(upbeat music)- Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host Daniel Stewart, along with my brother Peter Stewart. And we are honored to have a very special guest with us today. Haydn Shaw is joining us. Haydn, welcome to the Leadership Growth Podcast.- Thanks for having me.- And so we are gonna be diving into a topic, a topic that all of us get to work through, muddle through, figure out on a day-to-day basis, and it's managing differences within the generational aspect. What does that mean? Is that even the right frame of mind to have as we interact with each other from various generations? As we dive into this, let me share Haydn's brief bio here so that we all get to know him. For the past 30 years, Haydn Shaw has been helping generations work better together with 5,000 days and 1,500 clients and projects in business school case studies. Time magazine has called him an expert on cultural differences in the workplace. And he is also the author of the book Sticking Points. Okay, so again, Haydn, welcome. And let's start off with, with kind of a starting question, what led you to dive into and care about generational differences? What led you to kind of want to tackle and understand this interesting way of working and behaving with each other? Well, I was working in social services, and it was fairly complicated because whatever you did didn't work for somebody. And so, you know, especially the baby boomers, and I know, you know, the baby boomers are now the old people in the equation, but they were the ones shaking everything up when I started out, and they were completely confusing to the traditionalists. You know, because while the traditionalists are frequently broken up into two 20-year generations, the differences between them meant it was just easier to consider all 40 years basically the same block. There was far more differences in the traditionalists and the baby boomers than there ever was in the subsections of traditionalists. And it was such a shock to the system when the boomers came along that people were trying to understand why their behaviors were so different, why they acted so differently. And it has not got easier. You know, Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine had a cover story about Gen X coming into the workplace and they were in a Grateful Dead t-shirt and they had their dog in their office and they had a little refrigerator under their desk. And now that'd be fairly standard procedure in even a lot of corporations. But back then that was just so radical to have your dog in the office. And they were saying, "What has hit us?" And so Fortune magazine had a cover story on every generation so far saying, "What has hit us?" Because just like when the baby boomers came along, each new generation leaves people scratching their head, wondering, "This isn't working. What we did before isn't working. They're not responding to our marketing pitches. They're not responding to our management approaches." All the things that made the previous generation happy leaves them rolling their eyes and quiet quitting. So what are we supposed to do? I had the very same questions.- You're framing it up very well, recognizing that this isn't something that's brand new. there have been generational transitions in the workplace for many years, yet we're in a fascinating kind of intersection between so many generations right now. And even as we were chatting before this episode, you mentioned this notion of life stage as opposed to generational differences. How do you distinguish between those and why might you prefer one over the other in terms of terminology?- Just in terms of explanatory value, sometimes the generational differences make a better explanation. They show up statistically more in surveys and other things. And at other times, the life stage gives a better explanation for why certain things happen. For example, and I did a tech talk, why half of what you've heard about millennials is wrong, And it could also apply to Gen Z because it's about this life stage of emerging adulthood. And, you know, these generations are just not loyal. Whatever happened to loyalty? Emerging adulthood is what happened to loyalty. Generational differences has very little explanatory power in why younger people don't stick around in organizations as much as we remember and as much as they used to. Emerging adults are characterized by change, freedom, and choice, so those don't sound a lot like 30 years in the same place. And so this new life stage has a much more powerful explanation for why people in their 20s don't stick around as much. And by the way, when it comes to managing, we have to do some things differently because emerging adulthood has changed the rules of the game for people 18 to about 30.- Yeah. So with this emerging adulthood, there's a new crop, so to speak, of emerging adults every so often, and that's kind of that generational view. And from everything we've read, there are more generations at work in the workplace now than ever before. So that adds all sorts of complexity. How do we--- That's because we don't talk to each other. Randstad discovered that the average person spends 40 minutes a week with someone of a different generation if they don't have a cube next to each other or they weren't placed by each other in a meeting. When it comes to discretionary time, we don't “date” people outside our age range. You know, there are words for people who date, men who date younger and women who date younger, and they're not happy words. They're not, "Yeah, go brag to your friends about being a cougar" words, right? And so we have these feelings about people hanging out and their ability to connect with people. And so we just don't spend a lot of time with people not of our generation at work.