"I'm a boomer. I grew up on a steady diet of "show up early, stay late, say 'yes, sir.'" That wiring served me well in my time at the White House and later in boardrooms. It also produced a habit that took me years to spot: the urge to please. In hard conversations, I'd soften the edges. Add extra words. Smooth things over. Younger colleagues didn't experience that as kindness. They experienced it as dodging. They wanted clarity, not choreography."
"Psychologist Jean Twenge, in her book Generations, shows how each cohort's habits grew out of the era that raised them: boom-time expansion, layoffs and divorce, student debt and purpose-driven careers, social media and permanent comparison. None of that is virtue or vice. It's conditioning. Trouble comes when we treat our conditioning as the gold standard and everyone else's as a flaw."
Workplaces commonly contain four or more generations working together with differing habits formed by historical eras. Empirical reviews find many generational stereotypes do not align with data on values and attitudes. Recent research indicates age-mixed teams can outperform when leaders actively manage friction. A practical leadership rule is that observable behaviors can be changed while unseen conditioning shapes behavior. Generational habits reflect conditioning rather than moral qualities. Leaders who increase self-awareness and adjust communication and expectations can convert intergenerational differences into team strengths.
Read at Fast Company
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