Leading Cross Generational Teams

Anita Brick: Hi. This is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Jennifer Deal. And Jennifer is a senior research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership in San Diego, California. Her work focuses on global leadership and generational differences. She's authored two books, Success for the New Global Manager and Retiring the Generation Gap. She's an internationally recognized expert on generational differences, hence the topic today.

And she's spoken in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. And I read in your bio that you aspire to do this with the penguins in Antarctica.

Jennifer Deal: Yes, I tried to get there, but my ship hit a barge, so I'll try again.

Anita Brick: OK, good. Jennifer has a BA from Haverford College and a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology from the Ohio State University. Thank you so much. I know that you are a very busy person, and we all appreciate you making the time to share your wisdom with students and alumni from Chicago Booth.

Jennifer Deal: Thanks for having me.

Anita Brick: So our topic is how do you manage teams when you have multiple generations? At a very basic level, because it seems like different people have different opinions, how would you define a cross-generational team?

Jennifer Deal: To me, a cross-generational team is a team that includes people from different generations. And at this point in the workplace, that's most teams people are on, because it's very rare to have a team where everybody was born within a few years of each other. So it's just a team that includes people of different generations.

Anita Brick: And sometimes the leader is older than the team, sometimes younger. And it's an interesting dynamic that can come into play.

Jennifer Deal: Yes, it is a very interesting dynamic and it does happen. And what we've seen in the past 15 or so years is more teams being led by younger people, which I think has increased the discussion of cross-generational teams, because in society, it's typical for people who are older to be in positions of authority over people who are younger.

But it is not typical for people who are younger to be in positions of authority over people who are older. Under those circumstances, everybody tends to be a bit nervous.

Anita Brick: And that comes to, you know, some of the questions that I sent to you and people talking about this topic. There are a lot of stereotypes that emerge: who boomers are, who Xers are, who millennials are. What are you seeing? What information might add some light to this whole conversation?

Jennifer Deal: Well, I hear the same stereotypes that everybody hears. I actually deliberately go out and collect them because they're helpful to understand what people are saying. What we see in the research is that the stereotypes are just stereotypes. They’re as accurate as other stereotypes are, and we know that stereotypes, by and large, aren't terribly accurate. What we actually find is that people’s stereotypes about their own generation tend to be positive.

People’s stereotypes about other generations tend to be negative. You know, we all have a few negative stereotypes about our own generation, but by and large, we perceive our own group or generation positively, and other groups, other generations less positively. So what we find is that when people from different generations work together on a team, one of the things they do is they use generational tags, which tend to be more positive about their generation and more negative about other generations.

So we hear more and more of the stereotypes coming out. By and large, the stereotypes aren't terribly accurate.

Anita Brick: One of the questions, and I think maybe we'll get to it next, if stereotypes for the most part are not true—I mean, any more than any other—why is this conflict still going on?

Jennifer Deal: First of all, the conflict is as old as time. In my book I have quotes back 2,000 years, people talking about other generations being rotten in one way or another. This is constant. You know, if you talk to your grandparents, they could tell you the stereotypes that were said about them. What happens on a team is that people are sort of jockeying for position, because everyone on a team wants power.

Typically, younger people want to increase the amount of power they have because typically they have less of it. And older people want to maintain the amount of power they have. One of the things they do is use things that are positive about themselves that they perceive as being selling points, in essence, for increasing their clout vis-a-vis other people on the team.

So what you start to hear is you start to hear a lot of conflict among the generations: younger people saying, you know, we have these new ideas, we have these fresh ideas. We're better with technology. We're closer to the client, which by default means that the older people aren't.

And older people say, well, we have experience, we have knowledge. We've done this before by default. Again says that younger people have no experience and no knowledge and, you know, should be quiet, right? So what you find is that you find these conflicts going on, these supposedly generational conflicts going on in teams that aren't actually about generational issues. What they're about are basic team issues that have to do with power and authority.