- Wow, so you're highlighting a potential reason, a potential trigger as far as why there are these conflicts. As Daniel was beginning to describe that we have an increased number of generations present, all collaborating, and now you're presenting this picture of everybody kind of working in their little cliques and their little groups with like-aged individuals, like-aged individuals, and the communication across these various groups and boundaries is less and less. So what--- But other than that, it's going great.- Yeah, other than that, it's great. So what can we do to either increase that communication? What can we do as leaders to help improve the workplace?- So leaders can do 12 things. That's why the book "Sticking Point" looks at the 12 places where the generations bump into each other the most. So that's all I'll do as far as shameless plugs go, okay? I think leaders can do three things. The first one is they can create opportunities where people naturally hang out together. Because, as you know, families have multiple generations, and family reunions have times when everybody hangs out and gets some food and does some three-legged races and takes a picture, and then they go usually off with people of similar interests, which means they end up with similar life stages or ages. Right? So there are times when we're together and times when we move toward a greater affinity with people. And so leaders just need some natural times, and food is a great excuse, but so are some projects. Secondly, creating opportunities for co-mentoring. I didn't coin that phrase, but co-mentoring basically says that people who are younger have things to teach people who are older. And while definitely mentoring comes down, mentoring also goes up the age deference pyramid as well. And so younger people don't have to be as deferential in everything. And one of the things that makes half of all mentoring relationships not work, statistically speaking, and you know, research after research, is that kind of grasshopper, often condescending aspects of the relationship where it's just one way. And so co-mentoring is actually healthier anyway. It's not so one-sided. And so setting up and encouraging people to go ask,"What are the things I want to learn and who are you going to learn it from?" And finally, just getting some basic education on some generational differences so we don't jump to the wrong conclusion. In the book, I say, if we don't understand generational differences, we get all wound up about small things, we ignore the big things and we propose the wrong things. And so just getting clear on some basic generational IQ and then adding into that, bringing forward life stages. You know, most of us don't need a lot of education on life stages. We just need to bring it forward in our head. You know, most of us are like, "Oh, you have a young child. That's a life stage. Oh, you have, you're not in a long-term, um, committed love relationship where you are locked into a career. You're in a stage now where you could easily move. Oh, that's a different life stage with a different set of needs, a very different set of what you pick in the cafeteria plan, uh, as far as health insurance and benefits go. And so we think in life, we think in life stages naturally. We already know a lot about life stages. Generations requires some education and some increase in IQ. Life stage, we just have to bring forward. We're already halfway there. Yeah. So, you're identifying this need for a sense of empathy and humility to get out of ourself, which is really hard for humans to do. So, talk through the process of being able to have that mindset. Because it's hard even for a co-mentoring thing. Look at somebody else and say, "You can teach me something," when there's visible age and life experience differences. What are ways to kind of work through that mindset? Because we can always learn, but it might not be as easy to accommodate. Can I thank you for an astute question? Sure. I don't know that I've ever been asked that question that way, quite that way, and that is right down the track of a very practical thing to know with this, especially how would a person with a lot more experience that tends to be a little more condescending, and rightly so. I mean, I remember teaching classes on delegation and somebody finally said,"I am the most technically skilled of everyone"in my entire department in this particular area." So when you say,"Not only do you rob people of opportunities,"but other people who are better than you." No, everybody acknowledges that I am the best one at this. And when it comes into a mentoring relationship where you have 25 years and they have four, you probably have hit more pitches to use a baseball analogy there. You've had more at bats. And so it is easy to not be humble and not be empathetic. And all one has to do is have a conversation around AI. And unless you're programming AI, you're probably going to get a lose in a Bobby Flay throw down with a younger person who did half their homework in the last years of college or grad school with AI. Just saying. There are plenty of places for us to be ignorant, right? And to say, need a little help here. And that's just one of the more recent ones. I love to say it this way. If you can't relate to the younger generation on the inside of your organization, you are not going to market to them effectively on the outside of your organization. So just learning from younger generations about your marketing language. Well, what about this doesn't land right? Well, how much time do you have? And you discover that some of your younger generations have been coached by their ex or parents to shut their yammer. Keep your job, keep your mouth shut until you're asked. Well, you ask and they're like, do you really wanna know? How bad do you wanna cry? Will you tell the CMO?'Cause the chief marketing officer will definitely cry if I begin to tell you how this lands. And then you begin to find out, oh wow, we