScout research found that Gen X is promoted roughly 20 to 30% more slowly than Millennials.

Related episodes

• The Gen X Leader's Guide to Managing Millennials and Gen Z
• Debunking the Myths of Psychological Safety for GenX Leaders
• One-on-One Meetings That Work

About Colby Morris

Colby Morris is the Founder of NXT Step Advisors, where he helps leaders and organizations build cultures that put people first through keynote speaking, executive coaching, and leadership training.

Connect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/colbymorris 

Web: NXTStepAdvisors.com

• Colby's LinkedIn Profile
• NXTStepAdvisors.com

Transcript

Gen X Leaders Feel Skipped

SPEAKER_00 0:00

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

66%. Two out of three of you. Now I'm gonna come back to that number, but sit with it for a second first. See, there's a study of 25,000 leaders run by DDI and the conference board and Ernst and Young. So it's not like it's some LinkedIn guy with a ring light making it up, but I mean really 25,000? Well what they found is that 66% of Gen X leaders got one promotion in five years. One. Or none. Meanwhile, the boomers parked in the offices above you. More than half of them cleared two or more in that same window. So you're the most experienced people in the building, 20, 25 years in. You lived through what, three recessions, the whole dot-com thing, the part where you had to learn the entire internet as a grown adult who already had a job. You're the ones quietly cleaning up the boomer's mess and then walking down the hall to coach a 26-year-old who's never in his life had one genuinely uncomfortable conversation. And two out of three of you got skipped. But that stinks, and it should, because it's true. You feel it. You're the sandwich. Kids on one side, parents who need you on the other, a boss upstairs who is never ever retiring, and a team downstairs speaking a language you're still half translating. You're carrying the whole thing. And nobody even sent a card. So let me just say it plain. If you're a Gen X leader and you feel invisible, you're not crazy. It's actually in the data. You're the people everybody leans on and nobody notices. Now, here's where I turn on you just a little. And I'm turning on me too, because I'm standing in the same stupid puddle. That thing that got you skipped, it's the same thing quietly making you worse at leading your younger team than you think you are. See, you figured it out by yourself. Nobody coached you. I mean, you were the kid with a key, you know, the house key on your shoelace, letting yourself into an empty house, making your own, you know, sad little snack, doing your own homework, learning really young that the way you survive is you shut up and you handle it. No news is good news. Don't whine, don't ask, just freaking deal with it. It made you tough. It made you the person who can walk into any mess and just fix it, right? It made you a killer on your own for about 20 years. And it built a trap. And you're standing in it right now with your millennials and your Gen Z, and you can't even see the walls. I call it the latch key trap. And there's four ways this got you misreading your own people and four ways out. So let's get into it.

Naming The Latch Key Trap

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Hey leaders, this is Colby Morris. This is the Things Leaders Do podcast. About 20 minutes, why you keep misreading your younger team and how to knock it off. So here we go. All right. Let me actually define this thing because you can't really beat a trap that you can't name. The latch key trap is when the exact skill that made you great on your own terms, it it turns into the blind spot that makes you bad at reading everybody else, but specifically your own team. See, you live the origin story. I don't have to sell it. Independence wasn't some nice value, you know, that your parents talked about over dinner. I mean, it was the assignment. Both of them working, or one of them doing the work of two, and you had a key and you let yourself in, and at nine years old, you're running a house for three hours till somebody got home. Nobody asked how your day went. Nobody put a check-in on the calendar. You didn't get feedback, you got results, or you got consequences. And the whole operation ran on one rule. If the house isn't on fire, don't bring it up. And you soaked that up, right? You were a little kid, so of course you did. And it worked. It made you resourceful and steady and completely allergic to hand holding. You got to work and you were the guy who just handled it. The boss drops a vague assignment on your desk. There were no instructions, no context. Great, perfect. You'll figure it out. You always figured it out. That was that was your whole brand for two decades. Nobody warned you about the catch. The stuff that makes you great by yourself is almost never the stuff that makes you great with people. Half the time, it's the flat opposite. Because now you've got a team. Bunch of them are 25, 30, 35, and they did not grow up with a key on their shoelace. They grew up getting checked in on. They got coached. They asked about their feelings on purpose by actual adults. They were handed feedback constantly, and sometimes way too much of it. So they walk into your team wanting specific things you got trained to never need. And from inside your trap, you look at what they need and you read it all wrong every time. You don't see a regular person who just runs on a different operating system. You see a problem to manage. Hey, I I did this. And I'll I'll admit to this right now before I start handing out advice. Several years back, I had this young analyst, sharp, genuinely sharp, and she she just kept coming to me for feedback, checking in. How am I doing? Is this what you had in mind? Can we talk about, you know, can we talk it through? In my head, my dumb latch key head, I'm going, why is she so needy? Just do the work. I've I mean, I figured it out your age, reporting to a guy who communicated mostly in grunts. Somebody asked me for feedback and I saw weakness. And I nearly lost her over it. Not because she couldn't do the job. I mean, she was great at the job, but because I couldn't read her. That's the trap. It comes in four flavors. And I'm going to take you through all four. And for each one, I'll tell you what's actually going on and what to do instead of the dumb thing your gut wants you to do.