Anita Brick: That's all well and good. So how do you, as a leader, change the conversation? It's about “this person grew up in the ’50s and this person grew up in the ’90s,” and that seems to be maybe a way of diffusing the real issues. How do you get the conversation on point?

Jennifer Deal: Well, it depends on exactly what's going on, because typically people aren't terribly direct.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah.

Jennifer Deal: Yeah. About their use of these. They're more pumping themselves up, sort of being slightly negative about the other. You have to decide how directly you want to take it on. And that's a truly purely contextual issue. In some cases, you might take somebody aside and say, do you realize that when you say X, when everybody here is Y? – Is that actually your intention? Calling people on it often makes them stop. They know what they're doing, but they don't necessarily mean it as negatively as everybody hears it.

Another option is to sort of point out to people the reality, which is that once people get in the workplace, there actually aren't many differences among them. There's a special issue of a journal out that I was a guest editor on with a colleague, the journal Business in Psychology, about millennials.

It has a lot of articles, and one of the things it looks at is, are people actually different once they get in the workplace? Do they have different attitudes? Do they have different expectations? And consistent with what I said in my book, the answer is no. There aren't many differences. What I found, and what some other people have found, is that saying to people, you know, I hear what you're saying, but it's not true. I mean, you know, it's just fundamentally wrong.

Oftentimes what people will do is they'll complain about the values of people of different generations. That's sort of a buzzword. One of the things we found in our research is that the values across the generations are virtually identical. The way they might go about enacting those values might be different, but the fundamental values themselves are the same.

And if you understand that, you might be able to get beyond the conflict. Or as a team leader, you might be able to sort of move your team beyond that issue and say you're not arguing about the goal, you're arguing about the means.

Anita Brick: Good point. No, it's a very good point. What if you're not in a leadership position? One of the alums asked, when will we begin to see a decrease of what I call boomer bashing? A lot of job coaching is what boomers need to do to fix themselves, to be more like young folks.

Jennifer Deal: It's funny because you hear two sets of arguments going on, and one is the one the alum mentioned that the boomers need to change. They need to become more like younger people. They need to be more interconnected, all these sorts of things. On the other side, you hear older people typically say, you younger people need to learn some values and some work ethic, and get that it isn't all about you. So you hear the bashing going both ways. I'm sort of constantly surprised because it isn't really real.

Anita Brick: What do you mean by that?

Jennifer Deal: I think the comments are real. What's driving the substance of the comments is … it's all perception. And I really think it’s sort of motivated comments, if that makes sense? Where people are saying it because they win—they become more powerful as a result of the commentary. So it never enters my mind that my boomer colleagues have a different attitude than I do, unless they explicitly express it to me, because there's no evidence that they do.

I hear what the alum is saying, and it's incredibly frustrating from both directions. It's incredibly frustrating for boomers to be told you need to behave differently because these younger people need you to behave differently, right? Quite honestly, you don't. On the other side, it's incredibly frustrating for younger people to be told you have to push yourself inside out to behave differently because you don't know how to behave, when most of them actually do. What I would expect to happen as a result of the economy is for boomer bashing to decrease.

Anita Brick: Why do you think it will decrease?

Jennifer Deal: One thing that's been very interesting to me during the recession is that there's a lot of media attention to the idea that organizations need to change, and boomers need to change because the millennials need them to be different for the millennials to be engaged and to continue working and to be retained by their organization. What people don't seem to be talking about is the fact that millennials have the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

Anita Brick: Oh, wow.

Jennifer Deal: College students can't find jobs. There's a massive generation and a massive unemployment rate and few jobs being created. What isn't clear to me is why the result of this sort of confluence of events is that organizations and boomers need to change how they behave to accommodate people who are many, many, many, many of.

Anita Brick: Where do you think this comes from?

Jennifer Deal: I think it was a trend that started three or four years ago, and people haven't stopped moving in that direction. People get this idea that there's this war for talent going on, right? It's been a discussion of a war for talent for about a decade now. They don't say, OK, wait a second. There's a massive unemployment rate.