are really missing, I mean, I don't wanna go too far afield, but what I've discovered is the average millennial and now Gen Zer can tell within four years the age of your graphic designer. Whereas Gen X and above, they can't, until Apple came along with the iPhone and design mattered as much as functionality, hence the iPhone 4. Steve Jobs, all right, then nobody uses it in a phone anyway, but isn't it cool? And so it, when design matters more than functionality, a whole generation came up where design really matters. And so when they, when they intuitively know that much about your marketing, just having conversations with them about that. So finding places where you need to know something, um, is the first. The second is. to just shut up and listen to what they want. Many of us who are parents of people in their 20s, emerging adults, have learned that we got to turn way down the volume of how much we talk and way up the volume of how much we listen. It is not the same thing. Even if they live at home, it is not the same thing as raising teenagers. It's not a delayed or prolonged adolescence like it was originally called. Emerging adult, it is a whole new life stage where they want relationships with people who take them seriously and listen to them. The research on this is unequivocal. The single most important thing you can do for retaining emerging adults is be someone other than their parents who they can talk with and think with out loud. Empathy is really the key. And lastly, to wait until they ask a couple of times. So do you have any ideas on what I could do about this? Well, you know, probably a few, But my experience and your experience will be so different because times have changed that I hate to impose any of that on you. First, they'll be like, I don't know what to say'cause I'm used to people in authority positions just rambling at the mouth thinking that's mentoring and coaching. Okay, well, yeah, I really would like to know. Maybe not what you would do, about what you think my options are, what would be the best options. And suddenly you're off into an invited conversation. And they'll write on Glassdoor, oh, my mentor or my manager is amazing. They're like, it's like talking to my parents. One 50 year old manager, a female manager, she said to me, when my employee said that to me, I freaked out."Oh, this is such a great, this is so great. You're just easy to talk to." It was my mom. She goes, "Mike, I am a person that takes care of themselves. I'm a young 50, please do not relate." She goes, "I was emotionally all disturbed for the next three days about it." But I said, "That was absolutely the best compliment she could give you." And you can see it all over Glassdoor when people make that comparison of how easy they are to talk to and relate to and to think out loud with. I know that's a long and detailed answer to a short question.- But there were so many nuggets in there, Haydn, as you're describing and talking about it. And it comes down so much to the value of the relationships and the interaction and that ability to care and to listen. And one cautionary note that I think we can really double click on is that willingness to listen, that willingness to listen as somebody might ask a question, but just because they asked a question, it is not giving you permission to now just unload every bit of information and wisdom that you ever wanted to share. It's that caution to maybe suggesting one or two things, maybe it's a restate of that before you just start offering everything because they're wanting to engage in a conversation and you don't wanna overwhelm them with, oh great, now they wanna know all of my wisdom. That's not a conversation, now that comes into information download so that you'll know how important I am. And that does not build and nurture that relationship.- Even ChatGPT or Perplexity tries to adjust its answer, even though it will dump six bullet points on you, it does try to adjust its answer to you and what you're requesting. And so, we could do at least as well as something running off of servers, in somebody's backyard somewhere, right? We could do at least as well at what you just suggested.- I think we can, and I hope we can. Let's go back to this idea of co-mentoring,'cause I think there's so much power in that. And as listeners might be hearing this concept and it might be new to them, maybe they've tried to implement it before. What are some of the suggestions you would give to leaders who think, hey, I wanna try and adopt something like this. I wanna bring it into my organization. I wanna bring it into my team. How might they go about doing that so it can be successful?- You know, I watched a bank out in New England who did it as well as anybody I've ever seen do it because they had tried it for five years and it didn't go so great. And like most of us, they learned a lot better ways of doing it. More than that, they handed it over to the employee resource group of young professionals to create their own co-mentoring path. And so what they did wrong was they began to assign people and the research on there is very clear. Half of all mentoring relationships don't work when they're assigned. Two reasons, chemistry's not right. And mentoring has to have some trust and some thinking out loud aspects to it, or it's just more management, right? It's more classic management. One-on-ones, boss does 80% of the talking, the employee takes notes, tries to keep the breathing side pointed up to show you're interested and promotable, and we just roll back on. And they need to have more, to your earlier point, they need to have more two-way conversation for the mentoring really to work. And so the chemistry has to be there. And secondly, people have to be at a life stage where they have time for it. Some people are mentors and they've got so much going on in their lives. So let's say that