Exploding the myth of the generation gap at work – recovering the art of transitions

It turns out that I was 10 years old when the phrase generation gap was invented by a Mr John Poppy, writing in Look magazine. I had grown up buying into the myth that there was this gap between me and my parents and my parents with their parents, between pupils and teachers, and between the twenty-somethings entering their career and the 55+ year olds heading out of theirs. A generation gap is defined as a ‘difference of opinion and outlooks between one generation and another (work skills, beliefs, politics, language, demographies and values)[1]’. The problem is we haven’t been ruthless enough about the language we use. As we know, only too well from the rise of social media, language shapes the consciousness of our day to day life. A meme is some words, put together, that act as a carrier of an idea across the culture. A ‘successful’ meme spreads like wildfire and becomes the new truth and few people question it.
 
The generation gap is a meme that has been and still is, causing real problems in the workplace.
 
Clearly there are issues that arise between people of different ages. My parents grew up in a world of little technology. I grew up in a world of emerging technology and my children and grandchildren are marinated in it, with almost every waking breath . There are genuine differences in experience and differences in language and different expectations of everything from careers to relationships. Things are changing and evolving all the time, but differences are not the same as gaps.  Once we introduce the word ‘gap’ we assume a break, a distance, a separation, an ‘otherness’ and irreconcilable differences.   A gap becomes something fixed and often unbridgeable. It becomes a space, which becomes a void, which becomes a chasm, which becomes an uncrossable reality. Many see a gap as something you get as close to the edge of, but don’t expect to cross over.      
 
As you will gather, my contention is that the generation gap is a modern constructed myth that has been brought into and allowed to shape the way we look at the whole span of life, including work. And it really hasn’t been and still isn’t helpful.   I want to swap the phrase ‘generation gap’ for something like ‘intergenerational transitions’.  To make my case let me bring back onto the stage two important ideas – development and work.
 
Historically[2] work was observed as a journey from inexperience to wisdom, apprentice to Master (my first golf partner started life pushing barrows of parts across the concrete floors of the Ford assembly plant at Dagenham and eventually became the CEO of the whole Engine Plant). You hopefully received some basic education as a child and then entered a career in the working world was an apprentice. Your expectation was that you came to work as a learner (That is the latin root of the word). To start with you weren’t expected to contribute much, but as you accumulated experience, so your value to the organisation increased. At a certain point it was seen that you had the confidence and skill to start shaping a part of this organisations story. This was your first step into leadership[3].  Roughly between aged 30-60, you would mature into your leadership and shape greater and greater dimensions of the organisations story. By your 50’s onwards, in traditional societies, the elders of the organisation and/or in your wider life would tap you on the shoulder to invite you to begin the make the transition from your current ego-identity and crystalize your leadership experience into wisdom, so that you too would become an elder who invested back into those younger than you in the organisation and beyond. With the relatively recent explosion of university as the next step of choice for youth as an entry point into the workplace and the downgrading of perceptions of apprenticeships, along with societies abandoning of eldership, the view of the working world changed.               
 
From a developmental perspective we are on a non-stop journey from childhood, to youth, to adult, to senior, to elder. Much work has been done to chart that developmental journey. They key insight is that whether you follow Erikson, Levinson or Jung, there is no gap between these phases of development, only transitions, thresholds, or crossings-over. There are no fire-breaks, or overnight fissures, just a flowing of a tide that moves in and out, but always in one direction. Development - physical and emotional and moral – begin at birth and it doesn't stop until our last breath. Much that is written about development seems to evaporate somewhere between 30-50 years and then it morphs into old age and retirement.  Jung was insistent that every phase is a development phase, including old age and every phase matters. We are invited to keep on growing in our 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s….  At each stage of development, we need to seriously be asking ourselves, ‘what does this phase ask of me and what does it invite me to invest in?”
 
By buying into the myth of the generation gap we have created real problems in the work place today. We have young people arriving at the front door of their careers believing they have not only the energy and innovation, but also that their degree has conferred on them the experience and the wisdom of the elders. We have an aging generation of leaders who don’t want to let on about their existential anxieties and don’t know how to move on from leadership to eldership and so they hold on to their positions in defence against the looming expectation of a fearful retirement. We have young people pushing on the ceiling to get rid of those olders who seem to be blocking their pathway to promotion. We have other olders leaving their senior positions in organisations because they have had enough, but who then leave a massive experience and wisdom vacuum for the upcoming leaders[4]. We have young people jumping from organisation to organisation[5] to seek more effective career progression, creating a perpetual nightmare for HR in finding ways to both employ and retain high potential staff entering the job market. We have retired olders who feel abandoned by the organisation they have served faithfully and invested so much in, because their wisdom is not invited back to mentor or advise new and existing leaders. These multiple dynamics play havoc with any mature approach to building organisational legacy and succession planning.
 
