Generations, Inc.

From Boomers to Linksters--Managing the Friction Between Generations at Work

Meagan Johnson, Larry Johnson

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814415764
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Cultura del lugar de trabajo

Now that five different generations are on the job simultaneously--from Traditionals to Generation Y to Millennials--it's important for companies to understand how their people can not only coexist and cooperate, but thrive together as a team.

Written by Meagan and Larry Johnson, a father-daughter team of two generational experts, Generations, Inc. offers the perspectives of people of different eras to elicit practical insights on wrestling with generational issues in the workplace.

This book provides Baby Boomers and Linksters alike with practical techniques for:

• addressing conflicts,
• forging alliances with coworkers from other generations,
• getting people with different values and idiosyncratic styles to work together,
• and running productive meetings where all participants find value in each other's ideas.
• The generation we were born in influences our expectations, actions, and mind-sets.

Generations, Inc. includes realistic strategies for relating to your team members' different views of loyalty, work ethic, and the definition of a job well done--and tips to make those perspectives work together to strengthen your workforce and grow your business.

CHAPTER 1
Signposts: Harbingers of Things to Come

“Life is rather like a tin of sardines—we’re all of us looking for the key.”

—Alan Bennett, British author, actor, humorist, and playwright

Meagan Remembers

When I was six years old, I went to the grocery store with my father. He bought an item priced at $1.69, but the cashier misread it and only charged him 69 cents. (This was 1976. Scanners had yet to be invented, and cashiers manually entered prices.) My father alerted her to her mistake. She thanked him and charged him the extra dollar.

I was dumbfounded! At the time, my weekly allowance was a dollar. My father had just thrown away what it took me a week to earn. So I said, “Dad, that was dumb. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and you could have saved a whole dollar.” “Yes,” he replied, “but how I feel about myself is worth more than a dollar.”

My memory of that event has followed me all my life. It helps me decide how to handle situations in which I must determine the right thing to do. It taught me that there is more to life than material gain. I’ve even used it as a standard for picking the company I keep. Would I want a friend who would have kept the dollar? I think not. Thanks, Dad, for the great life lesson.

Larry Responds

You’re welcome, Meagan, but gosh, I don’t even remember this big event in your life. In retrospect, it seems I was able to convey a simple life lesson for a pretty small price. If it had been a million dollars at stake instead of one, I hope I would have acted as nobly.

It does remind me that early experiences can have lasting influences on our lives. I attended YMCA summer camp when I was ten years old. My family didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford the tuition, but I was an enterprising sort. I secured a position as a dishwasher that allowed me to go for free.

For some reason, an adult counselor at the camp considered tuition workers second-class citizens. On an overnight excursion, after a long day of hiking, this counselor told the kitchen crew to wait until all the paid campers got their food from the chow line before eating. I waited and waited. When I saw some of the paid campers queuing up for seconds, I got in line. This counselor grabbed my arm and jerked me out of line. In front of all the other campers, he dressed me down, reminding me that I was just a “dishwasher,” and I had to wait for the “real” campers to eat.

My humiliation was unbearable. I burst into tears, threw my plate in the counselor’s face, and ran into the woods, hoping I would get lost and starve to death just to show them how unjustly I’d been treated.

Luckily, a more sympathetic counselor tracked me down and escorted me back to camp, where he gave me something to eat. He told me not to take the counselor who had been mean to me seriously because he had some personal problems that caused him to act that way. In retrospect, he should not have been allowed to work with kids, problems or not, but I did gain something positive from the experience. In the years since, I’ve traced any empathy I have for people less fortunate than I to that unpleasant incident. It gave me a small taste of what it feels like to be discriminated against. It was a painful, but beneficial, event in my life.

Personal and Group Signposts

We call these kinds of events personal signposts: experiences in our lives that significantly contribute to who we are. They are personal because they are unique to each individual. They are signposts because they influence our future decisions, reactions, attitudes, and behaviors.

Other signposts have just as much impact on us, but these spring from the experiences of the groups to which we belong and the society in which we live. These group signposts can have a strong effect on us because they are magnified by the power of numbers. For example, if you are a member of a racial minority, you may or may not have endured racism yourself. However, the fact that your friends, family, and colleagues probably did will affect how you view the issue of discrimination. And, if you combine this group signpost with one or more personal signposts associated with race, the effect can be very powerful.

