Being age-blind to the differences within an organization doesn’t help anyone. Rather, recognizing and celebrating them can become your superpower.
Interview By Brenda Ice
Hello. My name is Brenda, and I am a proud member of Generation X, which means a few things to me. Cereal was not just for breakfast. Saturdays meant cartoons. Chores were unpaid internships. I’d like to say my age cohort isn’t something I let define me, but when I consider my job, the people I report to, the staff I supervise, and the students who count on all of us, it is something that may linger in the back of my mind. So, if I’m being honest, I suppose I am fascinated by exploring these generational differences, how they affect the workforce, and the ways in which they should be attended to, much like it is for other identities.
Megan Gerhardt is someone who shares that fascination. As a professor of leadership at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Ohio, she has spent a decade and a half focused on studying, writing, and speaking about the importance of reframing age and generational differences in the workplace. For her, these differences are an opportunity to leverage acceptance rather than wield a crutch or punchline to blame or shame.
That research has led to her book Gentelligence: The Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce, written with co-authors Josephine Nachemson-Ekwall and Brandon Fogel. Her observations – such as the fact that using a period at the end of a text message can be downright scary to those of a certain age – struck a chord, and her work has caught the attention of the The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes, among many others. We spoke ahead of her appearance at the ACUHO-I Campus Home. LIVE! conference this June. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
To start off with, why do you think we as a society are more comfortable with generational stereotypes and even using them in derogatory ways? Saying “Okay, Boomer” or “Easy there, Snowflake” just kind of rolls off the tongue for folks in a way that we don’t do with other cultural stereotypes.
That’s a great question. We can become desensitized to it when we see it in the media. Even when I write articles for different journals or news outlets, I may think it's a very balanced piece, but I don't pick the title. Everyone will click on the headlines that are a little bit more provocative. But still, when we were researching the book, we found quotations going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle that essentially say, “What's wrong with these kids?” I think it's a very classic narrative.
The reality is that we judge things we don't understand, and we tend to judge, in a negative way, things that are different, especially if we don't understand why they're different. When I do my talk, instead of using those cookie-cutter lazy slides where we loop all the people into one box based on their generation, I've started using a wave to illustrate generations. I love that as a visual because every time a new generation enters the workforce, they cause waves, and they do that by bringing in their own set of norms.
One of the things in my work that I find interesting is that when it comes to age, we have this natural age polarization in organizations. Think about the fact that you usually enter an organization with people similar in age. You graduated from college around the same time, so you’re all getting your first job. Then, as you get promoted, people's career trajectories loosely follow a career model that lines up with life stages. The people you work most often with at your level of career are not far off in age from you. There are exceptions, particularly in education. But you don't have a lot of opportunities to interact in meaningful ways with people significantly older or younger than you. Because of that, we don't really have opportunities to break down those stereotypes.
It's very easy for me to say “Okay, Boomer” if I don't do interesting work or have in-depth connections or conversations with people who are 20 or 30 years older than me. I just think I don't know any people like that, so my representation of them is that they're out of touch or they don't know how to use tech, or whatever generalization I like to use.
We are lucky in education, and I do firmly believe this is why I'm so passionate about this topic and why my insights on it are sometimes unique. Like you, I work in higher ed, so every day I have a lot of examples that fly in the face of what we're hearing about Gen Z.
Certainly, there are outliers, but my experience is that we very much misunderstand whoever the youngest generation is because we don't quite know where a lot of that is coming from. It's easy for us to stereotype because we don't have opportunities to interact in meaningful ways unless those are created by our organization. We can't substitute personal connections and stories for those stereotypes.
Regarding the other part of the question, about why we do that more comfortably than we would with other kinds of differences, I think it's because we haven't been socialized to think that it's not okay. I'm certainly not saying there aren't people who would do that with other kinds of differences, but most people are aware enough that they go, “Oh, you're not supposed to say that about women or about whatever other group.” For whatever reason, we gave generations a pass. It's not a protected class exactly unless we're talking about people over 40. It's a little bit mushy and somehow seems like a piece of the puzzle we skipped over. It also has that unique characterization that a person stays in the same generation even as they change ages. So, if we're “Okay, Boomer”-ing someone, we will eventually be in that category that we used to call Boomer.
I was reading an article where you said that when we talk about someone's generation, it ends with a comma and not a period. Could you elaborate on what that means? More importantly, how does that impact our work in higher ed, or specifically in housing and residence life?
I think their generation is a very important part of someone's identity. I hear people claim that grouping people into generations is damaging and not helpful. I don't agree with that. I think ignoring someone’s generation is the age equivalent of someone saying they are colorblind. It's better than being biased and prejudiced, but it's not honoring the fact that this person has a different life experience and that they've experienced key events in the world. There are certain norms around how they were raised, what it meant to get an education, or how they prioritize wellness over career or vice versa. When I say to follow “generation” with a comma, not a period, it's saying let's not get rid of it. Let's acknowledge that being a high school student during the pandemic is very different than being a 42-year-old during the pandemic.