There are more people coming out of college than we can possibly absorb into new jobs. There are highly educated people in their early 20s who can't find positions. What I've heard people say in organizations is we're going to upgrade talent and role, because we can get better people now than we could four years ago.

Anita Brick: Oh, absolutely. And the cost differential has dropped.

Jennifer Deal: Exactly. So under those circumstances, what is the pressure on the organization or the boomers to alter their behavior to retain people who they can find lining up outside their door?

Anita Brick: It's a really interesting question to ponder. And maybe that's part of the broader question that leaders need to ask, in terms of what talent do I really want and need? How do I manage and retain them? And realizing that there is this lopsided supply/demand curve right now?

Jennifer Deal: That's right. Because remember, the millennials, this youngest generation, is about as large as the boomers, right? So there's a whole different conversation when it comes to Gen Xers because there really are too few of them. But when it comes to boomers and to millennials, there are lots and lots of them.

Anita Brick: Now at the other end, there was an entrepreneur, 27—actually, there were two. There were two people talking about this, someone who is 26 and the other person is 27. Most of the employees are 45, plus some as old as 60. There is this challenge, this conflict between let's do it the way we've always done it and let's move on. And the other aspect of it is, so if you take a stand and say we're going to do things differently, how do you motivate these boomers to kind of come with you?

Jennifer Deal: There are two different questions. One is about change and the other is about motivation. With regard to motivation, you don't motivate older people any differently than you do younger people. Motivation is motivation. And frankly, most people are intrinsically motivated, not extrinsic, motivated by—intrinsically the motivation comes from within them versus extrinsic, you do it to them, right?

So there isn't going to be a lot of you motivating them to do the job. To me, the question is how well do they fit their jobs? If they fit the jobs, then they're probably motivated to do them. If they don't fit their jobs, then they're not necessarily …. And then that's an issue as a manager, you can address, but you wouldn't address that any differently for someone who's 50 than you would someone who's 30.

Anita Brick: Well, that's a good point. And I think the other part of it is in terms of getting people to at least listen to you. How does a younger leader gain credibility when other people have decades more experience than that person does?

Jennifer Deal: It's hard.

Anita Brick: What would you advise?

Jennifer Deal: It's not an easy thing to do.

Anita Brick: OK.

Jennifer Deal: Part of it comes from if you've actually been put in a position of authority over them, you have authority. You can use that authority, but you need to use it more delicately than you might necessarily with younger people. You're going against the social norm. Again, the social norm is that younger people report to older people, not older people reporting to younger people.

So there's an upside-down power dynamic that goes on. What I'd recommend is that you be really careful and listen a lot. It doesn't mean that you're not setting direction for the group. It means that you acknowledge that the people who've been around for a long time, longer than you have, have a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge, and that you appreciate that and you understand that and you want to take advantage of that.

While, at the same time, you know, the buck stops at your desk that you're the one who is responsible to the organization. It's a delicate line to walk. You're unlikely to make everybody happy. But if you listen a lot and express gratitude for knowledge and experience of the people who are working for you, that helps. What we actually found in our research is that one of the key retention factors for older people was being respected, feeling respected.

Younger people want to be respected as well with regard to retention and sort of this management issue of older people who have a lot of experience, more experience, in the case you're talking about than the person who they're now reporting to. Right? They really appreciate you expressing appreciation for their experience and understanding of their experience. That's very important. I think that everybody understands organizational hierarchy. You just don't want to feel dissed.

Anita Brick: You're right, because most people, if you appreciate them, will do way more than you could even imagine.

Jennifer Deal: It's equally true for younger people, but in the sort of example you were describing with the older people reporting to a younger person, it becomes even more delicate because again, the social dynamic is upside down right now.

Anita Brick: That makes sense.

