8. From Them to Us

In late 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an article called, “The Slowest Generation,” whose mid-50s author excoriated Young People for not taking races seriously enough. Median marathon finish times rose by 44 minutes from 1980 to 2011, one of many facts the author used to accuse Young People of an endemic and increasing laziness.

The article irritated me, and so I wrote a reply. An abbreviated version is provided here.

Then, in 2014, while in the initial stages of thinking about this book, I posted an article on LinkedIn that went viral, with more than 70,000 people reading it in the first 48 hours. Its success, in fact, is part of the reason that this book exists. Here’s an edited version:

We’ve come a long way from where we started. We’ve discussed eight key concepts that Young People and Old People have in common, as well as several explanations for why your Younger or Older colleagues think and behave the way they do. You’ve been given a couple dozen strategies to address generational issues with people significantly Older or more-experienced than you, as well as a couple dozen to address people significantly Younger or less experienced. For your convenience, those have all been compiled in Chapters 12, “Summary of Main Points,” and 13, “Summary of Strategies.”

However, that might all seem a bit overwhelming. And because the point of this book is to make things simple, I want to mention that you don’t have to do each and every one of the strategies you’ve been given—these are just some of your options. Also if this feels like too much, focus on just the key concepts. Understand them, and the right strategies will come to you naturally.

But I want to try to simplify things even further. Twitter has done that, and it’s made a ton of money. So let’s see if I can knock each concept down to 140 characters:

• Loyalty must be earned and can’t be assumed. This is true in every type of human relationship, personal and professional. If you are not working to create a loyal environment, you will not have loyal workers. If you are not willing to be a loyal team player, you will not receive the benefits that loyalty would earn you.

• Advancement is an unending process, not an inalienable right. Everything you’re good at today—every single thing, including the things you had a natural inclination for—is a result of practice, dedication, and perseverance. Remember this and don’t expect to be given something you’ve made no concentrated effort to earn or to keep something you make no concentrated effort to maintain.

• Existing business practices exist for very good reasons. This does not mean they can’t be modernized or updated, but it does mean that (a) they represent the best ideas anyone at your company has ever had, and (b) barring an imminent crisis, they are the best starting point for figuring out how to modernize. The past informs the future—it always has, and it still does.

• Questions and ideas are not an implicit attack on existing systems or your own authority. Some existing practices are outdated, and others could be improved. That is not your fault and should not be interpreted as a weakness; it is simply a function of the fact that things change.

• New ideas are inherently risky, and you can’t perfectly predict which will succeed and which will fail. Some will become embarrassing mistakes, and others will lead to wild success. The only way you can minimize the former and maximize the latter is to talk about all new ideas long enough to make the most well-informed decisions you possibly can.

• Some things move at a different speed than you wish they did. This is not my opinion; it’s simply the way of the world. Career advancement happens relatively slowly, and technological advancement happens relatively quickly. If that’s not entirely to your liking, take comfort in the fact that it’s not entirely to anyone’s liking. At least we’re all in the same boat.

Once again, you’ll notice that I’ve moved away from framing these issues as “generational.” That’s because the core difficulties we face have nothing to do with generational qualities and everything to do with perspective. The big problem is that Young People do not have the ability to see the world the same way Old People do because they haven’t lived long enough to experience the same things, and Old People typically forget what it’s like to think like a Young Person because that’s just what happens.

This is an important point: The people you work with who occupy different generations than yours are not fundamentally different than you. They aren’t operating under a completely new and heretofore unknown system of human behavior. They are simply at a different stage in their lives and careers than you. If they’re Older or more experienced than you are, then they’re doing what you (or at least some of your same-age colleagues) will do once you reach their age and experience level. And if they’re Younger or less experienced than you are, then they’re doing what you (or at least some of your same-age colleagues) did at their age—they’re looking at the world they’ve inherited and deciding how best to make a difference and how best to get what they want. The conditions may be different today than they were 50 years ago, and the technology is certainly different than it was 30 years ago. But people are not fundamentally different today than they have been since the beginning of human civilization. Once again, we are all far more Us than Them. The more you see your colleagues as people, and the more you can imagine how you would behave if you were in their positions, the more smoothly your business will run.