Let's also make room for all the other layers of who a person is. When I go and speak, there's sometimes a tension in the room like, “Oh, here we go. She's going to tell us that all people our age are this and I'm not, and this is dumb.” I hit that straight on to say, I don't know who they are. When you tell me you were born in 1982, I don't know if that tells me a lot, but it does tell me something. But I want to know more. I want to know if you are an older or a younger Millennial. I want to know what your gender identity or your religion is, where in the world you grew up, your race, and your socioeconomic status. Did you grow up in a rural or an urban environment? Are you a first-generation immigrant? Are you the oldest of seven?
People come up to me all the time and say, “Okay, I'm with you. But here's the thing, my parents were a lot older than my friends’ parents, so I think I was raised more like a fill-in-the-blank.” When they do that, I think they're trying to figure out if that's okay. People shouldn't assume you are like this because you're a Millennial, because, in fact, your development and your experiences were very different. Maybe you had friends who had those experiences, but those weren't yours.
So that's what I meant by the idea of the comma. I think we make room for all those layers of identity, and that's how you have the kind of complex conversation we need to be having.
How did you coin the word “Gentelligence,” and what does that really mean?
I coined that term back in 2016. It means we just need to be smarter about the way we're talking about generational and age differences in the workplace. We have unfortunately been given a lot of these stereotypical ways of thinking about generations that aren't engaging or accurate for people. Unfortunately, I think that has kept us from making the progress we need to make.
My work all falls under the umbrella of having smarter conversations about generations in the workplace. I can't tell you how to manage your Gen Zs or what it means to have a Baby Boomer boss. I can help you understand how to have better conversations with that person by understanding how to frame them and why generational norms tend to shift. When we understand the “why,” then I think we can understand the difference in a way that makes us more open to navigating it.
In the book, we talk about the current state of things, which I think we've established is not great. The reality is that age and generational differences in the workplace are most likely going to be a dumpster fire. That is people's daily experience, and the research backs that up. It’s just like any kind of difference: If you cross your fingers and hope everybody's going to figure it out, they're not. It causes team conflict. It causes a lack of engagement. It causes turnover among all different generations. It's not good.
Age diversity and generational diversity themselves don’t positively relate to anything that we would want to see in the workplace unless – and this is where I’m interested – it is managed and led well. I’ve heard these climates and cultures called different things, like age-neutral or age-inclusive. But it all just means we've created a place where you don't feel that your age, young or old, is holding you back.
We're not just talking about older people, although that's where we have our federal protections. Why should the younger generation be told they can't or shouldn't do something unless it's based on something valid and not just an artifact? Then the older generations feel edged out, patronized, or devalued. You can see how that would have a negative impact. But if we can turn that around and age is not a hindrance, then they feel they have an opportunity to develop, learn, and grow regardless of age. They feel like their unique point of view is valued by their coworkers. They believe the fact that one person can see a situation differently than another is fascinating, interesting, and important – and is not a threatening or a negative thing.
It is then that we see age and generational diversity turning into a positive that leads to better innovation, better performance, and greater team engagement. That’s the linchpin I try to focus on with Gentelligence. How do we give you the tools to get there? A lot of it is baked into this idea of trying to understand the “why.” Let’s try to understand that being open to the way you see it, the way I see it, and the way somebody 20 years older than me sees it could be good for all of us and the organization.
I think we all aspire to be good leaders and good supervisors of the team that we have. Are there one or two tips or strategies that we could employ to get to that level of being a better practitioner, not only for ourselves but for the teams that we support?
The book goes into four practices. The first two are focused on how to break down and dial down the tension around generational difference. We talk about that from a couple of different angles. We address bias like we already talked about. Let's be aware of and audit bias. But I talk about assumptions in a slightly different way now than I did when we wrote the book. After identifying these assumptions, the second part is adjusting the lens. I think this is really important. One key thing I've seen be sticky is this idea of assuming we're having the same conversation with someone of a different generation or significantly different age. But we're not.
For example, I'll have conversations with people who are talking about the importance of a flexible workplace, transparency, or development: terms we throw around all the time when we're managing people. I love to call the question and say, “Okay, before we move on, when you say it's important to develop people, what does that mean to you?” If I'm talking to someone who's a Gen Xer like myself, development might mean you get regular performance reviews. We check in quarterly. I'm keeping an eye on your performance improvement goals. Check, check, check.
To a Gen Z, their norms (I focus a lot on norms rather than stereotypes) mean that when I say development, there's often an element that they care about me as a person here. They care about my life. They care about me uniquely as an individual. That's where that snowflake trope comes in. But again, I always say go back to the why. Why would they think that way? Well, these are people who have had to be pretty good consumers of knowledge, right? What's the source? Why is this person telling me that? Can I trust this person? I love this idea of considering what assumptions you are making and digging in for a little bit about the conversation you think you're having versus maybe the conversation they think you're having.