Larry remembers an experience he had when working for a large organization. He and his boss, Irene, were conducting interviews to fill a position that would report directly to Larry. It came down to two finalists: one Larry liked, and one Irene liked. Since Irene was the boss, Larry yielded, and they hired her choice.

It turned out to be a mistake and they eventually had to let the woman go. In discussing it later, Irene graciously claimed responsibility for the fiasco. She said that she had let a prejudice hidden deep within her affect her judgment. It turns out that Larry’s preferred choice was white, and Irene’s was black. Irene herself is also black.

Larry was surprised. Irene had never struck him as being racially motivated. After all, she had hired him, a white guy, when there had been several minority candidates from whom to choose. She also had a sterling reputation as the consummate HR professional. Larry asked her to explain.

Irene replied that she hadn’t preferred her candidate because she was black, but because the white candidate’s Southern accent grated down at her “very core.” As a young black woman growing up in the South, she associated many negative experiences with a Southern drawl. The combination of a group signpost (being black) and the personal signposts (these negative experiences) affected Irene’s ability, years later, to be fair and impartial. To her credit, she promised to make a conscious effort not to let this prejudice affect her judgment again.

Irene’s story illustrates the good news about signposts. They can have very positive effects on our lives, as did Meagan’s experience with Larry at the grocery store, or they can have very negative effects, like Irene’s reaction to a Southern accent. But they can be changed. Signposts are not life sentences. Irene proved the point. She learned from her insight and made a conscious decision to move in a different direction.

Generational Signposts

A generational signpost is an event or cultural phenomenon that is specific to one generation. Generational signposts shape, influence, and drive our expectations, actions, and mind-sets about the products we buy, the companies for which we work, and the expectations we have about life in general. Generational signposts mold our ideas about company loyalty, work ethics, and the definitions of a job well done.

Meagan’s grandfather, Joe, was from the Traditional Generation (the parents of Baby Boomers born before 1946). He came of age in the 1920s and struggled to raise a family during the Great Depression, a major signpost for his generation. Joe, like most of his cohort, believed that if you were lucky enough to have a job, you owed absolute loyalty to the company that hired you—always. Joe worked for Procter & Gamble for forty years. Throughout his employment and his retirement, he insisted that everyone in the family buy only P&G products. If P&G made it, they bought it.

Compare that attitude with that of people from Generation Y (born after 1980). Their average job turnover rate is approximately 30 percent. ¹ Some employers tell us they feel lucky if newly hired Generation Yers stick around past lunch. This lack of job loyalty can be traced to many factors including that the job often pays very little so the only way the Gen Yer can make more is to move elsewhere or the job itself is not his or her calling in life, it’s just something to do until he or she finds a career path. For many, however, they simply don’t need to work because they still live at home and are being supported by Mom and Dad. That phenomenon can be associated with a major signpost for them: They are the offspring of what we call “helicopter parents.” We’ll explain many of the implications of that parentage in Chapter 6, but suffice it to say that these kids are often overly indulged.

Life Laws

When Meagan was a young child, Larry traveled every week. She and her mother loved to surprise him by meeting his plane at the gate. It became a Friday night family tradition. However, for every generation born after September 11, 2001, that family tradition now takes place outside the security area. Today’s young people have no recollection of being allowed to enter an airport concourse without submitting to a TSA screening. For them, this necessity is a life law.

Life laws are events that have social, political, or economic influence on our lives but occurred before we were old enough to remember any difference. We’ve talked to many members of Generation X and Generation Y who take for granted the fact that schools are not segregated by race. They can’t imagine a time when it was otherwise. Consequently, they often have little appreciation for the sacrifices made by their Traditional elders that led to the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Oliver L. Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et al.—a decision that outlawed segregation in schools. Nor do they remember the subsequent struggle by the civil rights movement to turn the ruling into a reality. For them, school integration is a life law. It’s always been that way.

Life laws are important because they often affect how one generation views another. If you were part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, you may have little patience with 18-year-olds who take their civil rights for granted. Likewise, if you are from a younger generation, you may have little patience for an older worker who is still bringing those struggles to work and sees the world through that lens. For example, we know a Gen Xer who found it irritating when she was pregnant that her Baby Boomer boss said she should be grateful the company was letting her come back to work.

