Four Generations
There are currently four generations in the workforce. People in their 20s, people in their 70S, and every age in between. Having grown up at different times, amidst radically variant cultural contexts, it does not feel surprising to me that we are having a heck of a time trying to understand and work alongside one another.
Dan Schawbel is one of my favorite modern-day workforce researchers. I remember reading something of his that has stuck with me ever since. Essentially, all four generations currently in the modern day workforce feel deeply disrespected and misunderstood by the other three.
Ouch. And, in my lived experience - that tracks. We treat one another as generational caricatures - tropes of the lowest side of what our particular generation is known for - and made fun of.
I get it. I feel defensive and protective and that's the posture I’m in when I feel like people are talking down to or around me in a way I’m receiving as judgmental and punitive.
I am so grateful that ever since I got my first job at 15 I have been on cross-generational teams. At the pharmacy inside of a cub foods grocery store I worked shifts with pharmacists my parents' age, cashiers who were there part time to make a little extra money and spend time with people in what otherwise would have been their retirement years, and alongside other highschool kids from neighboring districts. It was a powerful lesson to learn how each of us reacted to different customers - from people who needed help navigating medicare reimbursements to folks throwing pregnancy tests over the counter at us telling us to double-bag them, quick.
In 2002 I got my first paid job as a community organizer and fundraiser at Washington Citizen Action. I started the summer after my junior year of college and organized my entire senior year schedule around my canvassing shifts.
I graduated college on a Saturday and was at WCA full time the following Monday. At that time we were campaigning to lower the cost of prescription drugs, draw attention to the rates and causes of hunger, and register low-income and people of color to vote. It was certainly an all-hands-on-deck time, and looking back - thank god we had people from their late teens to their early 80s on the case!
We simply would not have been able to reach and resonate with so many different community members had we not been a wide range of messengers ourselves. Each generation on our staff had different motivations, fears, and lived experiences. Because of that, we could better understand, and thus mobilize, people like us who were hungry for change. What scares and motivates someone in their 60s, is of course different than what overwhelms or inspires folks in other seasons of life.
I am a student of the Enneagram. One of the things I am working on is my tendency to subconsciously slip into the pattern of objectification. What does that mean? Objectification is the deep dehumanization of other people.
It’s talking to and treating others as though they can’t and won’t ever “get it,” or “get me,” or both. Objectification is writing off whole people and groups as not of value, as less than, as unsalvageable and not worth my time, attention, respect, care, or curiosity.
Objectification sounds super mean. And it is. But often, for me it’s super subtle, unconscious, and insidious. It’s deciding someone isn’t worth my time because they say or do one thing I don't understand.
In the modern-day workforce it can feel like we’ve all written other generations off. You can’t or won’t understand. You’re simply too hard or annoying to work with. When we do that we are operating from our own lowest side. Lest we forget - we are most certainly annoying, too.
Learning how to adapt across lines of meaningful difference, like age, includes knowing our role, having a clear goal, and pursuing it without losing our soul. Put another way, adapting means slowing down and genuinely getting curious about why our colleagues are approaching their work so differently than we are. Adapting means taking a beat, taking a breath, and infusing humanity, patience, and curiosity back into our relationships with one another.
To be clear, this is not and exercise about pretending that our circumstances should magically justify our behavior. It’s about reconnecting to the bigger picture.
We can either play “us vs. them” our entire careers pretending our shit doesn’t stink while making fun of how other adults organize their lives and work. If we want to be petty and short-sighted, we could choose to live that way. Or…
We can make the effort to learn of the depth and complexity of our colleagues’ from different generations’ approaches and perspectives.
Some people we work with lived through the draft to vietnam
Some people we work with have had social media in their pockets their entire lives, their sense of self compared to billions of others everyday.
How can you imagine yourself moving from someone who views and operates with age as a dividing line to being a person and leader who actively, and on purpose models curiosity and creativity, leveraging the assets of a multigenerational team?
Let me know what you try!
Next week my commitment to you is to finish and share and essay about upping our resilience strategies and how we can use electricity as a concept that can help us.
Until then,