Hidden Challenges When Managing Teams with Generational Gaps | Avoiding Toxic Work Culture

There are huge generational gaps on most teams today, if not all teams.

Today's leaders basically need to be translators because for the first time in history, we have four generations that each make up a sizable percentage of the workforce.

The impact is that this creates a diverse spectrum of communication, preferences, core values, working styles, expectations, you name it. It creates a diversity throughout your team and throughout your company.

But before we continue, I just want to quickly introduce myself for those of you who are new to the channel. I'm Doug Howard, and I'm a leadership coach and consultant, and I teach leaders and managers how to increase your impact at every level of your organization, by teaching you the science behind understanding, motivating and influencing all types of people. I post new videos each week so make sure you hit that subscribe button.

Today's episode, we're going to take a close look at how generational gaps create hidden challenges on your team by walking through the unique differences between each generations preferences, when it comes to values, motivation and communication. Basically, how do they prefer to be led?

Then we're going to walk through a few real examples of how this manifests problems on your team. At the very end, I'm going to give you a resource that will help you manage the generational gaps on your team.

Let's take a look at the unique differences between each of these generations, just in case we're not on the same page.

Understanding Baby Boomers

The first generation is the Baby Boomers. These are people born approximately between 1946 and 1964. These people are in their fifties to seventies right now. Their values are optimism. They're team oriented, they value personal growth and they value a work centric identity. That means they're really feel connected with what they do.

When they introduce themselves to somebody, they say, hi, I'm Tim. I'm an engineer. Hi, I'm John. I'm an architect. That's part of their identity.

Their communication style. They prefer meetings, phone calls, emails. They value direct and personal interaction with people because that's how communication was for the majority of their lifespan, especially their core working years when they entered the workforce through the middle part of their career. We didn't have DMS and chats and all things like this. So they're really comfortable with that in-person face-to-face interaction.

As far as work expectations, go. They're very work centric. Work comes first and they value job titles. They won't admit this, but they're seeking acknowledgement and recognition. They want to be rewarded for the hard work they're putting in. They want to be recognized as an expert, if they're an expert in their field. They value that external validation, so to speak.

Understanding Gen X

Now the next generation is Gen X. These are the people born between 1965 and 1980.. These people range somewhere in their forties to fifties right now. This generation places a high value on work-life balance, independence, adaptability, skepticism.

Before I continue, just want to point, we already have a contrast in the two generations. The purse, the first-generation is very work centric. This one values work-life balance. So there's a contrast there. We're going to explain how this impacts your team here in a moment.

Their communication style. They prefer emails and instant messaging. You're starting to see this generation start to embrace technology a little bit. They value work efficiency.

As far as work expectations go, they value flexibility. They're going to want feedback and they're going to seek a good balance between work life and personal life.

Understanding Millenials

The next generation is Millennials, also known as Generation Y. These people are born between 1981 and 1996. They are values are diversity collaboration. They want to work with a purpose, they want their work to have meaning. They also, they value technology. They appreciate what technology can do.

As far as communication style goes, they prefer digital communication, social media, texting DM-ing. That's what they were most comfortable with.

Then for work expectations, there's a high value in work-life integration. So we're gen X wants work-life balance. Millennials don't really see a divide between work personal life and work. It's more like integrated. If there's a wifi set up nearby, they can work. Their also seeking purposeful work. They desire rapid career progression to. They don't see any reason why they can't, accelerate their careers faster. They don't look at time as the same way as a Baby Boomers do or as as Gen X does.

Understanding Gen Z

The last generation, the youngest one is Gen Z. These are people born between 1997 and 2012. These people, at least the ones that are in their workforce, they're in their twenties right now. Their values are they're very entrepreneurial.

They're digital natives. They grew up in a digital environment. This gives them an entirely different perspective than every other previous generation. Things like social media is a norm for them. They don't know life without it. They don't know analog life, so to speak. They have to intentionally learn these things and I'm going to come back to that idea. The other things, they value our authenticity and social consciousness.

As far as their communication style goes, they prefer everything fast. They want instant messaging. They like video content. They like collaboration tools like Teams and Slack and WhatsApp. Anything that has ongoing collaboration digitally.

As far as work expectations go, they're looking for diversity. They're looking for diverse opportunities. They place a high value on independence and working alone and working independently. They believe it or not do desire, clear expectations and mentorship, even if they don't show it. They like being guided. They like being told how to do things. But there's this dichotomy with them that they don't like seeking help at the same time. So it's an interesting contrast.

