Generational differences are vastly exaggerated (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Nicole Smith: I would say within the first couple of weeks I realized we have a problem. I had a group of managers who were managing a group of young journalists on the digital side, and they shared with me how my team, who were in their forties, fifties, and sixties, wouldn't play nicely when it came to doing projects together.

Adam Grant: Nicole Smith was in her thirties when she was hired as a manager in a newsroom. Her job was to oversee a team of veteran print journalists who'd been at the paper for decades. 

Nicole Smith: My goal was to get in there and say, okay, the way that we've been doing it, I respect it. Is there also another way that we can do it so that more people can see your work?

Adam Grant: Journalism was in the midst of a seismic shift from print to digital. Suddenly success was measured by online clicks, views, and shares. This transformation demanded new skills and new ways of thinking. It called the value of classic reporting into question. It required even the most seasoned journalists to change the way they did their work. But that wasn't the conversation Nicole walked into. Instead, it was all about age. 

Nicole Smith: I'll never forget this, they told me how there was an invisible barrier where people from the team that I was now managing wouldn't even walk over into the other side of the room, lest they would be seen as a traitor for working with the younger group. And I remember getting done with that meeting and I, I sat and I watched. I watched to see over the next couple days if anyone from my team walked over past that invisible barrier. Not one person. 

Adam Grant: That barrier was generational, or at least the newsroom staffers thought so, and this really threw Nicole for a loop because she knew all her colleagues had something to offer regardless of their age.

Nicole Smith: That was the moment that terrified me when I realized I was in something deeper that I wasn't sure if I knew how to climb out of it. I'm not sure, quite frankly, that I really fully understood the effects of ageism, when it just sits there and it festers and it's a lot to grow. It just felt like, wow, we have a problem here, and it's causing this great divide between this great set of colleagues and then this great set of colleagues, and they won't come together to make something even better.

Adam Grant: There are five different generations in the workplace today, and they all have something in common. They have some strong views about other generations.

Generational voices: I can't handle Gen X.

F***ing Millennials. 

Gen Z is terrifying. I think they're unhinged.

Okay, Boomer. 

Adam Grant: But are generational differences the real problem, or is the idea of differences what's getting in the way? And if it is a myth, what better relationships could we have and what great things could we create without it?

I'm Adam Grant and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces. Today: the problem with ageism and how to overcome generational divides at work.

It is so strange to me that people identify with generational cohorts. Like I would never introduce myself as a Gen Xer. I might talk to someone about how I love playing Oregon Trail and how Stranger Things reminds me of my childhood, but the generation itself is not part of my identity. Why are people into this?

Jennifer Deal: It's a shortcut. It's a quick way to find affinity. It's a quick way to bucket people. It's also a quick way to say, I'm better than you are, 'cause you're part of this cohort that behaves in these ways that I don't like, and therefore I am more valuable in the workplace than you are. 

Adam Grant: Jennifer Deal is a senior research scientist at USC, and a leading expert in generational shifts in the workplace, which means she's heard all the stereotypes. Young people are entitled and selfish, old people are stubborn and rigid. 

Jennifer Deal: I started doing the work in 1998, and I had evidence of people saying the same things about young people back into the late 1960s. The same complaints about Baby Boomers as about Gen X, as about Millennials, as now about Gen Z.

Adam Grant: These stereotypes are not new. They cycle through every few decades. It's called the illusion of moral decline, the belief that younger generations are somehow worse than the ones before. Whatever your grandparents said about your generation, you're likely to say the same thing about your grandchildren's generation. Psychologists find that we stereotype generations because of a failure of comparison. Instead of comparing younger generations to our younger selves, we compare them to our current selves. 

Jennifer Deal: One of the places I see this a lot is the idea of loyalty. People write a lot about how Gen Z is disloyal, with the implication that we were loyal to our employers 20 years ago. We weren't. 20 years ago, loyalty was roughly the same as it is now. And then 20 years ago you saw people saying, well, these young people, Gen Xers or Millennials, are disloyal. In the imagined past, people were more loyal to their organizations. But then you go back and you look at what people said about Baby Boomers, and lo and behold, it was "these young people are not loyal to their organizations." So you see the same pattern.

Adam Grant: We're forgetting what we were like at their age. 

Jennifer Deal: There's some actually really good data, especially about things like changing jobs. There's really good data that shows that young people over time are more likely to change jobs than older people are. But that's pretty steady over time, with it just being a young people, not a generational effect.

Adam Grant: You mentioned Gen Z. Gen Z arrived in the workplace, and it seems like all of a sudden we're cool with Millennials now. 

Jennifer Deal: Oh yes, this is what happens. The next group comes in and they're more irritating, so everybody forgets about the one who was previously irritating, though typically what we see is that if you jump a generation, Gen Xers are gonna complain slightly less about Gen Z than Millennials are.

