Have you ever found yourself baffled by the motivations of your older or younger colleagues, or frustrated with how they show up in the workplace? Join us as we navigate the nuanced choreography of guiding a team bursting with generational diversity. As we peel back the layers of generational values, we confront the cultural and era-specific influences that have shaped workplace expectations and behaviours. With a focus on developing an empathetic and adaptive leadership style, we explore person preference and communication, and how to weave that into the fabric of a team.
Are you able to create support and motivation to get the best engagement and effort from a multigenerational team?
If you are hoping for strategies and awareness that that will resonate with and inspire every member of your team, you should give this a listen.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Have you ever found yourself baffled by the motivations of your older or younger colleagues, or frustrated with how they show up in the workplace? Join us as we navigate the nuanced choreography of guiding a team bursting with generational diversity. As we peel back the layers of generational values, we confront the cultural and era-specific influences that have shaped workplace expectations and behaviours. With a focus on developing an empathetic and adaptive leadership style, we explore person preference and communication, and how to weave that into the fabric of a team.
Are you able to create support and motivation to get the best engagement and effort from a multigenerational team?
If you are hoping for strategies and awareness that that will resonate with and inspire every member of your team, you should give this a listen.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are going to be talking about the complexity of leading a team when you have members of different generations in it, and how you go about doing that. So we'll jump into GA's story. He writes I have been in many different management positions over my career as a leader. There are some things I enjoy and some things that I find frustrating. One of the things that is frustrating me more and more is working with younger generations of workers. I understand that they grew up differently and I want to respect everyone, but honestly, I find it hard to not see them as lazier, more entitled and more sensitive. I'm not basing this on one person, but on a multitude of experiences with lots of different staff. I feel like I waste a lot more time trying to deal with them and their emotions than I ever used to with previous generations. I have opened a, trying new ways to work with them and want to know what would be most efficient. So thank you first of all for sharing that.
Speaker 2:
Ga and I have talked to many different leaders and staff and there is a lot of focus on trying to figure out how we can most effectively work with this dynamic that happens when you get people of all different ages coming in to work in the same place. And there are a couple of things I want to start with as we go into this conversation, and the first is that we're talking, obviously, very broad strokes about some of these concepts, so we can build some understanding, but ultimately, everything in this is generalized, and what you'll notice in this episode is what we're ultimately going to end up talking about is values and preferences, which are things we've discussed on the show before. You can go back to previous episodes and so, as much as we're going to talk about some of these broad strokes, the best thing you can still do is to really work with your team individually to figure these things out. Every staff is going to be different, every experience, every way, and so if you want to be an individualized and responsive leader, which I believe is the best way to lead, take this with a little grain of salt. Don't take it to mean that now you'll treat everyone under 20 in a certain way and everyone over 50 in a certain way. That's just not going to work for you.
Speaker 2:
So I see this very similar to how I see personality typology, which I like as a basic skill as well, in that it's great to have a generalized understanding of a group of people, what they might value, how they might want to react and interact to things, and so it's about understanding that preference as a base and then using that to build on your understanding. Maybe it helps you figure out the first thing you might want to try, and then you're going to again seek that feedback and figure out if that thing worked. So a great example for this is you're looking at these pieces of different generations, how to interact with them. You can take this as an idea, try it out with that group and see if it works or doesn't. We don't want to quarter in people on these assumptions and expectations, but to look at this whole idea, the first thing we're just going to talk about is the impact that your generation that you grew up in has on you, and especially in the workplace, because, we will admit, there are differences.
Speaker 2:
Of course. The world is constantly changing and there is a culture that you grew up in, in the location that you grew up in, that only existed in that way for a certain number of years. Technology changed the world, changed political pieces. All of these, of course, meshed into the culture that you lived in and you grew up in and you have these expectations. As that happens and everyone gets these we have an expectation from our culture Because in that culture we grew up in or that culture we grew up in the work world in, things happened in a certain way, for a certain reason. You were rewarded for certain things, you were penalized for other things and you build your concept of what work should be off of those ideas. The same way that if you grew up in a different country and you moved to the one where you currently live, you're going to have a different idea about how the world operated, what you could come to expect.
