Communicating across generations in the workplace

With Gen Z entering the workforce, communicating across generations is getting harder! What is the best way to accomplish this? Boomers like one way, Millennials another.

I offer a training on how to do this using humanistic principles and science.

https://humanistlearning.com/generationaldivide/

First – the science. The generations aren’t all that different actually. Personality wise – humans are humans are humans. About the same number of boomers and Gen Z are narcissistic for instance.

What does differ is our life experiences and fears. Basically – did you grow up in a time of social investment? Or a period of social disinvestment.

Boomers experienced scarcity – but also – social investment.

Gen Z – is growing up in a time where there is very little social investment and actually quite a bit of social disinvestment.  This leads to differences in the levels of social trust each group has.  Boomers have a lot of social trust.  Gen Z have a lot less.

The good new is that what we value is basically the same so we can use our values to connect to one another.  And this is true across any diversity dimension.

The problem in communication tends to be something called – dignity violations. Basically – how people feel their dignity is being violated or has been violated in the past – makes them sensitive to future dignity violations and they often won’t even consider another viewpoint until their past dignity violations have been recognized and validated by the other person.

The way to get past this defensiveness is to validate the dignity of the other person.  Don’t demand they validate your dignity before you recognize their humanity. Validate their dignity.  After that – the rest gets easier because communication and problem solving – among equals – is collaborative and respectful.

Most of the tricks to doing this involve personal practice. Recognizing your own responses to dignity violations. Recognizing how your own biases are impacting how you are feeling about the other person, and choosing to override your instinctual response and view the other person as fully human too.

Hope this helps and please let me know if I can be of any assistance to your work group. I offer training to groups to help them use science to remove unwanted behaviors - whatever they are. 

How to deal effectively with age differences in the workplace

Most workplaces have employees that vary in age. One of the most common questions I get - has to do with helping employees and leaders - create cohesive work groups out of teams with large age differences. 

- What requirements do different generations need? 

The big shocker is that there isn’t really much of a difference between generations. They have the same levels of narcissism and emotional problems. They also have similar levels of conscientiousness and stick to itiveness. The big difference actually has to do with social trust. Older people grew up in a time of social investment and as a result – have a lot of social trust. Younger people have been experiencing social disinvestment – so they have low levels of social trust.  This difference in trust may make it seem to an older person that a younger person is less invested. And they may very well be because in their experience, you can’t trust others to follow through on their promises – because society hasn’t.

What younger people need – most companies can’t supply – which is the concept that if they give themselves to the company – the company will reward them for their hard work.  The social trust for that equation – just isn’t quite there for younger people and for good reason.

- How do you avoid workplace conflict and keep everyone happy 

Humanistic communication strategies and a lot of compassion. Everyone has issues. Everyone. The tendency is for people to think they are right and the other person is wrong when a conflict arises. The way around that is to create team cohesiveness. So that everyone sees themselves as part of the same team – working towards a common goal or problem to be solved.  This way – conflicts are seen as disagreement over best course of action as oppose to being seen as life and death struggles for the righteousness of our tribal cause, whatever that is. Disagreements are ok – conflicts are not. Everyone is on the same team getting the same thing done. This means treating everyone with dignity and compassion. If there is a disagreement  - don’t turn it into a conflict. Ask questions so the problem can be solved collaborative. This is true for all groups, not just for groups with age differences.

- How to motivate teams with a mix of generations

Dignity and compassion – for everyone. Foster a culture of social trust and create psychological safety so that people can air disagreements without them blowing up into conflicts. The best solutions are created collaboratively – and that means everyone has input. If you can create a culture where people can pose contrary positions and ideas without being attacked for having different ideas and instead – having those ideas seriously considered, you will create a culture of trust, which will help ensure that disagreements – don’t escalate and that everyone is motivated to contribute because they know their contributions will be welcomed and considered as valid.


And this trust – brings us back to the top. What do people need?  Trust.

To learn more - I have a course on bridging the generation divide – millennials and boomers at Humanist Learning Systems. https://humanistlearning.com/generationaldivide/

The Impact of Income Inequality

Last week I wrote about verifiable outcomes. We should be making decisions based on the impact they have.  Well, it turns out that income inequality kills the economy. That isn’t a guess, or an idea, it’s a verifiable consequence. So … what are we going to do about it?

Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University Business School, has written a great article about how income inequality kills the economy and what we can do about that. It’s worth reading, here is the link:   http://evonomics.com/joseph-stiglitz-inequality-unearned-income/

Here is the problem in a nutshell. Hoarding of wealth at the top means less wealth circulates in the economy. Wealth is the life blood of the economy. If the wealth stops moving, systems start dying.
There are several reasons why wealth gets hoarded and wealth inequality happens. But a lot of it has to do with laws and policies written by our government. To create more wealth equality, we have to change some of our laws.

For instance, minimum wages, help ensure that some of the wealth is shared and not hoarded. Places that raise their minimum wage see more vibrant economies. If you are in HR, you can encourage better salaries as a way to ensure that your company not only gets and retains good talent, but that you do your part to ensure that wealth isn’t hoarded. Keep reminding yourself wealth needs to be shared to be useful.

Stigilitz’s closing paragraph has a list of things we should be doing to correct course and end the wealth hoarding in America to get us back on track. He says,

“The economic policies required to change this are not difficult to identify. We need more investment in public goods; better corporate governance, antitrust and anti-discrimination laws; a better regulated financial system; stronger workers’ rights; and more progressive tax and transfer policies. By ‘rewriting the rules’ governing the market economy in these ways, it is possible to achieve greater equality in both the pre- and post-tax and transfer distribution of income, and thereby stronger economic performance.”

Interesting, one of the first things he suggests is more investment in the public good. In my course on Bridging the Generation Divide, it turns out that the level societal investment in our communities is one of the biggest differences in the generations and it directly impacts how much social trust a person has. More social investment in your youth equates to more social trust as you enter the workforce. Less social investment, means less social trust. Want to know why millennials don’t trust your company? It’s because society didn’t invest in them the way it did for boomers and gen x.

We are all in this together. We all benefit when our economies thrive. Our individual and collective decisions impact how much wealth is shared and how much is hoarded at the top. As I write this, congress is considering a bill that would give a tax break to the top 400 wealthy people in America. So that they can keep even more of their money. The trade off is less spending on public health. Less spending on the public good.  It is decisions like this that exacerbate income inequality and income inequality hurts us all. We as individuals and as a body politic need to start making decisions that are based on verifiable consequences and not on an ideology that has proven again and again to lead to bad outcomes and stagnating economies.

To learn more about how social investment impacts your employees – check out my Bridging the Generational Divide course

Diversity – Age and Millennials

Diversity has many dimensions. It’s root is difference and how we manage differences between people.

There are so many ways humans differ from one another. Sometimes we differ because of culture, gender, race, religion, age, and economic status.

I want to focus right now on age differences as I was asked about this by a client. If you have a big enough business, you have employees that range from young 20 somethings to people of retirement age.  And the differences between the life experiences of the people in the almost ready to retire group are totally different from those just starting out.

Not only is an older person more likely to be married and own a home, they are also more likely to have grown up without electronics (aside from a tv that probably didn’t have a remote) and had an amazing amount of personal freedom in their childhood along with possible mandatory military service.

Young people just entering the workforce, on the other hand, grew up as digital natives. They didn’t have a lot of freedom as children as their parents were too afraid to let them play outside by themselves. They’ve had no shared experience like military service and they have yet to get married and have kids. (check out the research on millennials here - http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/millennials/)

What you need to know about these “differences” is that they are generalizations.  There is no stereotypical baby boomer and there is no stereotypical millennial. Yes, millennials are more narcissistic than boomers (but not by much. Whereas ~15% of boomers are narcissistic – ~17% of millennials are – which isn’t a really big difference when you think about it).

What I’m trying to say is that do not treat any individual millennial or boomer as if they were stereotypical. They aren’t. They are an individual. And as an individual, they could vary quite a bit from what the “average” person of their age group is said to be like based on the data.

As Steven Pinker states in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”

When faced with diversity of any kind, what you should strive to do is to treat people like the individual they are. Get to know them as individuals and don’t resort to stereotyping them just because they aren’t the same as you.

It’s this last bit that gets to the crux of the problem people have with diversity. We want everyone to be perfect for us. We expect other people to respond to us the way we want them to respond to us.

But, I’ve got news for you. The world doesn’t revolve around you and you are unique. Even within your age cohort, ethnic group, gender etc, there is a tremendous amount of diversity!  Allow other people to be who they are and stop trying to impose your ideas of who they should be on them.

If you allow them to be who they are, they may just surprise you by knowing something you don’t that will help make you a better person and your company more effective. Don’t let the lack of shared cultural experiences throw you off. These other people are still human and still want and need the same things that all humans do. To belong and to be respected.