Gentelligence
The following is an excerpt from Gentelligence:The Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce.
Blame 60 Minutes: How Morely Safer fueled the generational wars
“A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred: from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie. They are called, among other things, “millennials.”
In 2007, 60 Minutes introduced Millennials to the world with the news story “The Millennials Are Coming,” framing this generation as some sort of plague humanity would have to survive. Host Morley Safer referred to the brewing generational showdown in the workplace as a “psychological battlefield.”
The gauntlet was thrown—the business world as we knew it was being turned upside down by these Millennial intruders, and it was up to the older generations to protect it.
The Millennials were convenient scapegoats for the strain and chaos that twenty-first-century technology introduced, and this resentment has now raged on for over a decade.
Just for fun, do a Google search on things Millennials have killed. The last time we checked, the popular press had blamed them for the end of golf, bars of soap, casual dining, napkins, and American cheese. Every war has casualties. In the case of generational conflict, the loss is one of talent potential.
The ongoing and strikingly one-sided, negative narrative around the multigenerational workforce has led each generation to play into this war. The danger with this mindset is that we overlook potential benefits that come from bringing together, people with a diversity of thought and experience.
Failing to consider the possible advantages, we have largely squandered the opportunities right in front of us, including the chance to utilize generational diversity to increase innovation and improve problem-solving and realize how generational understanding can help improve organizational performance in significant ways.
The loss of potential talent in generational wars
Companies across a wide range of industries are experiencing the consequences of generational wars. The damage they bring to organizational cultures by creating unhealthy competition and sowing mistrust is evident, and the seemingly endless generational tensions have a long-term effect. The road toward intergenerational cooperation has narrowed and is now full of steep terrain.
While the trend of Millennial shaming has received by far the most energy and media attention of any generation to date, this phenomenon began well before Safer’s piece on 60 Minutes. Frustration about the attitude and behavior of youth dates back thousands of years.
In 11 BC, a writer named Peter the Hermit remarked, “The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no respect for their parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone know everything and what passes for wisdom in us is foolishness in them.”3 At the end of the eighteenth century, French philosopher Auguste Comte noted that change in society comes with a change in generations, as it is the conflict between generations that creates unhappiness with the status quo.
We have seen this in our own times as well. Baby Boomers were seen as too revolutionary for the Traditional generation. Gen Xers were labeled “slackers” for their unwillingness to adopt the workaholic tendencies of the Baby Boomers. Millennials were called “entitled” for expecting opportunities at a younger age than those who came before them. Gen Zers, the first of whom just graduated college in 2019, were labeled overly sensitive “snowflakes” even before entering the workforce.
In March 2020, the New York Times published an article titled, “How Outdoor Voices, a Start-Up Darling, Imploded.” Founded in 2014, the athletic apparel brand became a sensation as it carved out space for itself among other major brands like Nike and Lululemon by focusing on everyday people and a mission to “get the world moving” as a way to stay happy and healthy. Yet signs painting a gloomier picture of the company soon emerged, including a portrait of a deeply rooted conflict between its young Millennial founder and the older, more experienced executive team. Ultimately, following a head-on crash with the executive team, the founder was ousted.
This example, and the continuing struggles the company is facing, remain a powerful, cautionary tale of what can happen when the generational divide remains unmanaged. Outdoor Voices is not the only company that has publicly struggled to manage the generational divide. In March 2020, PwC agreed to pay $11.625 million to settle an age-discrimination case that alleged that the company recruited only at colleges for associate-level positions, making those positions unavailable to older workers. Among the settlement conditions, the company agreed to hire age-inclusivity consultants to train those involved in recruitment and hiring.
Since February 2018, IKEA has faced five separate lawsuits that alleged the company discriminated against older employees and that the company had created a corporate culture of age bias. The most recent lawsuit in 2019 by a forty-eight-year-old former employee claimed that four employees in their twenties had been given a position he had been denied. The plaintiff alleged that when he asked an IKEA manager why he had been passed over for another promotion, she “told him that the role he applied for was new and required an external candidate who could come up with ‘new and innovative ideas.’”
Companies from every industry—including Google, IBM, RJ Reynolds, WeWork, CitiBank, and Marriott—have all been sued for age discrimination in recent years. While these stories represent anecdotal evidence of an ongoing age and generational war in the workplace, research has found additional evidence to support the rage. More than half of employees report they aren’t likely to get along with a coworker from another generation. As with any war, there will be fallout as a result.
Until we create a sustainable way for generations to not just peacefully coexist but also learn from one another, we will not be able to stop the loss of valuable talent potential or benefit from its many promises.