Gen Z seems to be the generation that most people in the workforce today are struggling to understand and struggling to figure out how to lead. So just while we're on the topic of Gen Z, if you're struggling to manage the younger generation, you should check out my episode called Bridging the Gap With Gen Z. I included a link in the description.

Let's take a step back to just look at the big picture of this. The implications of the generational gaps in the workforce can significantly impact various aspects of your team and your organization. I want to look at a few main areas.

The first one is productivity and efficiency. Something that's very important to engineers, right? Miscommunications, misunderstandings, and just differences in preferences of how you like to be communicated with. This all leads to reduce productivity.

To give you an example of this. If your team is scheduled to discuss a new project. Baby boomers, they prefer in-person discussions. Gen X-ers they prefer emails. Millennials, they prefer collaborative work for platforms like Slack. Gen Z, they prefer instant messaging. So we have some different communication styles with some slight overlaps between the four of them.

For you as the manager, deciding on the communication method becomes challenging and it potentially leads to miscommunication or only partial engagement from team members. Some members of your team might struggle to work cohesively, and that's going to impact the completion of the tasks and the projects on your team. Some people might not be getting the same messages just because you're not communicating it on a platform or in a method that, makes them feel engaged to it.

Now the next area is employee engagement and retention. If you don't address generational differences, it's going to lead to disengagement and dissatisfaction amongst your team. Especially with Millennials and Gen Z, because they won't hesitate to seek new opportunities if their needs for flexibility, purpose-driven work, and career growth if those needs aren't met. They're going to leave. They have no problem with that.

Let's take a look at knowledge transfer and succession planning, because this is something that unfortunately, I think a lot of managers don't think about because you're stuck in the now you're stuck trying to manage today's environment. You're not really thinking about the future because you don't have the bandwidth to. But big trend that's coming up on the horizon is Baby Boomers are continuing to retire. They're the ones that have all the product, knowledge and expertise. They're the ones that have that tribal knowledge that isn't really documented at most companies.

As a manager, you face the crucial challenge of how do you transfer that critical knowledge and experience to the younger generation before they retire, before they leave and take that knowledge with them. This was something I was up against as a manager. This is something that I'm hearing a lot of managers talking about struggling with right now. They're not thinking about it or they're realizing this is an upcoming problem on the horizon. They're just not sure what to do about it or how to handle it.

Lack of effective succession planning is going to result in permanently losing essential knowledge on your product, systems, and operations. That's going to be nearly impossible to recover from that. You're going to have huge productivity and efficiency losses, and it's going to be a very tough obstacle to rebuild from when that person just suddenly gives you two months notice that they're going to retire.

Not acknowledging these generational gaps also impacts innovation and adaptability on your team. These are two very important things for engineering teams, because we're talking about the dynamic changing work environments, that just proves one law of today's environment, which is change is the only constant.

This is why there's a lot of value in having different generations on your team. You're bringing varied perspectives and approaches to problem solving and to innovation. Instead of just getting the same stale ideas with just certain perspectives when you're not getting the whole group looking at things from different angles. But on the other hand, if you have a diverse team, but you don't have a very collaborative and open environment that's open to diverse ideas, it's going to hinder your team's ability to innovate and adapt to changing market trends. You're going to get left behind by your competitors.

Let's talk about how this impacts your leadership style and your management style. I'm a true believer in the fact that you cannot effectively lead or manage people unless you understand them. That means understanding their perspective. How do they view the situation? How do they view the problem? What motivates them? How are they influenced? How do they like to learn? How do they like to be coached? I can go on and on, but you can't effectively lead or manage people unless you understand what makes them tick.

Managing today's workforce requires adaptive leadership styles to accommodate for all these different generational preferences that we just talked about. You need to truly understand each person on your team, which includes understanding these generational differences between them. If you ignore this and if you expect other people to conform to your way or to the previous way, it's just going to result in conflicts, dissatisfaction, lack of clarity, and more importantly, lack of effective leadership across your diverse team. You're not going to be able to effectively lead them or manage them.

This trickles into team culture because if you don't manage these dynamics well, generational differences will continue leading to a fragmented team culture. Fostering a cohesive and inclusive environment becomes a lot more challenging when you have different generations that have conflicting values and work styles.

Here's some real life examples to illustrate how intergenerational differences cause misunderstandings, conflicts, and lack of cohesion with your team.