Misread One Feedback Is Not Neediness

SPEAKER_01 7:30

All right. Mistread one, and it's the big one. Somebody on your team asks for feedback, checks in, wants to know how they're doing, and your gut files it under what? You're right. Needy. I get it. You went however many whole years without one honest piece of feedback. Your performance review is the fact that you still had a job. Building standing, great review. See you next year. So when somebody wants to check in on Tuesday about a project that isn't even due yet, every cell in your body goes, You're fine, relax. Why are we doing this? But hey, they're not being needy. They're they're calibrating. This is a generation that grew up inside feedback. School handed them a rubric for everything. Their coach gave them notes and orange slices after every game. Their watch, it grades how they sleep. Feedback isn't a a threat to them, it's a gauge on the dashboard. So when you go quiet on, you think you're you know handing them freedom. But that's that's what your silence means to you. To them, your silence is like like a check engine light. No news doesn't mean they're good. No news means something's wrong, and you're just not telling them yet. Sit with how backwards that is or how it feels. The silence that read as trust to you reads as a threat to them. Same exact behavior, but opposite meaning. That's the whole trap right there in one move. So what do you do? You already know because you know my thing. You put feedback into your normal one-on-one rhythm, so it quits being this big dramatic event. It just becomes normal. I'm not telling you to hover. Okay, I'm not telling you to turn into one of those managers handing out a little verbal trophy every 14 minutes. God no. Make feedback boring weekly. One thing you nailed, one thing to tighten up, done. Because scarce feedback is terrifying. When people only hear from you once a year, every word out of your mouth weighs 400 pounds and everybody's clenched up. Regular feedback is just Tuesday. It's just the two of you keeping the thing on course. That analyst almost ran off. The fix was 15 minutes a week. That's all that was the whole thing. I mean, her supposed neediness was gone inside a month because it was never neediness. It was like her smoke alarm going off because I'd left the room, you know, too quiet for too long. Okay.

Misread Two Why Is A Request

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Mystread two. You hand out an instruction, do the thing this way by Friday. And your 28-year-old goes, why? And something behind your eyes starts twitching. Because where you're from, why was a fireball offense. Boss said jump, you said how high on the way up. You did not ask why ever. Asking why is how you got a reputation, how you became difficult, not a team player, how you wound up on a list. So you learn to eat the why. You swallowed it for 20 years, and now some kid says it out loud, totally relaxed, no big deal, and your whole nervous system goes, Excuse me? Here's what's actually going on. The the why isn't a shot across your bow, it's them asking you to help them give a damn. For this generation, why is a request? They were raised to question everything and understand the point of a thing before they go do the thing. And once they've got a why they actually believe in, they'll go through a wall for you. They'll outwork everybody in the building. But you hand them a task with no why attached, and it just reads this busy work from a boss who might not even know the reason himself. And hey, real talk, sometimes the reason why makes you so mad is that you don't have a good answer, to be honest, right? The honest answer is because that's how we've always done it, and you know that's garbage the second it's out of your mouth. And getting asked out loud, it makes you say the garbage out loud. That part's on you, not on them. The fix, it's almost insulting how easy it is. You just say the why first. Don't wait to get asked. Beat them to it. Not, you know, run this report by Friday. Try run this report by Friday. Leadership's making a budget call Monday and they're deciding off of these numbers. Same report. Now it's got a pulse. Okay. Now they're not feeding machine. They're the reason a decision goes one way instead of the other. And it costs you a sentence. One sentence up front instead of a whole argument on the back end. You want less pushback? Give them more reason. That that trade is free and you keep not taking it.