Jennifer Deal: And you don't want to insult people because telling somebody older than you what they're supposed to do culturally is insulting within an organizational hierarchy. It isn't meant that way, but it doesn't stop people from potentially feeling that way. And so you might be able to defuse some of that by being more expressive of appreciation than you might typically.

Anita Brick: So now you have this upside-down pyramid of someone younger leading a team of people who are a lot older. What if you overlay on that … I know this is not necessarily your area of expertise, but if you have some thoughts, certainly would love them. What if you overlay gender on top of that too?

Jennifer Deal: When you overlay generation and gender on top of each other, it can be pretty complicated. It can also be pretty darn simple. It depends in part on exactly who you're working with, because there are some people of the opposite sex, and of the same sex of the older generation, who are perfectly happy with you being in charge. And there are some people who are not.

It isn't necessarily a function of whether you're male or female; more a function of the person you're managing and how they react. It can be more complicated. It can be less. It really would depend on the situation.

Anita Brick: OK, so here's a specific situation. It sounds like this is more generational than gender related. A student said, “Sometimes I feel that I'm at the UN when I sit in meetings with my team. There are different generations, and their generational jargon is causing schisms in the team and making some of the projects particularly challenging. Please help”—with lots of exclamation points.

Jennifer Deal: I would be very interested to hear what generational jargon is causing problems, so please email it in because I want to hear this. Really interesting to me. What I'd say is if there are particular phrases that become hot buttons with the team, perhaps you could have the team sit down and put together a list of terms or jargon that just won't be used. it would sort of be an extension of the typical setting ground rules in a team meeting.

Anita Brick: Oh, good point.

Jennifer Deal: Yeah, the teams do that at the beginning. Another thing is that it might be useful to explore why people are getting so upset about a choice of words. What are those words implying? What do they mean? How do people feel when they're used? Are they being used to exclude a particular group of people? What's going on? It's possible that some of the people perceive the terms are actually being used to marginalize one group.

Anita Brick: Oh, OK.

Jennifer Deal: In that case, what's likely going on goes back to power. Each group is trying to gain more power within the team in comparison with the other group. If you remember, if you keep going back to the fact that most generational conflicts are about clout and power, it simplifies what you see in front of you a lot if you take the generational issue out and figure—the conflict that's going on that appears to be about generation is actually about power within the team. You'll be able to deal with it more directly, because most of the time that's fundamentally what it's about. It's not actually about somebody being older or younger.

Anita Brick: No, it's a good point. One of the people was talking about being in a firm that is now under the rule, so to speak, of a private equity firm. And I did a little bit more research about this particular question from an evening student. What this person said is that some of it is stereotypes that people who are older are just not going to work as hard or be as committed. They don't have as much energy.

So there is that perception. And then there's also pressure from the private equity firm to do more, better, faster. The evening student asked, what could he do to tackle the issue? Does he have to clean house? Is there a way of … in a way, this person is a go-between or translator between the group that's been there, that hasn't necessarily been running the company all that well, and these pressures from the private equity firms. What do you do to at least create some dialogue?

Jennifer Deal: It's fascinating to hear this because most of the time what I hear is that younger people aren't working hard enough.

Anita Brick: And is it from older people?

Jennifer Deal: Yes.

Anita Brick: That's so funny.

Jennifer Deal: I rarely hear anybody saying that older people aren’t working hard enough. This is very interesting to me. First of all, I'd point out to them that there actually are laws that prevent firing people or letting people go based on their age. So up front, that's not a good idea. There's been a big increase in lawsuits in the past two years.

Anita Brick: Oh, really? OK.

Jennifer Deal: Yes. Based on that—because people are very aware of the fact that a lot of organizations are choosing to let older people go, there's been a really impressive increase in the number of lawsuits filed, and complaints filed, with, I think it's the EEOC. I wouldn't go there. I’d go back and sort of see what's going on with this idea that people aren't working hard enough.

Is it about working hard or is it about productivity? One of the comments we hear all the time from younger people is that the bosses want a lot of face time. From their perspective, it isn't about face time, it's about productivity. So where I'd go is how well managed are the people in the firm? Are goals set? Are goals met?