Gen X Assumes Gen Z isn't Paying Attention During Meeting

The first story I want to share is about a Gen Z person who was taking notes on their phone during a meeting. They were legitimately taking notes using their phone. They had a note taking app and that's just their preferred way of capturing information today.

Now, me, I'm a manual note taking person. I'm a millennial, by the way, I probably should have said that when I was going through all these generations. My generation seems to be a little bit mixed, some preferred digital, some prefer analog.

But in this meeting I was in this Gen Zer was taking notes on their phone. There was a person who is Gen X in that meeting, and they just assumed that this person was texting and not paying attention during the meeting. They saw them looking down on their phone like this so they just assumed that they were texting. They assumed that they were on social media, all assumptions, but nevertheless, Gen Z felt comfortable with calling this person out in the meeting. Hey, what are you doing on your phone? There's a meeting here. Why aren't you paying attention? Basically embarrassed the crap out of this person in front of everybody.

This is the youngest person in this meeting and they just got called out for being on their phone and they were so embarrassed they didn't correct the person. They didn't say I was taking notes or anything like that. They just put their phone away. This really disengaged this person from the meeting. Now they were just pretending to pay attention. They are pretending to be part of the meeting, but really they were just feeling ostracized. They were feeling left out and feeling like they were being picked on or ganged up on.

What happened was, now this person felt like they needed to conform, this Gen Z person. The Gen Z person was more comfortable with taking notes on their phone, but because other people were perceiving it as them being not present or not engaged or not paying attention, they didn't feel comfortable with doing something that worked for them.

The next time they come to a meeting, they tried taking notes on a notebook, but that really didn't work well for them and their way of thinking. You can just see that's an example of how there's this disconnect created and it really created some disengagement from that Gen Z person moving forward.

Boomer Thinks Millenial Lacks Professionalism

This next story I want to share just shows you the difference in value is between Millennials and Baby Boomers. Millennials, just to recap, we're all about work-life integration. We don't really see there being a line between where work starts and life personal life stops.

An example of this, this is actually from, years ago when I was a manager. There was a person on my team who was really excited to buy a new release of shoes. I'm not into fashion or anything like that, but he was, he really liked. Staying up on things and there was this new, shoe release that was coming out at 8:00 AM on Tuesday morning, limited sizes available and things like that.

Anyway, the point is, he had to be, on his computer to buy these at 8:00 AM. So right at 8:00 AM, he's on his work computer. He's getting this credit card out and buying these shoes as well. He sat next to someone who is a Baby Boomer and the Baby Boomer saw him shopping on company time and he thought this was unacceptable. You can't do that.

So he yelled at him here in the cubicle in front of everybody. People could hear this. I'm arriving to work around this time and I just hear this thing blowing up. I hear them arguing, shouting at each other. Why do you care? What I'm doing? This is my personal business. This is nothing to do with you. Well you're working on company time you shouldn't be doing that.

I'm not going to go on and rehash this whole thing, this thing really escalated quickly all because someone was making a quick purchase to buy shoes that they had to get at a certain time before they were sold out.

If you're a Millennial watching this, or if you're a Gen Z person watching this, you probably side with the person who was buying the shoes. Meanwhile, if you're a Gen X person or a Baby Boomer, you're hearing this thinking, yeah, you shouldn't have been doing that on company time.

I'm not here to say either side is right or wrong. What I'm pointing out here is these types of things are happening all day. Everyone's observing each other and they're having, they're making judgments about other people's actions and their behaviors because their preferences and their natural ways of communicating and their natural views on work-life balance are different. This is what creates all these schisms and your department.

I was fortunate enough to see this thing happen because as a manager, I could address it. I pulled both people together and we talked about it. We talked through it, we created a mutual understanding on this topic and and it really helped bridge these two people together, honestly.

Now had I just blindly sided with the baby boomer on my team, that Millennial was going to feel very ostracized. They're going to feel like I didn't get them. They probably weren't going to want to continue working for someone like me. They weren't going to feel comfortable with bringing things up to me either. On the other hand, they, weren't gonna feel comfortable with being honest with me about things. They're going to probably just try to hide types of things that, I wasn't okay with, like maybe watching Netflix on company time or something like that. Instead, because I handled it in a way that I showed I understood both people's perspectives and I helped them understand each other, both sides were comfortable with each other and with coming to me to talk about these things and to figure out what is acceptable behavior at work and what isn't. Versus hiding it and just assuming I wouldn't understand.

