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Xer’s, Y’s, and Boomers
I’m beginning to sound like my grandparents. I remember them saying things like: “Young people today think they’re so smart. They don’t know a thing. It’s not like in my day.”
Working recently with a labor management project in the healthcare industry, I shared a lunch conversation with a woman who’s been a labor organizer for 30 years. Somehow, we began bemoaning Generation X’s ignorance of their own union history, Generation Y’s lack of appreciation for the work of their management predecessors, and furthermore, X’s and Y’s clueless misunderstanding of…You get the picture. I felt a snarling Old Fogy struggling to explode from my chest, like some Baby Boomer alien, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting X, Y, or Z passerby.
Just then, a 30-something RN-administrator and a much-pierced 20-ish med tech joined our discussion. Both made this point in their own way: These neat and tidy attempts to identify people by arbitrary generation names are, well, nuts. To label someone born in one year completely different from one born perchance the very next—independent of gene pool, upbringing, education, or cultural influence—demonstrates our continual urge to simplify, classify, and divide. Instead, they reminded us, we ought to take advantage of our differences. Tolerate, not castigate.
EMBRACING GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES. I myself was recently whacked back into my Boomer pigeonhole by a birthday gift book from my sister called The American Dream: The 50s. It was the quintessential life-flashing-before-my-very-eyes experience without the usually requisite near-death part—MacArthur, 3-D movies, tail fins, DiMaggio, anything pink, the rise of suburbs, coonskin caps, duck and cover drills...whew! I devoured it all in one sitting.
Whose “American dream?” My own three adult offspring would be bemused but unimpressed by my enthusiasm. My late mother might have remarked, "Yes, but where's Rudy Vallee, the flivver, or the Dust Bowl?" And half the people who are my clients now, striving to be serious captains of industry, might roll their eyes at the irrelevance of anything over 30, much less 50.
Which, I suppose, is exactly the point about diversity and the need to tolerate—no, embrace—generational differences. Those handy Boomer-X-Y-Z corrals fail to contain us. We have the annoying habit of squirming over, under, and around the edges.
Way back last century, in the 1970s, I was lucky to be part of a labor management project in the auto industry that included the design and start-up of five "innovative" assembly plants. Part of the two-week orientation we designed for all employees was a video discussion session that always seemed to hit home.
It was built around a series by Dr. Morris Massey called, "What You Are Is Where You Were When." With frenetic presentation style (and a natty polyester outfit), he offered a simple and compelling premise: 1) our behaviors reflect our values; 2) our values are shaped by "significant emotional events" (personal, familial and societal); 3) a good clue to understanding values and behaviors, our own and others’, is to discover what was happening in a person’s life and surroundings at age 10.
It rarely failed. When employees, with a bit of support, began talking about their experiences at that age, their stories revealed a richness well worth treasuring. It was relatively easy to ask, “So what?” and elicit practical implications for our own behavior in that new workplace diverse in age, gender, race, and nationality.
Curious, I recently searched the internet for information on Morris Massey, my early hero. I discovered that both the man and his message endure. He did not disappear, as some suspected, in a heavenly flowered microbus, never to be seen again. Those helpful tapes, I’m told, were updated in the 1980s. In any case, I'm not promoting the products, but the process—the healthy, pragmatic reflection they prompted.
BRINGING EVERYONE TO THE TABLE. “Why bother reflecting?” you might ask. Because getting important work done together will happen only painfully and poorly if we continue to crouch behind the barricades of our own ignorance, secure in our stereotypes: “Xer’s don’t…Y’s can’t…Boomers are…management never…unions always…bosses will…employees won’t…” It’s a hard not a “soft” skill to insist on getting past the easy labels to discover what each of us brings to the table—and then use it.
I'm sure that today, with the right provocative questions and the courage to ask, we could evoke the same kind of positive response I saw and heard 30 years ago—back in my day when by-golly we knew how to…Oops.
If I could revisit my recent lunch conversation, I think I’d sound less like my grandparents. We all can. To any nay-sayers, I offer the words of Casey Stengel (Who?!) explaining the secret of his success in the face of long odds: "I heard it couldn't be done, but it don't always work."
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