If people are managing by face time, then you sort of begin to understand why people might say, well, they're leaving early and coming in late and not working very hard. If they're meeting all their goals, does that actually matter? I'd really have the person go back to management 101, go back to goal setting and explicit expectations. And then if people don't meet the expectations, that can be dealt with directly. I think that that's a more effective way to deal with what people perceive as nonperformance for people of any age.

Anita Brick: And it sounds like that's the place to start up-front to kind of do an assessment of the team, see what the strengths are. Like you said earlier, is person A in the right role? Maybe person A belongs in person Z’s role, because the skills and interests and passions are all more closely aligned. But that takes an enlightened leader to restructure in a way that doesn't downsize people, that just moves people around.

Jennifer Deal: People think it's easy to clean house and start new. It may be, in some cases. It's not always the best solution because the people who are there have a lot of knowledge that you would lose. So the question is figuring out what you're not getting that you need to be getting. And I keep going back to management 101.

It takes time, and it takes effort. And a lot of people complain to me and say that I don't want to do that. The reality is that when you manage based on explicit objectives, everybody works better, everyone's more efficient, and you know whether or not people have met the goals.

Anita Brick: It's true. And it sounds like the whole idea of—from your research and from what we've been talking about today—the whole idea of a cross-generational team and having that be the differentiator of the team is a bad idea.

Jennifer Deal: Yeah, it's not relevant.

Anita Brick: Right. And start with what do you need and who can do the job. But you have to be open minded in the sense to get past your own internal stereotypes.

Jennifer Deal: It's never clear to me why someone being of a particular generation is a relevant characteristic on a team. Unless you're targeting a particular generation as your client, right? And then you do it in part because you presume that they have knowledge that somebody else does it. But those are rare circumstances.

Anita Brick: It's true. I have a friend who is in her mid-40s, which for someone in advertising is—most people in advertising are a lot younger. But one of the things I know that she does, and she has a real knack for it, is she's able to really connect with people 10, 20 years younger than she is, get into their mindset and use all that kind of wisdom and knowledge that she's built up over the last 20-plus years to turn out advertising that actually connects to that generation.

Jennifer Deal: To me, generation is one other demographic category that is not particularly relevant. What's important is what knowledge people have, what interests they have, what they want to be doing and what they can bring to the team.

Anita Brick: So when you think about all of this, you know, we've talked about—certainly there are challenges or stereotypes that we need to be aware of so that we can get past them. Someone who is working to create a stronger team, a more productive team, a more high-performing team, what are things that that person could do? Maybe two or three things to build trust and respect, and then leverage the knowledge that is cross-generational.

Jennifer Deal: With regard to trust, trust is fundamentally about what you do, and it's very difficult to get back once you've lost it. So leaders need to be careful to do what they say they're going to do. There's a whole chapter in the book about what leaders should and shouldn't do with regard to trust, because people of different generations trust and distrust about equally, and leaders need to be aware of that: that you don't need to be different for the different generations.

You need to do what you're saying to do. Be trustworthy, be credible, be competent is often a good one. People are more likely to trust you if you're actually competent at your job. It's a good idea for leaders of teams to remember that the different people of the different generations don't have different values, that they value the same things. They just might express those values a little bit differently. Respecting everyone on the team is critical.

Now, the issue is that sometimes people of different generations perceive respect differently. And so one of the things you need to recognize is that you might need to manage the respect issue slightly differently with the people who are older than you've been with, people who are your age or younger than you.And as we discussed earlier, if you're a younger person managing older people, one of the ways you can do that is being more explicitly appreciative of the experience that's brought.

Now, at the same time, you have to remember that just because younger people haven't been in the workforce as long, it doesn't mean they don't have a lot of experience. Remember, experience isn't just what you get in the workplace. People have experiences through all of their life, and you might not know about those experiences, and those might be directly relevant to whatever you're doing. So remember that just because younger people haven't been in the workforce for as many years doesn't mean they don't have very valuable experience that they can contribute.

