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 Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z. Historical references, communication preferences, motivations, notable challenges.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.
Tool one: give your team a shared language for style
I use the DISC framework, but I teach it with animals, because people remember animals.
A year after an animal personality styles session, nobody remembers whether they were a high D or a high C. Everybody remembers they were a Lion.
- The Lion wants the bottom line and wants it now. Direct, decisive, impatient with process.
- The Otter wants energy, connection, and recognition. Talks to think. Fills silence.
- The Retriever wants stability and harmony. Loyal, supportive, and often the last to tell you something is wrong.
- The Beaver wants accuracy and a clear process. Will not commit until the details hold up.
Why does this work better than a generational label in a public sector setting?
First, it applies to the individual, not the cohort. You get information about the person you actually manage. And it is symmetrical. The supervisor has a style too, which means the conversation stops being about what is wrong with them and starts being about how we adjust to each other.
It is descriptive, not a verdict. Calling someone a Beaver is neutral. Calling someone a typical Millennial is a judgment, and everyone in the room hears it that way.
And it hands you an instruction.
If you need buy in from a Beaver, send the data ahead of the meeting. If you need it from a Lion, lead with the recommendation and hold the background until asked.
None of the four styles is better. A functioning team needs all four.
Knowing the difference is how people stop taking each other the wrong way.
This matters more in government than almost anywhere else, because tenure is long and turnover is low. You are not managing these people for eighteen months.
You may be managing the same twelve people for a decade. Unresolved style friction does not go away on its own. It compounds.
Tool two: stop guessing and let people write their own instructions
The styles session builds awareness. This next one builds specifics.
I call it Team Member Operating Instructions. It is exactly what it sounds like. Every person on the team writes down how to work with them, and then reads it out loud.
The short version
Send four sentence starters a few days before your next team meeting and ask everyone to complete them.
- I am at my best when…
- I am at my worst when…
- You can count on me to…
- What I need from you is…
At the meeting, have each person read their answers.
You go first. If the supervisor is vague or safe, everyone else will be vague and safe, and you will have wasted forty minutes.
The longer version
When I have more time with a team, I use a twelve-question version. A few of the questions that consistently earn their spot.
- What is the best way to contact you during the day?
- What is the most effective way to give you feedback?
- How do you prefer to be recognized for doing great work?
- What is something the team should know about you that has sometimes been misunderstood by previous coworkers?
- What is a pet peeve of yours the team should know about?
The recognition question alone is worth the meeting. Public agencies are usually limited in how they can reward people, which makes it even more important to know which of your employees wants to be named in front of the division and which one would be mortified by that and would rather get a short note from you directly.
That information costs nothing and changes how valued someone feels.
The question to watch closely is the one about being misunderstood. That is where the quiet employee finally explains why they go silent in meetings, and where the blunt employee admits they know they come across harder than they intend. Those are the two sentences that usually change the room.
Every assumption a generational chart was filling in for you gets replaced by something meaningful the person told you directly.
The public sector wrinkle nobody plans for
There is a version of this problem that is specific to government, and it is more expensive than meeting friction.
When someone retires after a long career in an agency, what walks out the door is rarely written down anywhere. It is not the process. It is the judgment. Which vendor actually delivers on time. Which council member needs a heads up before the item hits the agenda. Which exception the state approved in 2011 and why.
Agencies usually treat that as a documentation problem and respond with a checklist and a transition binder.
It is not a documentation problem. It is a relationship problem. The knowledge never transferred because nobody built the conditions where a newer employee felt comfortable asking a question that might sound obvious.
Both tools above are the front end of succession planning. Not because they teach process, but because they make asking possible.
What to do in the next two weeks
- Use this personality styles assessment handout with your team. Ninety minutes is enough to get real value.
- Send the four sentence starters before your next team meeting and read your own answers first.
- Pick one person whose style is furthest from yours and change one specific thing about how you communicate with them.
- Pair your longest tenured employee with your newest one on a real task, not a shadowing exercise.
- Put a reminder on your calendar for ninety days out to revisit what people said they needed. Agreements that never get mentioned again quietly disappear.
The chart was never going to tell you who they are
You do not have four generations on your team.
You have twelve people, and they are not confused about each other because of when they were born. They are confused because nobody has ever asked them to explain how they work, and nobody has given them a shared language for the differences they already notice.
Give them both, and the generational problem mostly stops being a problem.
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