Are you struggling to manage people who are older than you?
Lindsey Pollak explains that cross-generational dynamics in the workplace are becoming increasingly complex, driven by rapid technological advancements and longer career spans.
As a workplace expert and author of The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace, Pollak addresses listener questions about motivating older direct reports and engaging senior employees who may be skeptical about new technology. She also offers practical advice for navigating situations where you’ve been promoted ahead of more experienced colleagues.
Key episode topics include: leadership, business communication, motivating people, age and generational issues, leading teams, leading across difference.
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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership—case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
Are you struggling to manage people who are older than you?
Lindsey Pollack says cross-generational dynamics at work are only getting tougher to manage, with faster developments in technology and people working longer.
Pollack is a workplace expert and the author of the book, The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace.
In this episode, she takes questions from listeners who are struggling to motivate older direct-reports and senior employees who are skeptical about using new technology. She also has advice for what to do when you’ve been promoted ahead of your more experienced colleagues.
This episode originally aired on Dear HBR: in August 2019. Here it is.
DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: , from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.
DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts and help you move forward.
ALISON BEARD: Today we’re talking about managing older workers with Lindsey Pollak. She’s the author of The Remix: How do Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace. Lindsey, thank you so much for coming on the show.
LINDSEY POLLAK: Thank you for having me.
ALISON BEARD: Are cross-generational challenges in the workplace worse or different than they have been in the past?
LINDSEY POLLAK: Definitely, yes! I myself am a Gen Xer which I always out myself at the beginning of conversations. And when I entered the workplace in the ’90s there were only three generations in the workplace. Well, we’ve seen expansion on the older end of the workplace with people working longer. And now we have millennials and now the new Gen Z is coming in. So, in the 20 years that I’ve personally been in the workplace, we’ve gone from three generations to five. And that changes a lot of the dynamics.
ALISON BEARD: We do hear that generations don’t actually have differences. You know, I as a Gen Xer am not really that different at age 40 than my parents were at age 40. Do you find that to be true?
LINDSEY POLLAK: I actually disagree. Just look at something like the average age of marriage. It’s gotten much older. So, a 21-year-old in the 1950s has quite different expectations than a 21-year-old today. Retirement, so a 55-year-old 20, 30 years ago has very different expectations of their career than somebody today. So, I really think it’s about the particular time in which you’re existing and what the norms and expectations are in that particular era.
DAN MCGINN: Here we go. Dear HBR: I lead a team of five analysts who are spread between two offices, in two Midwestern U.S. cities. Our company recently restructured and brought its analyst together into one business intelligence department. There were many internal applicants. At the time I was the youngest and least tenured, but I was chosen to lead the new team. I manage two separate groups of analysts with different job descriptions. I know the interworking’s of the business analyst well because I was one of them. I had to learn more about the parts inventory analysts. I’m struggling with the cadence of our communication. We have weekly scrums. That’s where each team meets virtually to talk about what they will accomplish that week and review the previous week’s work. I believe they’re important, but some team members see them as a waste of time. One employee disregards them because of my age and the fact that I’ve been with the company for just two years. We meet quarterly in person as a group to discuss our longer-term goals and the progress on those. Only I see the team members in my city every day. I travel to the other location once a month. Finally, our company’s also trying to take advantage of new online communication and project management tools. Some picked them up right away. But I have issues teaching some who are older and less tech-savvy. So, my question is, am I doing this right? I want to communicate well without micromanaging. How do I implement new forms of communication and how often should we meet as a group, and individually? Lindsey, what’s your initial reaction?
LINDSEY POLLAK: My initial reaction is this is a person who is not necessarily dealing with a young person managing older workers, but someone who has really never managed people before. And so I think there’s some classic mistakes or challenges that this particular person is facing that a lot of people face when they’re starting out. Whether they’re managing people of any generation or age.
ALISON BEARD: So, what are some of those particular challenges?
LINDSEY POLLAK: So, the first one that I noticed in this question is the very, very last word that he uses individually and that’s where I would start. He seems to be viewing this group as a team and that is incredibly important. But every individual on the team wants to feel important as well. So, he’s talking a lot about scrums and group meetings and visits. I really want to know if he has spent any one on one time with each person that he is managing. Obviously, there are some, there’s a level of discomfort when you’ve all been peers and somebody gets promoted, whether that person is your age or older, or younger.
ALISON BEARD: I do think though that the fact that these peers that he’s now managing are older them him, he’s definitely creating more tension. Peter Cappelli at Wharton has written about lessons from the military, you know these junior officers coming in fresh out of college to manage more experienced Sergeants, and that the thing you need to do is treat them as partners, to hear their opinions, particularly on important decisions. In our letter writer’s case, I think that might be around how the team is meeting and how the team is communicating. Get their input one-on-one, before you make decisions about how the team will come together.
LINDSEY POLLAK: I agree with that. One of the pieces of advice I would give to the letter writer is to do a lot of listening, and to not feel that all of the decisions, although he is certainly the leader and needs to take that leadership role, he’s not alone in this. The team can still have input that can be valuable to him. I know politicians talk about listening tours, but that seems like a good piece of advice for him and to your point particularly with some of the workers who are longer tenured.
DAN MCGINN: Do people in his situation, people who are a new boss, who encounters resistance, are they sometimes too quick to attribute it to their age when it might not be because of their age? Is this sometimes like a false indicator?
LINDSEY POLLAK: I do think that’s true. I think that we often think of the one thing that makes us different or might potentially be a problem, and we draw more attention to it than perhaps other people do. It might very well be an issue, but I wouldn’t think it’s an issue with absolutely every person and I think it’s worth some investigating to see if there’s other factors at play. It might be beyond age.