Adam Grant: Why is that? 

Jennifer Deal: Well, Gen Z is more of a threat to Millennials than they are to Gen Xers. They're closer in the organizational hierarchy. Millennials also have more interactions with Gen Z just on a day-to-day basis than Gen Xers do. I think of it as jumping a generation. The grandparents are less irritated by the grandchildren than the parents are.

Adam Grant: Older generations aren't just perpetrators of stereotypes, they're victims too. In a nationally representative survey of how often American adults 50 and up experienced ageism, 93% said regularly. That includes assumptions that they have poor memories, lack energy, and hate change. Boomers aren't imagining it. In one experiment, college students were randomly assigned to see a photo of someone they were gonna train on a computer task. If the trainee looked to be in their fifties rather than their twenties, the students gave less effective instruction because they had lower expectations. 

Jennifer Deal: Oh, yes. People say that older people can't learn new technology, and it's just not true. If there's technology that's directly relevant to the workplace, and you give people the opportunity and the time to learn it, people of all generations can learn it. I mean, there isn't a generational difference in being able to learn these things. 

Adam Grant: In a poll, nearly half of employers said they were worried about older workers' tech skills, and a quarter admitted they'd pick a 30-year-old over a 60-year-old if both candidates were equally qualified.

Age discrimination prevents people from getting hired, getting promoted, succeeding and sticking around. And it's not just workers who are harmed by ageism. Employers are missing out on real talent. Research shows that in suggestion boxes, on average, the most valuable ideas don't come from people in their twenties or thirties. They actually come from people above 55. You can see it in entrepreneurship too. 40 year olds are more than twice as likely as 25 year olds to launch successful startups. And amongst scientists, the average age for Nobel Prize winning work in physics, chemistry, and medicine is between 40 and 45. The lesson here is not that we should favor older workers, it's that we should stop making assumptions about people based on age groups.

There's good evidence that organizations that fail to engage people of different ages end up struggling, because they lose out on new ideas. 

Jennifer Deal: What I typically say to managers, leaders, and organizations is you should never be making decisions based on someone's membership in a particular generation. You really need to focus on the person in front of you and what they can do and want to do. Not on some perception of what a particular generation is interested in or not interested in. And that's just as true for younger people as it is for older people, because there are more differences within generations than there are between generations when you look at individual people. 

Adam Grant: Think about your coworkers from your generation. Even though you're the same age, you're different in many ways. You have different personalities, interests, skills, and experiences, and you might be at different life stages too. 

Jennifer Deal: Are you single? Are you partnered? Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you not? Are you looking after other relatives? Those types of life stage issues give people more in common when it comes to what they need from work and what they need to be able to do at work than generation does. 

Adam Grant: A Gen Zer and a Millennial who are both new parents may have more in common with each other than their generational peers who don't have kids. This plays out in remote work preferences too. It's not about whether you're a Millennial or Gen X, it's about whether you're caring for young kids or aging parents, because that makes flexibility more important. 

Jennifer Deal: Yeah. If you think about it just in terms of what is required of you in life, people who are at the same life stage have more in common than people of the same generation. 

Adam Grant: At work, regardless of our age and generation, our motivations are actually a lot more similar than they are different. 

Jennifer Deal: Every generation at work wants to be well paid. They want to do interesting work. They want to have the opportunity to advance, to learn and develop. They want a supportive boss. They wanna be treated with respect. They want to work with people they like and trust, and they want leaders who are credible and trustworthy. 

Adam Grant: They also want meaningful work, a sense of community and a life outside work. 

Jennifer Deal: All generations have similar values. They just express them differently. 

Adam Grant: That's so important that it's worth repeating. Every generation wants the same basic things out of our careers, but we have different ways of expressing these values. 

Jennifer Deal: Some people would say, I value my family by working really, really hard and staying in the office long hours and making a lot of money and moving up in the organization. While other people would say, I value my family by limiting my hours and being at home with my family and not working weekends. Both groups would say that they value their family. They just express those values through different behaviors.

Adam Grant: When we exaggerate the differences between age groups, we miss out on many avenues for finding common ground. That's not just good for belonging, it's also vital to succeeding. So how do you overcome generational stereotypes to help your team do their best work? More on that after the break.

Nicole Smith: So I have inner conflict with what generation I belong to. 

Adam Grant: Nicole Smith is right on the cusp between Millennial and Gen X. Meaning she can pass as either. 

Nicole Smith: Depends on the crowd, right? If it's cool to be a Millennial in that crowd, I'm a Millennial. If it's not cool, then I think I get to flip flop in between.

Adam Grant: As a newsroom manager in Atlanta, Nicole was grappling with the divide between the older print journalists and younger digital journalists. She thought if she could get one person on her team to embrace working with the digital team, to walk across that invisible barrier in the newsroom, the rest of her team might fall in line.