But I said I was going to try to knock this all down into a Twitter post, and I obviously failed at that. If this were a YouTube video, you would have already switched over to the next video. So I’ll try again: Young People, you don’t know how to think like your Older or more-experienced colleagues because you simply haven’t lived the same experiences they have. Old People, you’ve mostly forgotten how to think like your Younger or less-experienced colleagues because time and distance make it virtually impossible to remember how we felt 5, 10, 20, and 50 years ago. I think we can all agree on that.

So here is your Twitter takeaway, your one-sentence summary of generational differences in the workplace of yesterday, today, tomorrow, and 1,000 years from now:

No matter what generation you are a part of, you do not know everything there is to know.

That’s it. That’s all there is to say. You do not know everything there is to know. That’s the reason we hire consultants, talk to marriage counselors, listen to TED talks, and read business books. This entire book has been an attempt to illustrate this single concept. All the statistics and examples and psychological explanations and various anecdotes have brought us here. No one group of people has a monopoly on knowledge, and all of the generational issues you’ve faced or will face at work are direct results of people thinking they understand more than they actually do.

Here’s a softer way of looking at this: No one group of people knows everything. I deliver presentations for a living—hundreds of cities, 49 states, 2 countries, and counting. I’ve spoken at tech conferences, agricultural expos, health care summits, women’s business symposia, bankers’ associations, government agencies, nonprofits, sales conferences, hospitality conventions, and everything in between. I’ve met rich people, poor people, hard-line conservatives, hard-line liberals, urbanites, country folk, capitalists, quasi-anarchists, immigrants, and every other group of people imaginable. And I can say with perfect confidence that if any one of those groups of people were suddenly endowed with the ability to impose their will on the rest of us, our world would take an immediate turn for the worse. If the United States were run entirely by uncompromising Republicans or uncompromising Democrats, the United States probably wouldn’t still exist. If your marriage is dominated entirely, in every decision, by the wishes of only one of you, you have an unhealthy marriage. As much as it pains me to admit this, it turns out that other people occasionally have good ideas.

Young People, you need the Old People you work with to teach you patience, to give you perspective, and to show you what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. Without them and the benefit of their advice, you’ll end up wasting an enormous amount of time trying to reinvent the wheel—a wheel that you’re not likely to reinvent any better than they’ve already invented it. To help drive this point home: Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Bill Gates founded Microsoft, and all of them did it before they were 30, but none of them did it without listening to the advice of a whole lot of Old People who knew a whole lot more about running businesses than they did.

Old People, you need the Young People you work with to look at your business with fresh eyes, to ask questions that are difficult to answer, and to help you navigate the world at the speed at which it moves today. Because they were born into a hyperactive world, today’s Young People are masters at holding onto to ideas for only as long as they’re useful and then happily switching to whatever new, seemingly better thing comes next. They’ve been doing it their entire lives, and it’s a skill all of us can learn from them.

I want to end this chapter with one final observation. When you really get down to it, the entire conversation about generational differences in the workplace is somewhat misleading. The issues we’ve discussed throughout this book—loyalty, work ethic, change management, expectations of career advancement, and so on—are issues rooted primarily in our attitude and experience. There are people of all ages who are naturally loyal, perennially lazy, devoted workaholics, chronically impatient, exuberant risk-takers, instinctively conservative, methodical, chaotic, and every other combination of qualities that it is possible for people to have.

