The Most Effective Way to Turn Four Generations into One Team
Sean Glaze is an author and leadership expert who has worked with clients like the CDC, John Deere, and Emory University to increase collaboration, boost performance, and build exceptional workplace cultures. Sean’s engaging conference keynotes and interactive team building events help you develop more effective leaders. As a successful coach and educator for over 20 years, Sean gained valuable insights into developing winning team cultures – and founded Great Results Team Building to share those lessons.
There are Two Tools That Work Better Than Your Generational Chart
That generational chart is the most widely shared management tool that has never once changed a behavior. I know, because I built one.
Four columns. Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z. Historical references, communication preferences, motivations, notable challenges. Leaders love it. They print it. They forward it to the whole division.
Then Monday morning arrives, and nothing is different.
I keep the chart because it does one thing well. It gives a room permission to say out loud that the friction is real.
In government especially, where you may have a twenty-six-year-old analyst reporting to a supervisor who started before email was a work tool, people feel the gap and they have been trained not to mention it.
So the chart opens the conversation. It just cannot finish it.
Here is why, and here is what I use instead.
Why managing by generation falls apart
It describes a category, not the person in front of you
You do not supervise Millennials. You supervise Marcus, who is thirty-four, who wants blunt feedback and quietly resents being copied on a thread with nine other people.
The chart tells you about a demographic average.
It tells you nothing useful about Marcus.
The research is shakier than the confidence with which it gets quoted
Much of the published work examining generational differences in workplace values finds the effects are small and difficult to separate from age, life stage, and tenure. A twenty-five-year-old in 1985 wanted flexibility too.
They just did not have the language for it or a supervisor willing to hear it.
Be careful about building a policy on a chart.
It gives you nothing to actually do
Read across the Gen Z row and you get advice like engage through tech.
What does that mean at eight in the morning on a Tuesday when the report is three days late and you have to have a conversation about it?
A tool that explains behavior but does not change it is just entertainment.
What you are actually looking at is style, not age
A supervisor once told me her newest hire was disrespectful. Interrupts in meetings. Sends three-word emails. Pushes for a decision before the group has finished talking it through. Her conclusion was that this generation has no patience.
Then I asked about another person on her team, a twenty-nine-year veteran of the department. Also interrupts. Also sends three-word emails. Also wants the decision made and the meeting over.
Both are Lions. Thirty-five years apart in age. Same wiring.
Meanwhile, the two people she described as easy to work with, one twenty-four and one sixty https://greatresultsteambuilding.net/team-building-keynotes/ one, are both Retrievers. Steady, agreeable, and both quietly frustrated, because neither one had told her what they actually thought in eight months.
As a teamwork speaker and facilitator, the counter-intuitive positive I firmly share with audiences is that the generational chart cannot see any of that. It sorted the wrong way.
Public agencies have limited ways to reward people, which makes it more important to know which employees want recognition.
There are Two Tools That Work Better Than Your Generational Chart
That generational chart is the most widely shared management tool that has never once changed a behavior. I know, because I built one.
Four columns. Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z. Historical references, communication preferences, motivations, notable challenges. Leaders love it. They print it. They forward it to the whole division.
Then Monday morning arrives and nothing is different.
I keep the chart because it does one thing well. It gives a room permission to say out loud that the friction is real.
In government especially, where you may have a twenty-six-year-old analyst reporting to a supervisor who started before email was a work tool, people feel the gap and they have been trained not to mention it.
So the chart opens the conversation. It just cannot finish it.
Here is why, and here is what I use instead.
Why managing by generation falls apart
It describes a category, not the person in front of you
You do not supervise Millennials. You supervise Marcus, who is thirty-four, who wants blunt feedback and quietly resents being copied on a thread with nine other people.
The chart tells you about a demographic average.
It tells you nothing useful about Marcus.
The research is shakier than the confidence with which it gets quoted
Much of the published work examining generational differences in workplace values finds the effects are small and difficult to separate from age, life stage, and tenure. A twenty-five-year-old in 1985 wanted flexibility too.
They just did not have the language for it or a supervisor willing to hear it.
Be careful about building a policy on a chart.
It gives you nothing to actually do
Read across the Gen Z row and you get advice like engage through tech.
What does that mean at eight in the morning on a Tuesday when the report is three days late and you have to have a conversation about it?
A tool that explains behavior but does not change it is just entertainment.
What you are actually looking at is style, not age
A supervisor once told me her newest hire was disrespectful. Interrupts in meetings. Sends three-word emails. Pushes for a decision before the group has finished talking it through. Her conclusion was that this generation has no patience.
Then I asked about another person on her team, a twenty-nine-year veteran of the department. Also interrupts. Also sends three-word emails. Also wants the decision made and the meeting over.
Both are Lions. Thirty-five years apart in age. Same wiring.
Meanwhile, the two people she described as easy to work with, one twenty-four and one sixty https://greatresultsteambuilding.net/team-building-keynotes/ one, are both Retrievers. Steady, agreeable, and both quietly frustrated, because neither one had told her what they actually thought in eight months.
As a teamwork speaker and facilitator, the counter-intuitive positive I firmly share with audiences is that the generational chart cannot see any of that. It sorted the wrong way.
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