Speaker 2:
And maybe now that you're in a new country, you find yourself modifying your behavior to mesh, to blend in a little bit better, to balance that with the new culture you're in. Or, conversely, maybe you see people around you who have come from a different culture or a different country to where you are and you see them trying to find this balance of their culture to this majority culture that they're now finding themselves in. And as a leader, I know sometimes people can feel this. Maybe you were in an organization where you used to be more of the majority culture. Maybe your organization matched you a bit better that way and now you're in a different organizational culture and you're trying to figure out how to balance that out. And, of course, this all to say is is workplaces already have a very interesting situation with culture, in that we bring a variety of people who may or may not have a large amount of shared values, or might have quite different values, quite different experiences, together for a long period of time, working towards something that hopefully is important and valuable to them, and we're expecting them to figure out how to interact, and I will actually say that generally, the stronger your work culture is. So, if you've taken the time, you've maybe listened to some previous episodes and built a really intentional culture that has some of those structures, those expectations, the values, the ways that people can work together, it's actually going to lessen some of these other culture clashes because you have a sense as a staff member, as a leader, how to interact and why and what's important, and so it helps you move away from maybe these other cultures that you're unconsciously part of to this very intentional one your workplace. So the first thing I'm going to suggest is look at your organizational culture and how that might be supporting you in this process or maybe hindering it. Maybe it makes it a bit more complex because of how your culture is.
Speaker 2:
Of course, our culture is made up of individuals and we're talking about individuals of different generations. So we should go just for a really brief dip into some of those motivators and supports and communication preferences of each of the generations in the workplace, just to get a little quick sense of them. So, of course, you have your baby boomers. So generally they're going to value stability, team cohesion, this steady professional development, and their preferred communication is usually more structured emails, phone calls. Next you go on to Generation X and they were placing more value into the work-life balance, into adaptability, into autonomy, and their communication was concise and direct. Millennials continue on valuing that work-life balance and, with that, starting to care more about purposeful work and personal growth, and they tend to like more of an open, collaborative communication style and they might use a variety of technology to do so. And then, finally, generation Z tend to revalue more of this entrepreneurial mindset, digital integration and this quick and diverse career advancement. They're also generally looking for meaningful work and they want quick feedback. They tend to prefer instant messaging and more visual communication.
Speaker 2:
Now, if you want to learn more about this, that was a very brief summary. There is a lot of information about this online and so I don't want to go too deeply into these points. But even from that very brief summary, you can probably hear some different values happening, and we've talked before. When you have different values, it's quite possible for those values to clash. Not saying that one is good or one is bad, but if you have a generation, for example, that values more autonomy and a generation that values more collaboration, there's going to be a point when those two generations come up to each other and say, kind of have to have this arrangement or agreement of what is this? What are we actually going to agree? We value in this workspace and I actually want to add one more generational layer to this discussion. I'm actually going to take it back even one more generation to the traditionalists, and I don't think that there's too many of these people in the workforce anymore. They'd be getting quite old. But what I want to mention, they have the.
Speaker 2:
Their values were more around loyalty, discipline, hard work and a respect for authority. Preference of communication was face to face, and even though the individuals might not be working anymore. I think it's important to mention because the foundations of our corporate world, I find, are still very heavily rooted in some of these concepts. If you think about very hierarchical structures, the concept of you come to work, your boss tells you what to do, you do your work, all of those pieces are quite a traditional spew of the workplace. And so bringing this up because you might see a culture clash, not only obviously between, say, a leader and a staff members, individuals but also within the workplace, because we've also seen a trend of workplaces that are focused more on probably a younger generational value set, that they're more purpose driven, that they're looking for more collaboration, less hierarchy.