Indeed, the most common criticism people have about any previous attempt to define a given generation is that the descriptions don’t perfectly match. And that’s true—they don’t, because they can’t. There is no quality or characteristic that we can attribute entirely to people in their 30s or 50s or to people who are exactly 6 months into their professional lives or 3 years away from retirement. Each of us is a unique combination of our particular experiences, which in turn shape our beliefs about life and work. All of us come from different backgrounds with different desires, upbringings, mentors, cultural influences, and educational experiences—and all of that plays a role in shaping who we become, what we want out of our lives, and how hard we’re willing to work in order to get it.

Because of this, the only way to perfectly address the problem of bringing everyone you work with into the Us camp is as follows: Get to know everyone you work with so thoroughly that you can provide exactly the kind of incentives, encouragement, recognition, and opportunities they are looking for.¹ Anything less than this is necessarily imperfect and will therefore fall short of the ideal working environment we’re all striving to create. However, this strategy is at best impractical and most likely completely impossible.

¹ This is also the core strategy of the vast majority of any leadership, communication, and team-building book you will ever read.

Thus, we are forced to find ways to try to simplify what would otherwise be a superhuman task. Some authors and experts have chosen to use personality types as their framework for understanding how we work together. It’s a good approach, given that our personalities tend not to change very much; that is, an introvert usually stays introverted throughout his or her entire life. However, theirs is also an imperfect system, considering nobody is 100% introverted, analytical, emotional, or anything else. Still, viewing the human element of your business as a collection of discrete personality types makes a certain amount of sense, as long as the number of “types” is small enough to understand and manage. A personality test designed to distill your workforce into 23 separate categories would hardly simplify the way you interact with others or encourage them to perform at higher levels. I’m certain that those who focus on personality types have done everything they can to distill the entirety of humanity into as few personality types as they can specifically in order to make their system as practical as possible. It is the same reason I advocate for a two-generation model.

One of the reasons it makes sense to divide the working world along generational lines (vs. personality types) is that many of our attitudes change with time and experience, and those changes have a bearing on how we act. Because loyalty requires time to develop and thrive, it’s generally true that people become more loyal as they get older. It’s also true that people tend toward complacency as they age because the pressure to innovate and change decreases incrementally as we develop a track record of success. Youth often agitates for change because we yearn to prove ourselves and be taken seriously as we mature, and there is no better way for the young to make that happen than to force their elders to admit the merit of their own actions and ideas. The things that motivate us also tend to change as we get older; all of us generally crave meaning and purpose more than money when we’re young, and all of us slowly evolve as we put down roots and start families and realize that we have more to think about than just ourselves and our own goals.

But again, these are just tendencies, not absolutes. We humans are complicated, and as we try to deal with one another, often the best we can hope for is to think in ways that simplify those complications as best as possible. That’s what I have attempted to do here. I believe very strongly that this two-generation, Us vs. Them, approach is a simpler—and thus more effective—way to look at generational issues than the four-generation model we’ve been hearing about for so long. I hope you’ll agree. But even if you don’t, I hope you’ve found something in this book that you can use.

Correction: I hope you use the something in this book that you found. (Sorry, I got the words out of order in that last paragraph.) And to help make sure you’re able to apply this information in a productive way, make sure to check out Part Three. My editors made me include a third section because they argued (quite convincingly, I might add) that things with three parts are better than things with two. They pointed out that The Lord of the Rings would have been awfully depressing if it had ended with The Two Towers, and if our fingers had only two parts, then we’d each have 10 thumbs, and that would look weird.

Part Three is short, awesome, and short. In it you’ll find all of the key concepts and strategies we’ve discussed throughout this book, along with some concrete steps for having successful conversations with people who are significantly Older or more experienced or Younger or less experienced than you are. Along the way we also shatter the idiotic notion that Baby Boomers are universally “live to work” automatons while everyone younger than them is a “work to live” vagabond. There might be some other things in there too, but if I give it all away right now, then you’ll have less incentive to read it for yourself.

So please, don’t make me do all your work for you. Haven’t we discussed enough the importance of working hard? Turn the page already!