Nicole Smith: I realized there was one gentleman who was on my team who people really respected this person. If he said we should cover this story, they took it seriously. He had great influence. And so I remember us chitchatting and I said, so there's this digital team that looks like they're doing such great innovative work, and if we take our work and we couple it with their work, I think that our work will be disseminated much, much farther, and so I would like to work with the digital team. But he looked terrified. I'll never forget the look in his eyes. After a pregnant pause, he finally said, well, you are not gonna make us work with them, are you? 

Adam Grant: Us versus them. Old versus new. It was a workplace divided. Nicole needed to get people to work together under one shared goal: doing good journalism. But age stereotypes about what each side was capable of made that challenging. 

Nicole Smith: There was ageism steeped deeply into the culture that was holding back the change that we needed to have. We weren't addressing the part that was framing our situation. We were just addressing the symptom, which was lack of change.

Adam Grant: If the conflict wasn't due to age or generational differences at its core, what was the tension really about? 

Nicole Smith: I think the tension was about being relevant in the workplace, mattering in the workplace, having influence and seen as important in the workplace. 

Adam Grant: The root of intergenerational conflict often comes down to clout. Who has it and who wants it? Jennifer Deal has seen it time and again. 

Jennifer Deal: Everybody wants greater control over what they're doing. They want to increase the stuff they get to do that they like and decrease the stuff that they have to do that they don't like. And that comes through power and status and clout. And so you get into conflicts, and a lot of these conflicts are about who has to do the stuff that they don't wanna do and who gets to avoid it. 

Adam Grant: Age becomes a proxy for influence, and it's a distraction. 

Jennifer Deal: Sort of a prototypical argument is young people saying, well, our ideas are better because we are younger and more connected to the new ideas. We're more innovative, we're more up to date. And the older people are saying, our ideas are better because we have a better understanding of the business and the clients and more experience and understanding of what will actually work. And so you end up with a conflict between them that people talk about in terms of generations, when it's really about negotiating status.

Adam Grant: If you start to reframe this not as an intergenerational conflict or an age conflict, but rather a clout conflict, how does that help you solve it? 

Jennifer Deal: It doesn't help you solve it, but it helps you understand what's really going on. Because the, the generation thing is just a red herring. It's an easy stereotype to use, but it doesn't actually get to the crux of the problem. And if you understand that the framing is just there to add status to one idea and is actually independent of the idea itself, then you can get more directly to what really needs to be done and get less caught up in the sort of fraught arguments around who's better. 

Nicole Smith: And I felt both sides struggle with that. The older generation wanted their work and their history, remember, they had been there a long time, to be respected by that group. And I think the younger group wanted to be respected for what they brought to the organization. New or not. 

Adam Grant: You've probably seen this kind of shift happening in your industry, with younger workers entering the workforce trying to make their mark. Everyone wants to feel like they're making a difference, that their work has value and their time matters, but their different life stages lead them to value different kinds of contributions, and when those barriers start blocking people from doing better work together, they might need a manager's help to break through.

Nicole Smith: I thought about where people were in their life stage, in their career stage, and many of them were either solidly in the middle or towards the end of it. And if you're protective of that, if you're protective of your influence and people respecting what you know and your intellect and what you have to offer, that protection might come out sometimes as putting other people down.

Adam Grant: So what did you and the other managers do to try to motivate people to collaborate? 

Nicole Smith: I love how you're optimistic about the motivate part. 

Adam Grant: In organizational psychology, we distinguish between two dimensions of collaboration. Goal interdependence is sharing a common objective. Task interdependence is working together to achieve your objective. Extensive evidence shows that having a shared goal makes us more cohesive, and relying on each other to achieve that goal makes us more productive. Nicole created both. She started by aligning her team around a common goal. Then she emphasized how collaboration could amplify the team's work. 

Nicole Smith: I said to the group, I value all of you and what you do, and I'm excited to work with you, and I think that we can get your work seen if we start collaborating with this other group. Of course, in that meeting, people didn't understand it. They didn't understand why I felt the need to all of a sudden have us work with that group.

Adam Grant: Her team wasn't convinced anything needed to change. They'd done their job one way for decades. Why change now? That's called entrenchment. It's when experience brings tacit knowledge about how to get things done, but also adds assumptions and blinders. So Nicole broke through the barrier with force. She used her authority as a manager to require collaboration. The next time she sent out her assignments, she partnered digital and print journalists together on each project. 

Nicole Smith: Most people groaned. It was a physical outlet. "Oh." All I could do is say, my position says that you must go do this. And everybody's attention and investment and time and skill all is connected to this same goal and deliverable. Either you all do or you all don't. Either you all fail or you all win. 