Speaker 2:
Talked a little bit about this before. Those pieces are going to also influence your culture. Might have been influenced by who founded the company, how long ago, some of the organizational values. But as a leader or as a staff member in a company, you may also find it personally jarring if your organization is valuing just a different set of values than you do. That could because of generation or it could be in a more general sense, and so, as a leader, you want to consider this, you want to think about sort of people I'm serving and for myself, are we connected to this value or are we having a harder time with it?
Speaker 2:
I remember talking to a staff member actually, who had come. She was a little bit older, had come from very hierarchical corporate world for a long time and they were very structured companies where you did hard work and you did what you were told and you went home at the end of the day. And she is now in a more purpose-based organization, a little bit younger, who was really focused on some of these pieces of less hierarchy, more collaborative, more bringing your whole self to work, and she actually found it quite frustrating because her whole experience had been around these other components and that's how she saw the workplace. That was her work culture and so for her it was actually even fitting into this environment. She felt pressured to follow the values of the organization and she really had to work with that and see how it compared to her generational values and mindset. Not that either was a good or a bad thing, but this is how that culture clash can happen within that.
Speaker 2:
So there's a couple steps I'd focus on. We'll keep this nice and simple, and the first is just take some time to reflect and understand some of the components of let's start with the organizational culture that you might find familiar to you, some of the components that might feel more jarring or different from you. And what does that mean to you as a leader? Do you find it easy to go along with the values that are maybe more similar to your generation? They probably feel more comfortable and that's probably the way you want to communicate. So, if you are continuing to reflect on this and you're thinking about your interactions with these younger employees now, maybe you've done some research as well into what some of those generations might value more.
Speaker 2:
Of course, it's natural for you to probably have communicated from your culture, from your set of values, and it was more challenging to communicate in their way. And so, even just starting to think about these pieces what was really working well and why, and what hasn't been working well and what can we do with that and again, I like to put the onus for this on the leader, therefore the responsibility for the health of the relationship. And so, as a leader, if I know that I was probably communicating more in maybe this autonomous, direct way, and now I have these younger staff who are looking more collaborative and purpose-driven work. Okay, how could I communicate with them in a way that's more what they prefer? Because the reality is, of course, we all have preferences and it is the leader's responsibility to really be able to speak with those preferences and build a structure that works for the team member, that works for that staff. So these younger staff, I can guarantee, can do hard work.
Speaker 2:
When you figure out exactly that right combo of motivation and support that they need and this is, of course, extra work for you it creates a heavier oneness and I do believe it is very, very worth it. And, like I mentioned before, this of course starts with this general idea of generations and will need to be individualized as well to be really effective, because you'll still have, of course, two different staff members that could be the exact same age down to the day, but they can have different preferences and needs for that motivation and support. So, really working with that, I really encourage you with this to start having more of these discussions. I don't think it's a bad thing to be able to discuss in the workplace and staff meetings create some of this meaningful conversation, because if you just try to ignore it and treat all your staff the same, assume that they will have the same values, the same generational perspective, then you're gonna end up with results that aren't as effective because they're not actually responsive to those individual needs, to what's happening for different people.
Speaker 2:
So, ga, I know that doesn't fully answer your question. Probably there's probably a little bit more complexity to the different staff you're working with and how you've interacted with them and how you would like to interact with them. And I know it can be really easy to just get frustrated and say they are lazier, they're entitled, they're not doing the work, they're not motivated. And I would really encourage you which I think you are doing because you've written into the show and you're talking about how you don't wanna have that perspective to take that time to really pull back your perspective, understand it, understand the organizational perspective and then be able to meet them where they're at.
Speaker 2:
And as always, of course, I will be following up with you to make sure that I have answered your question, to continue this conversation and, of course, as a thank you for writing in, if you would like to write in your story your question, I would love to have it. You can find the link for that in the description below, and if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I wanna thank you so much for listening to the show, to engaging today, to hearing my millennial perspective of all of this. If you have a different perspective, I would, of course, love to hear it and to continue having these discussions, to continue thinking about what you can truly do as a leader to meet your people where they're at so you can really support them, and that you guys all get the best results. So thank you so much and have a great week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.