we've got a kid in travel teams and they are truly gone three out of four weekends every month, 10 months a year. And they may sign up for mentoring, but they're gonna miss a lot of mentoring meetings or they're gonna be more perfunctory than somebody who's in a different life stage. And they may have all of the best skills, they just don't have time to do those skills and add that onto their list. So those are the two reasons why assigned mentoring often doesn't work. And so three or four things, if you are a person who is looking for a mentor, just go out of your way to ask for help. Just say, "I'm looking for a mentoring relationship. I'd like to learn some things from you and come in with three or four questions and see if the chemistry is good." It doesn't help to go, "I'd like a mentoring relationship and you're a senior vice president. Can you mentor me?" Well, you know, that's fairly transactional. I'd like to get as high as possible for promotability and exposure. And that doesn't seem how good healthy relationships work either. Right? And so go in with some questions, see what the chemistry is. I remember I was with a group of people early in my career, there were four of us, we tried five different mentors before we'd go. We even called it the mentor meter. Nope, our chemistry is bad with this one. And they were great, brilliant people who mentored a lot of other people effectively. It was just our chemistry wasn't the best. It wasn't gonna be a long-term relationship. And so try that with four or five people and let it happen as organically as possible. One, in this banking organization, they took everybody out to a ball game. So they had dinner, and then they went to a ball game and they let people hang out at a cocktail hour. And there were clusters of people and they let them see if there was gravitation. And so, it was hidden, but each person kind of picked who they clicked with the most, and each of the mentors kind of picked who they clicked with. And so, two thirds of the people were able to kind of already pair up with somebody who they felt an affinity to. So that made it organized, but more organic. And that was an idea from the younger generations themselves on a way of doing it that would give better lasting relationships. And then secondly, it takes a village. Classic mentoring is a one-to-one thing, classic mentoring. And it's a bit of a, let's say I'm giving away my age with the show Kung Fu. It's a bit of a grasshopper relationship where I bow to my sensei and you have... But today the world is so complex and so many moving parts that I don't know that any one person can give everything a person needs to know. So it does take a village. And smart mentors find out what somebody wants to learn and says, "Oh, there are four other people who you ought to talk to. One, for a different perspective, and two, 'cause two of them are who I go to when I have questions. So I am not gonna be helpful for you, but I am, I know exactly who to call. Let me go set that up." And so that would be the other aspect of it is not to expect the one-to-one relationship to work. And then to set up, lastly, to set up different gates. So in project management, they talk about gates. To do a three-month thing. Well, we need a year-long mentoring program, why? Well, performance appraisals last a year, got it. But why don't we do three months and then make it renewable? Hey, you know what, I realized this came, I got assigned this project, and I'm not gonna do justice to you with as busy as it's gonna be for the next six months. So while everything was fine when we said yes three months ago right now, um, you're going to get shortchanged. Why don't you put me on a go-to list for people with questions and not your primary?" And so there are different thresholds. You know, I... I had a mentoring relationship with a retired senior vice president for about five years. I took him to dinner once a month. And one time my wife thought I was making the wrong decision so she called out and she showed up at the dinner that I was at so they could tag team telling me how dumb I was being until I agreed with them and made a career change. I thought that was cheesy. Although they were both right, I was wrong. I still thought it was cheesy. Hey, Haydn, as you think of all of the different generations that are currently in the workforce, or even life stages that are currently in the workforce, are there any that don't gel the most? You know, are there any that really struggle or some that are more easily managed? You know what I mean? What are some of the hardest ones to manage? I do. The problem is, it depends. They all have things that irritate them about the other generation. So for example, Gen Xers were all about efficiency. They're juggling kids, they're having to pay, you know, they had the most dual working partner. Boomers, especially older boomers, still had partners that stayed home or a partner who was the dominant breadwinner and Xers were less like that for the first time. And so, X's are trying to figure out who's gonna pick up the kids at daycare before they can't go to college, because it's like $18 a minute, every minute you're late. And so suddenly there's your university fund. And so they're juggling all of that and their whole thing was efficiency. And Gen Z comes along and they are the most emotionally oriented generation. We always would say there's no crying in baseball. Gen Z comes along and goes, "No, I'm upset."You gave me feedback and I'm upset." Generations are like, "You can't say anything to them. They're a bunch of snowflakes. Everything triggers them." No, they just cry in baseball. We'd have our heart cut out after a feedback session, and we'd go out in the hallway or the stairwell and try to pull ourselves together, and they're like,"Really? You really think that?" And so they show their emotions right there, and older generations are like"Oh, they just fall apart." No, they don't hide it like we were taught to hide it. And so there are places where even generations that get along really well, like parents, you know, younger boomers, older Xers, their children are the millennials. They know them well. It's just when they have to manage somebody else's, certain things like that throw them off. And, you know, when they want to talk about Teletubbies, everybody knows what they're talking about. If they're talking about feedback, it's different. More than that, Xers are so efficiency oriented a lot of times they won't even turn from the keyboard. Uh-huh, what you need?