ALISON BEARD: I mean I’m going to pushback a little bit here because I am a Gen Xer, in her 40s now and when I hear the words scrum and online communication and project management tools, my skin crawls a little bit. It takes me a while to get used to those sorts of things. So, I really do think that age and the disparity between this manager, our letter writer and these peers that he’s now managing, might center on a generational divide.
DAN MCGINN: One of the commonalities between things like scrum and things like these new online communication tools that have suddenly become so popular, is they feel very faddish. They feel like the thing that a company launches with great fanfare and then six months later they pull away from. So, I wonder whether this is resistance to sort of management fads as much as it might be to age.
LINDSEY POLLAK: You know, I think you’re right that every generation, probably those of us who’ve been around longer have a cynicism because so many communications and technology tools have come and gone. And so, we’re naturally skeptical about them. That’s why I think the why is important. If you say I want to use this, here’s why. Here’s what our strategy is. We’re going to reassess it in a month. I’d love to hear your feedback. That little description of the reasoning behind these choices could go a long way in getting buy-in. I think the other piece that’s important and Dan Cable talks about this a lot in his work, is giving people time to adapt.
DAN MCGINN: I wonder whether in some cases it can be useful to make some of this stuff optional too. Not just time to adjust to it, but in situations where it makes sense, maybe not making it a mandatory form of communication might give people a little bit more autonomy and a little bit more sense of freedom.
LINDSEY POLLAK: I think you’re right that adding some time and conversation around it is always going to be more valuable than just throwing it on people.
DAN MCGINN: Lindsey, might he be ignoring the political dynamics here? The fact that he came from one of the groups and is now managing the other group? The fact that he may have had rivals for this leadership role that he was given.
LINDSEY POLLAK: Absolutely. He mentions that he’s the youngest, least tenured person. He’s from one of two teams. That is a recipe for a lot of backward conversations and backstabbing potentially.
ALISON BEARD: How else can he build trust and credibility with this team though? It does seem like he’s setting a clear direction for how he wants things to be done. You talked about explaining why he wants it done that way. Is there anything else he can do to make them understand why he was chosen as their leader?
LINDSEY POLLAK: I think those one-on-one conversations are so important. As much as we’re talking about the technology that he wants to implement, I think it goes back to basics and breaking bread with people, sitting down and talking to them, getting to know them, listening to their ideas so that they can do the same with him. The other thing that brings up for me is I think he needs a little bit more confidence. He must be pretty good to have gotten this job or have something going for him. I think he seems to think, and I see this fairly often with millennials, that there is one quote, right way to lead this group and that if he can only find that Easter egg and figure it out he’ll win the game. And that’s not always true. There’s a lot of nuance. So, I would really encourage him to think about what kind of leader he wants to be, what direction has been set from his higher-ups on how to lead this team and if he can really set that vision for everybody, again there might be some politics going on and I think he has to address it, but the more he wavers I think the harder that will be for him to overcome.
DAN MCGINN: He seems to be dealing with this issue really in a vacuum without any acknowledgment that there’s a hierarchy and support system above him. I wonder if he needs to be tapping into that a little bit more to try to navigate this.
LINDSEY POLLAK: I think a lot of people aren’t aware of the resources available to them, to having mentors, to having the concept of a personal advisory board where there’s several people that he might call on. HR, his bosses, other people who are in a similar position. If they’ve gone through this restructure, maybe he’s not the only one in this position. I agree. There’s a sense of being alone and often that doesn’t have to be the case.
ALISON BEARD: So, do you think that he is being too aggressive in his weekly meeting cadence? Should he be doing things differently in terms of visiting the office where he’s not located?
LINDSEY POLLAK: I’m not sure if he has enough data on that, but I do think a goal should be figuring out what the right cadence is. He might not yet know that. And I think he should not be afraid to put it out there to the group. Again, not promising that he’ll go with their goals, but if every single person on the group feels that weekly is too often and it’s a waste of time, I think that’s information that he should take into account.
ALISON BEARD: And how about visiting that other office?
LINDSEY POLLAK: I personally think that’s critical, the more often the better so that they feel important to him, that he gets to know those people well. It might slow down over time, but I think at the beginning that face time is really important.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah, maybe go for two weeks straight at the beginning and over time he can taper down, but this idea that oh, I’m just going to go there for one day a month, that seems at odds with best practice in that area.
ALISON BEARD: When you’re young and you’re comfortable FaceTiming, or Slacking and think that that develops just as much closeness, you need to recognize that for older workers, it’s not the same thing.
LINDSEY POLLAK: That’s exactly right. I’m a big fan of the style conversation, Michael Watkins concept from the First 90 Days that you really have to communicate to the people you manage what your style is. His style sounds very techy and digital communication and that’s fine, but if he is in the position needing to build rapport with the people on his team, I think he needs to learn how they most prefer to communicate and again, front load that at the beginning, before asking them to migrate to the tools that he prefers.
ALISON BEARD: I do think the broader point we’re getting at is as a new boss he seems very focused on how he’s communicating, how often they’re meeting and maybe needs to spend a little bit more time focusing on the why as you said, Lindsey.
LINDSEY POLLAK: I want him to focus on the who and the why.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. So Dan, what are we telling him?
DAN MCGINN: Well, number one he’s a new boss and some of what he’s experiencing are classic new boss problems. Number two, we recognize there’s a political dimension to this that two tribes have merged into one. He’s affiliated with one of the former tribes. He’s also probably had other people applying for the role that he has now that may be a little bit resentful. So, this is a complicated mix. Age is one of the dimensions. In terms of how to deal with this, we think probably the biggest thing he can do is to deal with the team, not as a big collection of people, but a bunch of one on one relationships.