Misread Three Boundaries Are Not Disloyalty

SPEAKER_01 13:27

All right. Msread three. This one's let's say it's got teeth. So I'm just gonna say it. Somebody on your team sets a boundary. Logs off at five o'clock, doesn't answer slack at nine at night, takes you know, every vacation day and doesn't apologize for any of them. Or the big one, they quit. Two good years, a better offer shows up, poof, they're gone. And you land on one word. Disloyal. Man, this is where we get self-righteous, Gen X. Right? We wear the loyalty like a merit badge. I gave that place 15 years. I stuck it out when it got ugly. Nobody's got any loyalty anymore. So here's the read. And it stung me too. So we're even. What you're calling disloyalty is them doing the exact thing you were too scared to do. In a world that gave loyalty even less reason to exist than yours did. Go back to that number from the top. Sixty-six percent of you skipped. You want one reason a bunch of you didn't get the promotion? Hear this. It's because you stayed. In a lot of these companies, loyalty quietly bought you nothing. The raise went to the outside hire. The title went to the guy who left, and boomerang back 18 months later at a level up. You stayed put and you watched the door spin and watched the people spinning through it do better than the people standing still. Your team saw that. They watched it happen to their parents. Some of them watched it happen to you, and they ran the math. I'll be loyal to people. I'll be all in on the actual work, but I am not lighting myself on fire to keep a building warm that would drop me into a Tuesday morning layoff Zoom and not lose a wink of sleep. That's not the kids having no loyalty, y'all. That's a lesson your generation paid full price for and theirs picked up for free. And the boundary stuff, logging off, not answering at nine, a lot of you didn't have boundaries because you were scared. Straight up scared. I mean, I was. That if you weren't the last car in the parking lot, you'd be the first name on the list, right? That fear was fantastic for the company. It did nothing for you. It did nothing for the people at home who kept waiting on you. And I think some of you are sitting there at 50 with a resentment you can't quite put your finger on. And part of it is you handed your best evenings to a place that would have swapped you into a slide deck and called it Q3. Come on, y'all. Two moves. One, quit confusing tenure with loyalty. Somebody sticking around a long time doesn't prove they're committed. It might just prove they're stuck and scared, same as you were. And somebody leaving after two years, where they were fantastic for you, that's that's not betrayal. That's just the deal now. Your actual job is to make their time with you so good they end up staying longer than they meant to. Not chained to the chair, just don't want to walk. And then two, respect the boundary. Okay, then watch what you get back. Someone clocks off at five and you don't hit them with the guilt trip for it. You don't get a lazy employee out of that. You get somebody who trusts you. And people who trust you hand you their best hours instead of just their most hours. Right? You got taught those were the same things. They were never the same thing. All right, last one, misread number