A lot of times, these things don't blow up to the surface and you don't see them happen. What happens in most scenarios is that Baby Boomer doesn't say anything. He just keeps it up here. He's all annoyed at that person. He doesn't like that person now. He thinks that person's lazy. That's how these things fester and create a toxic work culture in your environment, without you even realizing it as a manager.

Gen Z Thinks Boomer is Ignoring Their Request for Help

This next story is about a Gen Z person having a clear communication disconnect with a Boomer. So the Gen Z person is a junior engineer right out of college and the boomer is a senior engineer with tons of experience. He's kinda like the resident expert in the team where everyone goes to him for all the sage advice when they're stuck on a technical problem.

The Gen Z person, he had a lot of questions for this Boomer senior engineer. He would always send these questions to them via Teams DMs, Microsoft teams. The Boomer made it crystal clear in person that he's always happy to help. In fact, he appreciated it when the younger staff would ask him for advice and support, cause it b oosted his ego a little bit too. Make him feel like he's producing value to these younger engineers and helping nurture them. He really enjoyed that aspect of the job of mentoring and coaching.

But he forgot to check his DMs. He just was not used to being in the habit of checking DMs on a regular basis because he assumes, if people have a question for him, they're going to call him or they're going to email him, or they're going to stop by his office when they need something. He'll go a few days or even weeks without checking his DMs, if ever. If they get lost in the shuffle, so what, he misses it. He doesn't really keep it as a top of mind priority and that wasn't really stressed to him by his manager either. He doesn't know any better.

So meanwhile, this Gen Z person has all these unresponded DMs asking for help, and he just assumed that the boomer was blowing them off. He stopped reaching out to him for help and he stopped asking questions. So just to give you an idea of how these disconnects happen, different communication styles, different preferences.

Gen X Manager Gives Authonomy, But Boomer Wants Direction

I want to give you one more real life example about this, and it's a situation where there was a Gen X manager, which means, his style is, he preferred giving his team autonomy and space. He did not like to micromanage. He liked to give people their space and trust that they would come to him for help. So his unofficial policy as a manager was that, he assumed you're good, unless you approach him for help. He actually gave the Boomers on his team a lot more freedom because he knew that they had seniority and expertise.

Meanwhile, the Baby Boomers on his team, they expected regular guidance and structured leadership from their manager. They were groomed in this industry to expect that kind of direction from their boss. They wanted to be given clear objectives, clear goals, deadlines, and rules to follow. They didn't want to be the decision maker as far as things that were above their pay grade, or they wanted that direction to come from their boss because they didn't want to be responsible for that decision. But they also had the mentality of, don't bug the boss, unless it's an emergency.

This created a huge disconnect because for the Boomers, without any clear direction, they didn't know what they should be working on. Not getting this from their boss, made them feel unsupported and it created a lot of stress and anxiety for them. This disconnect festered unnoticed for a long time to the Gen X manager, because he just thought he was giving them space to do their job and he thought that they were appreciating that level of autonomy.

It came to a head when one of the Boomers blew up on the manager after a deadline was missed. The Boomer literally yelled at him and said, what the hell do you expect? You never give me any direction. How am I supposed to know what the top priorities are?

That really caught the Gen X manager off hand because here he thinks he's being this noble manager who's giving all this space and freedom and autonomy and flexibility and allowing people to adapt and do things the way they want. He looks at himself as like a hero.

Meanwhile, the Baby Boomer is looking at like, how am I supposed to be knowing what I'm doing? How do I know if I'm doing this right. You're not giving me any attention or support that I need here.

It just shows you how there's not really a right or wrong in these situations. It's more just different perspectives and different values. As far as touching that right or wrong point, as the manager, it's on you to figure out how to manage these dynamics. It's on you to figure out how to understand the other person and align their communication style with what the team needs from them as well. Help make them aware of these disconnects as well.

So each of these individual examples that I walked through. They may not sound like a lot and they might not sound like it's the end of the world, but they quickly compound when they're happening over and over again throughout your team. This creates a schisms on your team and it makes it harder for teams to collaborate and feel included and feel comfortable with opening up with each other. Asking each other for support.

My goal with this episode was to create more awareness for you in regards to the unique challenges that are created when you have generational gaps on your team. I hope this episode gave you a lot more perspective on how to better understand, relate and communicate with your team too.

If you're looking to take this further, go check out my episode called How Managers Can Effectively Lead a Shrinking Workforce with Huge Generational Gaps. You'll discover the seven critical skills you need as a leader and you'll also gain tangible tips and resources that will help you develop each of these critical skills.

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