[laughs] Gen Z believes that if you give a thumbs-up emoji on a text message, you are cold'cause you don't care about me enough to even form letters. Xers are finally like, "I finally figured out text messaging." Emojis. Fast, efficient, I get home. And a whole new generation that comes in going,"My boss"-- they go on Glassdoor."My boss gives me no time and attention. They are always too busy." And Xers see it as efficient. Millennials would have been better with it. Gen Z's like, "I cannot believe how cold and uncaring they are."- Wow.- And so it just depends on what the particular topic or sticking point is. With some generations, that combination works great, and others, they drive each other bonkers.- So as we're--- How's that for a complicated answer to another short question.- We're talking about people. I don't know if there are ever easy answers when we're talking about people. The minute I think I have one, my wife explains to me why I muffed that situation up. We're always getting feedback. That we are. So, as we're beginning to wrap this up, I know a key topic that's on top of mind for many organizations and for leaders. It's how do you retain workers, particularly in this younger generation? What are suggestions, tips you would give to leaders and organizations striving to do that? Well, I know we're wrapping up. And so let me highlight what we've already talked about the most powerful one, which is to listen and let them think out loud rather than answer. So when somebody says to you, I just know, you know, they're 26, right in the middle of emerging adulthood. I don't know if I want to do this career the rest of my life. Now that I've done it for three to five years, I just don't know that I want to do this. And your first response is panic. Oh no, oh no. I even put you in my succession plan. Now I got to go meet with HR. Why did I lose somebody? What's going to happen to my, who else could be in my succession plan? We're having all these thoughts run through our head. We just cool it all back down. Yeah, I know I had similar questions too about if I really wanted to do this industry'cause most of the time it's good, but what you're talking about are the things that drive me and everybody else who complains about it drives them crazy about this industry. And you're not selling, you're just saying it, like you mentioned earlier, empathically, and then shutting up, you're restating it and shutting up. And you let them think out loud. Well, what do you mean? You went through the same questions? I did, but my answers may not be your answers, so tell me more about what you're thinking. Well, I don't know, I'm not leaning towards staying. Okay, I didn't always lean towards staying. I think it's a fairly important point to deciding what your career is gonna be, to lean away from it for a while, to see if you really wanna do it. So there's nothing wrong with leaning away for a career, even if you end up in it. I think it's pretty healthy. Really? Yeah, how else would you know if you really wanna do this long-term, now that you've had a chance to see all the sides of it? And you just listen and you lean into the negative rather than try to talk them out of the negative. And the funny thing is, like we mentioned before, if they have adults, authority figures, people who are older than them, the research uses the word adults, adults other than their parents, they can think out loud with, they tend to be loyal and grateful. It builds an important connection and makes an important contribution in their life and is the most powerful co-mentoring there is to tie it all together. It's also the single most important retention technique is just to shut up, cool down, and lean into the negative.- So let's end with one single question then for you, in kind of a Lightning Round. In your view, Haydn, what's the one thing that leaders need to do to best manage generational differences? Stay curious, my friend, stay curious. Whys are the most important question. Whys unite and whats divide. So you go online and find a list of nine things to know about Gen Z. That's a list of what's, and what's are good, but what's divide us. If we just start asking why, and if people come to us complaining about a different generation or a different life stage, and we send them back,"Hey, let's talk about it," as soon as you find out why that makes sense to them. And when they come back with whys, whys lead to great conversations. So to paraphrase that, Dos Equis commercial, stay curious, my friends, stay curious.- That's well said, well said. Haydn, thank you so much for being a part of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I really appreciate you having me. And what insightful questions. I know you think I say that to every podcast, and I don't. Well it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for the insights. It's been fun. Peter, thanks as always. And to our listeners, thanks for joining us. Please like and subscribe and take the ideas we've talked about here to help you along on your leadership journey. All the best, folks. Take care, everyone. Bye. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague, or better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com.