My call is for a re-marriage of a developmental view of work, with a development view of human aging and replacing the word ‘generation gap’, with the more helpful, facilitative words, ‘intergenerational transitions’.
 
Recovering the art of transitions would change the way we approach the inter-generations of the work force. Not only would this change the way we work, but it would give a meaningful direction to work itself, whilst also restoring hope to the aging process outside of and beyond our work life. Developmental growth does not have gaps. It has transitions. So, let us identify them and invest in them and strengthen them in the work place.
 
What might his look like?

1. Take on apprentices not graduates
Of course, an apprentice may be a graduate, but not necessarily. They key is the mind-set that you invite a young person onto the work force with. By explicitly calling them Apprentices you lay out the expectation that you come here with much knowledge, innovation, creativity and enthusiasm, but you come here as a learner of wisdom and perspective and experience from those who have gone before. “We are going to create possibility, opportunity, space for innovation for you, in the context of a career-long investment of mentoring. Relationship with more experienced people will be part of your diet here”. I’ve heard of a very well-established financial house that has already started to do this with excellent results.
 
2. Lay out a map of development at induction
When someone arrives at the organisation, you lay out, in their induction sessions, what the road map of development looks like here. You explicitly deliver a tangible vision of what the road map of development looks like when you work here.
You gain experience, you become a leader, you mature as a leader, around midlife we will start to help you make that ego-identity and wisdom transition and then you will hopefully become an elder within this organisation and your wider life, to reinvest your wisdom for the benefit of the upcoming leaders.
 
3. Invest in leaders to become elders
There is something that has always been beyond leadership[6]. If we fail to grasp this then we make a glass ceiling out of leadership and it has a negative push back on both the leaders and the organisation. Historically leadership was never the peak of the organisational or tribal pyramid, it was eldership.
 
Elders are those who have crystallised their experience into wisdom and perspective. They have largely moved beyond a ego-centred identity that is characteristic of so much leadership[7]. They can now remind the maturing leader that what they learned to aspire to at their induction – eldership beyond leadership – is now theirs to awaken. They can begin that inner work around ego-identity and that outer work of seriously investing mentoring in the rising leaders.
 
4. Call on the elders‘
Leaders are developed in the cradle of eldership[8]’.  Nelson Mandela’s leadership was developed from cradle to grave because of the presence of elders in his life. We have isolated leadership development from eldership and are reaping the consequences every day, at both the local and the global level. At a conference for NHS leaders I once asked how many of the two hundred participants had benefited from wiser, older leaders in their career? Most hands went up. I then asked how many of them had invited those retired leaders back into the organisation to share wisdom and mentoring? It was stark how few hands went up.
 
Can you imagine any world where you invest 40-50 years in someone’s experience and wisdom and then just push it out of the door without using it? Why not make it a policy to make it available to the apprentices, new leaders and maturing leaders and budding elders? I’m told that in some reputable Professional Service organisations the retired still come back for meetings. Why? Because they still have something to offer and feel adrift in knowing what to do. Often the role of elder is not identified or valued and the retiree ends up looking a bit of a sad nuisance. 
 
While we talk about the gap, we are losing a lot down those very fissures. However, by viewing the inter-generations as a pathway, a journey, that have their roots in history and human development, we can create a mindset and a map of transitions that build the individuals leadership, the organisations sustainability and legacy, as well as impacting the wider cultural contexts we find ourselves in. It’s a different narrative that, if you read it forwards across the life span, carries us across productive thresholds and if you read it backwards from the mature years, shows us a map of how we can invest in the upcoming generations. 
 
 So, what can we each do to reshape the 'intergenerational transitions' narrative at work today?

[1] www.Dictionary.com

[2] Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith have some good descriptions in Coaching, Mentoring & Organizational Consultancy  McGraw Hill  2006

[3] ‘Leadership is the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others’   Howard Gardner     Leading Minds 1995 
[4] Fortune Magazine October 2023 CEOs are leaving their jobs in record numbers in what is the  executive suite version of The Great  Resignation   Jo Constantz and Bloomberg

[5] Gallup research Business Journal

[6] To Plant A Walnut Tree   Trevor Waldock Nicholas Brealey 2012 & Amazon 2021

[7] See the work of INSEAD Professor Manfred Kets De Vries

[8] Reuel J Khosa Let Africa Lead  Vezubuntu Publishing (Pty) Ltd  2005