Generation Defined

During a speech, Meagan mentioned that she is part of Generation X. An audience member yelled out, “Aren’t you getting too old to be a Generation Xer?” That’s a risky question to ask anyone and, to her credit, Meagan resisted the temptation to snap back, “Aren’t you a little old to call yourself a Baby Boomer?” Instead, she clarified that generational groups are not determined by the present age of the members, but by the social events and demographics that were happening at their inceptions. Traditionals are defined as people born before the end of World War II. Thus, although people grow older, the period in which they were born always remains the defining time period that determines to which generation they belong. So if you are a Traditional, you’ll always be a Traditional. If you are a Baby Boomer, you’ll always be a Baby Boomer, and so on.

As it applies to groups in society, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary offers four variations on the word “generation.” We start with this one—a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously—and then expand it a bit. Here’s our definition:

Generation: A group of individuals born and living contemporaneously who have common knowledge and experiences that affect their thoughts, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors.

Absolutely no consensus exists on how to determine when one generation ends and another begins. The most common definition is based on major fluctuations in the birthrate. For example, World War II forced millions of Traditionals to postpone starting families. At the war’s end, after long separations, these folks were ready to marry and produce children. And, aided by the nation’s unprecedented postwar prosperity, produce they did!

In 1946, live births in the United States surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, 32 million babies had been born, compared to 24 million in the 1930s.

U.S. Birthrate Chart

When the surge ended in 1965, the Baby Boomer Generation included 78.2 million members—the largest American generation on record.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Pill gave women more control over reproduction, while the women’s movement increased their educational and career opportunities. As a result, many postponed having children and the birthrate declined. Only 49 million babies were born in the United States between 1965 and 1980, making Generation X the smallest American generation on record.

About the same time, the biological clocks of childless Baby Boomers started ringing. Additionally, many of those who already had children were divorcing and starting second families. So the birthrate climbed until 1996, when Generation Y recorded a head count of 70.4 million, almost as big as the Baby Boomer Generation. Starting in 1997, Generation Xers and some Yers began to have children and the birthrate started to climb again, creating what we call the Linked-In, or Linkster, Generation.

See the U.S. Birthrate Chart in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. U.S. Birthrate Chart ²

Five Generations at Work

History is in the making. Never before have five generations occupied the workplace as they do now. The three main groups are:

Baby Boomers, aka the Woodstock Generation, born between 1946 and 1964

Generation X, aka Latchkey Kids, born between 1965 and 1980

Generation Y, aka the Entitled Ones, born between 1981 and 1995

A few members of the Traditional Generation are also still working (aka Depression Babies, born before 1945), and we’re beginning to see the first of the Linkster Generation appearing on the job site (aka the Facebook Crowd, born after 1995). In reality then, five generations are now present in the workforce. This is rapidly changing as more and more Traditionals exit and more Linksters enter, creating a four-part milieu that will be with us until all the Baby Boomers retire. And, according to a host of studies, many Baby Boomers plan to continue working long past the age of 65, so this four-part milieu is likely to be the state of business for many years.

In this book, we will refer to members of each of the five generations as those born in the years just described. We will also discuss various generational subgroups that ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Authors’ Note
• CHAPTER 1 Signposts: Harbingers of Things to Come
• CHAPTER 2 Baby Boomers: The Elephant in the Python
• CHAPTER 3 Managing Boomers
• CHAPTER 4 Big Bird, Wayne’s World, and Home Alone: Signposts for Generation X
• CHAPTER 5 Managing Generation X
• CHAPTER 6 The Next Elephant in the Python: Signposts for Generation Y
• CHAPTER 7 Managing Generation Y
• CHAPTER 8 Old Dogs Have Lots to Offer: Signposts for the Traditional Generation
• CHAPTER 9 Managing the Traditional Generation
• CHAPTER 10 Cell Phones and Hanna Montana: Signposts for the Linkster Generation
• CHAPTER 11 Managing the Linkster Generation
• CHAPTER 12 Different Strokes for Different Folks: A Model for Managing Across Generational Boundaries
• APPENDIX A Resolving Intergenerational Conflict
• APPENDIX B A Quick-Reference Guide to the Book
• Notes
• Index