Adam Grant: I'm reminded of Gordon Allport's classic theory, the contact hypothesis. For groups that are disagreeing or having strife to come together, the ideal conditions that he laid out were they needed to have common goals. They need to cooperate to achieve those goals. They also need to be on a level playing field where they have equal status. And I think this goes to your point, that both of these groups wanted respect from the other. Neither was getting it. What did you do to make sure that they were on that level playing field? 

Nicole Smith: I assured the digital team that what they did did matter. That what they did could help us, and that they actually could be a teacher. You absolutely have something to offer. And then on the other side of that, I did a lot of assuring and reassuring to my own team that what you do is not obsolete. It still matters, it's still relevant. And just because someone who's younger than you can come along and teach you a different tool or a different way, doesn't undo or disintegrate what you've always had to offer. And that's really, really great experience and quality work and an understanding of a community that you only learn if you've been around 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years. So it was a lot of reassuring that both had something to teach and something to offer. 

Adam Grant: Nicole was intentional in making both teams feel valued, which helped reduce their insecurities, and working together helped them appreciate what they could learn from each other. I found in my research that when people feel valued, they add value. And when leaders make people feel valued, they become more collaborative.

Nicole Smith: The guy I said that was terrified in the beginning, remember, they had these projects they had to get done. They had deadlines, they had deliverables, they had all the things that you normally have. I remember one day him having a question for his digital partner, and he got up and he walked across the room. Oh my gosh. He actually crossed the invisible barrier. 

Adam Grant: Wow. 

Nicole Smith: Yes. Wow is it. And I remember somebody turning around to me and said, "Oh my gosh, did you see him walk over there? He went across enemy lines!" And this was a person who was highly respected, had a lot of influence, and seeing that person walk over and sit down next to their colleague who happened to be younger and be on the digital team, it gave the courage from the rest of my team to do that. So slowly over the weeks with these projects, people start flowing across that invisible boundary and the boundary over time became no more. 

Adam Grant: So when you say requiring collaboration was key, it sounds like there are a couple different elements to that. One is that people have shared responsibility for an outcome, and the other is that they're expected to work together in the process to get the result.

Nicole Smith: That's right. I hugely think everyone having to invest in the same goal or same outcomes is important. 

Adam Grant: It's one thing to tell people that and require them to work together. It's another to get them to see real value in working together. 

Nicole Smith: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: Did people start to stereotype less? Did they actually begin to respect each other's contributions?

Nicole Smith: Yes, I would say most people did. Eventually they saw the work that we were doing influenced by the younger team, and oh my gosh, I went from 500 people reading that to the next time I wrote a story 5,000 people actually read that! Or it was the most retweeted or it got the most likes and I could see it in the metrics. I can see that mine was the number one story. I, I partnered with this digital team, and mine was the number one most read story on the dotcom. 

Adam Grant: What was the impact in the other direction? What did the younger people learn from the older ones? 

Nicole Smith: I found a lot of the younger people when they would work on these projects, would either learn how to ask the question or think of an angle, you know, really thinking about how do I build a story, because they worked with the older generations. Well, let me teach you some institutional knowledge. Let me teach you about your city, about your community and how to talk to them and how to reach them and who has influence in this community. So it, it definitely flowed both ways. And so naturally people got addicted to success and winning, and they actually kinda liked that person over there when they got to know them and saw pictures of their dog. And what surprised me the most was I could take my hands off the steering wheel and it still worked.

Adam Grant: Nicole, why do you think there aren't more workplaces actively addressing age and generational biases? 

Nicole Smith: Well, that's the million dollar question. I'll be very honest with you. I didn't think of ageism too much until I was in it, until I saw it impacted the work. I'm a black woman, right? I thought about being black. I thought about being a woman. And I thought about the isms that we like to talk about a lot openly around the dinner table or on the media. But I don't know that people all the time talk about ageism. You kind of, you kind of start talking about it when you hit it. Maybe you're really young or maybe you hit 50 and you're having a hard time applying for work, and you just don't know why with all your experience, why people won't just follow through and hire you, and so it kind of just slaps you in the face.

Adam Grant: At the end of the day, age is just a proxy for something else. Sometimes it's a bid for power or status. Other times it's a source of miscommunication. The better you get at looking past age and generation, the closer you get to addressing what's really going on in the workplace. What counts is not when you were born, it's how you show up.

This episode was produced by our team of Millennial producers: Brittany Cronin, Daphne Chen, and Constanza Gallardo. It was edited by Gen Xer Grace Rubenstein, and hosted by me, Adam Grant, also Gen X. The rest of our team includes Greta Cohn, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruguiere. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown. Gratitude to the following researchers and their colleagues: Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert on the illusion of moral decline. John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler on kids these days. Julie Ober Allen, Maria Cebola, and Eden King on ageism. Ben Jones on innovation. Orlando Richard on age and performance. Nick Bloom on remote work. Jean Twenge on work values and Erik Dane on entrenchment.