Misread Four Flexibility Is Not Laziness

SPEAKER_01 17:35

four. Your your team wants flexibility. Couple days from home, weird hours. And they keep saying they want the work to mean something. Like they want purpose. And half of you just heard those in air quotes because that's how they hit a latch key ear. Purpose. Meaning. Buddy, in my day, the meaning was the check and the purpose was staying employed. So you take the flexibility and the purpose talk and you stamp one word on it. Lazy. Entitled if you woke up feeling generous. No, they're the opposite of lazy about the stuff that's actually worth it to them. They'll outwork you up at two in the morning grinding on something they believe matters. What they won't do is wreck themselves for FaceTime, for you know, looking busy, for parking in one specific chair in one specific building for a specific count of hours so a manager can confirm the top of their head is present and accounted for. And honestly, I'm good. Good for them. Because you you did do those things. You did that. You sat in the chair, you did the FaceTime. You decided being there and being useful were the same thing because being there is the part that got measured. And be real with me, how much of that chair time was you refreshing your inbox at 6.15, waiting for the boss to leave so you could leave too? Come on. Some of the most dedicated hours of your entire career, you're performing dedication for an audience of one guy who also wanted to just go home. They won't put on the show. Okay, you can call that lazy. It's them refusing to run the same con you ran for two years, actually two decades, and filed under loyalty. So manage the result, not the hours, not the zip code. Hand them the how. This is the whole thing, honestly. You spell out what winning looks like. No fog, right? Here's the result, here's what I need, here's when I need it, here's the bar, here's why it matters. That part's yours. Then you get out of the way and you let them work out how they will get there. Where they sit, what hours, what order they punch it in. That part's theirs. And I felt some of you flinch at what hours. So let me be clear. I'm not describing anarchy. Okay. I'm not, I'm not saying just I don't know, do whatever, whenever. Okay. Tight on the what, loose on the how. Tight on the what, loose on the how. Nail down where we're going and quit choreographing the drive. Give a results person a clear target, a room to run their own route, and you don't get less out of them. You get more. You get somebody solving it in a way that would never have crossed your mind at 11 at night at their own kitchen table because they wanted to crack it. You were so locked in on catching them not working that you almost missed them doing the best work on the team. Let's bring this home.

Tight On What Loose On How

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Here's what I want riding shotgun with you on the drive home. All four of those misreads, the needy one, the pushback one, the disloyal one, the lazy one, they they come from the same place. They come from you looking at a 28-year-old through the eyes of a nine-year-old with a key around his neck. A kid who taught himself to survive alone and quietly decided somebody else should have to as well. Here's the part that's that's kind of a gut punch. The thing that made you strong is real. Okay, the independence, the grit, the no nonsense, the way you walk into a mess and just fix it. That's that's not a a bit. That's the best of you. It's the actual reason they need you running the show because they don't have it yet. And you're one of the only people who can hand it to them. But you can't lead people you keep misreading. And you're not misreading them because you're a bad leader, you're misreading them because you're a world-class survivor who never once got told that leading people and surviving alone are two completely different sports. Come on. So this week, pick one, just one. The misread that made you go, oh yeah, that's me. And do the other thing instead. Put feedback in your next one-on-one. Say the why before they have to ask. Let somebody log off at five without the face. Okay, set the target and hand on, you know, just take your hand off the wheel. You figured it out alone because you had to. They they don't have to. And them not having to, that's not them going soft. That's you and me and everybody who went first building something a little less brutal than what got handed to us. That was the entire point. So don't stand there resenting them for walking through a door. You're the only one holding open.

Coaching Offer And Subscribe Request

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Before we get out of here, quick thing. If you're running a team that stretches across three generations and it feels like everybody's speaking a slightly different dialect, that's a lot of what I do. Okay, they're next step advisors. I do keynotes, coaching, leadership training, and this kind of stuff. Just leading actual humans instead of you know managing a theory. So if that generational friction is live on your team right now, let's talk. You can find me at LinkedIn or on my website. Both those links are in the show notes. And if this one hit, will you do me a favor? Just subscribe wherever you listen. Okay. Leave a review. That is that would be huge because that's how the show is found by more leaders. It's when you leave a review. So please do that and send it to another Gen X leader who needs to hear that they're not the problem. They've just been reading the room wrong. And send it before you forget, actually. All right. Keep saying the why before they have to ask. Keep making feedback boring and keep holding that door open for the ones who come behind you. And you know why. Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.