Anita Brick: And they might share that with you. If they trust you.

Jennifer Deal: Exactly. They might share that if they think that you would be appreciative of knowing it. Because when people are open to hearing what the people on their team think and are interested in and what contributions they have, people are much more likely to provide that information.

Anita Brick: If you say you're going to listen and you say you're going to be open, you can't make a preemptive decision halfway through the discussion.

Jennifer Deal: Or if you do, you need to be pretty darn explicit about why you're doing it. Occasionally, people in positions of authority have to make decisions because of stuff that's coming down from above them, within the organization. That's just organizational life. But when that happens, you need to be open with your team about what's happening, right? You know, misleading them about why you're doing it just makes them distrust you.

Of course, we've all undoubtedly been in a situation where something came down from on high telling us we had to do something, and then we have to go to our team who's in the middle of trying to do something that's different and say, no, we have to change course now. If you pretend it's your decision, which some leaders will do, and they find out later that what came down from—it was what came down from on high, you just lose the trust.

While if you're straightforward and you say, look, this is what's happened. I'm sorry. You know the magic words, but this is the organizational reality. People can often deal with organization reality if it's presented that way. It's when people pretend that it's something other than it is that people begin to not trust the person giving them the message.

Anita Brick: Got it. Anything else that you would advise someone who is trying to make their team more cohesive?

Jennifer Deal: Don't get hung up on the generational conflict stuff. If you need to deal with it, deal with it as a function of power. And one other issue that we sort of touched on briefly is about change. I often hear people complain that older people are less likely to embrace change than younger people are. According to our research, that isn't true, and it's a complaint that goes on all the time. The quick summary is that what happens is that when people are resistant to change, what's going on is that they think they're going to lose as a result of the change, rather than benefit as the result of the change. And that's true with people of all generations.

So when you're leading a team and you think that some of the people on the team are resistant to the direction you want to go or the changes you want to make, and you're attributing it to generation? Stop, because it's not about generation. It's about them thinking they're going to lose as a result of what's going on. And if you deal with it from that perspective, you're much more likely to be able to achieve what you need to achieve than if you dismiss it as a generational shift.

Anita Brick: Very good point, because there's nowhere to go if you address it generationally.

Jennifer Deal: If you say it's a characteristic of the person, there's nothing you can do, right? If you say, OK, this actually makes sense. Who wants to lose? Nobody does. I mean, just if you think about it, if you're given a choice between something that will benefit you and something that will cause you to lose something, you're going to choose something that will benefit you, even if it's a change, right? Why would you choose to embrace a change that you think you're going to lose as a result?

Anita Brick: It makes perfect sense.

Jennifer Deal: Yeah, it doesn't matter what generation you're from. And so it's really important when you're leading multigenerational teams, and someone on the team seems to be resistant to a change, to not think that it's about their generation or even the length of time they've been in the organization. It's really about what they think they're going to lose, or the fact that they've seen the same change done before and it didn't work then.

And so it's good to go and ask them sort of what's going on, but don't assume it's a result of generation because it's not—it's a result of potential loss.

Anita Brick: Good point. Any final closing words for us?

Jennifer Deal: No. That's good.

Anita Brick: Well, I think my biggest takeaway is that if you focus on the cross-generational differences, you're not going to win and you're not going to succeed. And it's a much deeper, broader issue than that.

Jennifer Deal: It's a tangent. You're being sidetracked. When you focus on that, you're being taken away. You're taking your eyes off the goal, the bottom line. When you focus on generational issues and think that those are the fundamental issue, they're not. Keep your eye on the goal and think in terms of power and clout within the team. That will get you closer to where you want to go more quickly than being pulled off on a tangent around generations.

Anita Brick: Got it. Thank you so much. This was great.

Jennifer Deal: OK. Thank you.

Anita Brick: Thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.