Related to that, there’s the idea of perspective taking. I focus a lot on what I call power questions. If we want to have smarter intergenerational conversations, let's have questions that can help us do it. So that power question would be, for example, “When I say development, what does that mean to you?” Another power question is, “Can you help me understand?” Curiosity over judgment is another part of that first category we're talking about. If you’re hit by something that I feel is generational – small or big – and do not get it, a pause to ask for help signals that you understand that the person might see this differently for a very good reason. You don't have any idea what it is yet, so ask for help getting there.
When you're traveling to a different culture, you know you have to put in the work to navigate it because you're going to be hit with people who grew up differently than you. They might communicate differently, and you don't want to get wires crossed. The same concept applies to generations. It's a kind of culture. I think you travel, in part, because it's fascinating and interesting to interact with people who think differently from you and live differently than you. That's what we get the opportunity to do every day if we think about it that way generationally.
Our last two practices are about finding that benefit. If we've dialed down the tension and are trying to get rid of the negativity, how do we then tap into the potential? I'm sure you're very aware that people really only get on board with the benefits of diversity when they have the opportunity to personally experience the benefits of it, right? I can do 100 modules on the importance of diversity, but if I'm on a team where we figured something out together that I never would have figured out on my own, now I'm on board. I understand why it might be worth the challenge. But how do you get there?
One part is psychological safety. That’s the idea that everybody, regardless of age, has to feel like they can speak up and have an idea and they're not going to be judged or attacked for it. But they also have to be able to ask for help. You have to be able to admit that there are times when you’ve got nothing. I've heard this so many places.
I work with a restaurant company, and one of the managers said at a recent workshop, “These kids don't even know how to mop.” There's this inherent judgment, like “What the heck's wrong with them?” And I remember saying, “All right. So, what do we do about that? I get that you grew up learning how to mop like it was second nature. They probably were on a travel soccer team six days a week, and nobody had time to mop because they were worried about getting into a good college.” There's probably a story there worth digging into.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't learn how to mop, but how about we take 10 minutes and teach them instead of shaming them? I'm not sure what good that does. It wasn't their choice.
At the other end, of course, it's the same thing when someone says, “That Boomer doesn’t even know how to use blank.” Well, maybe they don't want to ask because they don't want you calling them a Boomer. Maybe they are a totally skilled, smart person, able to learn technology, and would be happy to learn, but are not interested in the shaming that goes along with asking somebody to walk them through it. Psychological safety doesn't mean we give people every single thing they might possibly need; we may just like the idea that their needs might be different than our needs for life stage reasons, generational reasons.
My favorite part about it is the practice of getting to the place where, together, we create more than we could individually. The power question on that one is very simple: “How would you approach this?” It works when I go to class, or you're talking to resident assistants, and we're working on a sticky challenge that none of us is entirely sure how to confront.
For me, that topic is AI. I start every semester now by telling students we need to come up with a good policy for how we're going to use AI in class. I ask them what policy they would create. Walk me through it. Why would you create that? How is it helping you learn? What should we be careful about? Where should we put the guardrails up?
I ask this not because they get to decide, but because they know things I don't know, and the policy is going to be better, and we're all going to get on board with it if we have the conversation. Then I can respond, “Okay, really interesting. I love that. Here's a couple of things I didn't hear that I think we should think about” because I know things they don't know and vice versa. When you ask the question of how to approach something, whether it's an older person saying this to a younger one or a younger one to someone older, it's showing respect. It says your point of view has validity. I'm okay with it being different than mine. I'm not substituting your judgment for my own. I'm confident enough to be open to it because it helps, it's better, or I learn something new.
I swear this is particularly relevant on college campuses. There are people from older generations who think like my colleague when we were talking about learning to use Zoom during the pandemic. I said to just ask your students for help. If everything goes haywire, just ask them and they will help you troubleshoot. And he said he would never ask his students for help. I said, “Why not? It feels like I ask my students for help every single day.” And he said, “Well, they wouldn't respect me.”
Well, that's of its time. I think there was an era when the mindset was, if you're in charge, you don't ask younger people for help because they'll think you don't know what you're doing, and then they'll never respect you.
This generation is not that way, right? They are very aware that they learn things differently from how we learned them. They love the fact that I'm willing to ask, if the sound is not working, could some hip Gen Z come up here and figure out why and make that work for me? They're being recognized for what they bring to the table. That's just a silly example, but very common in my world. They respect me more because I respect them. My openness to their perspective, I swear, makes them much more open to my advice or my point of view because we're all on the same side of that tug of war rope.
I've noticed that your conversation has centered around Gen Z. Could you talk about what you have found in your research, or maybe even anecdotally from your teaching, about the benefits of Gen Z now moving into the workforce? How might we leverage a bit of their expertise?
That is a well-framed question. Very gentelligent of you.
The metaphor I love about this is that every time a new generation comes into the workforce, it’s like they are coming into your house and they shake the walls. We all did it when we were the new kids in town. One hundred years before or after us, that’s what the youngest generation does. Some of these walls that they're shaking are load-bearing walls. They are the walls that we built this thing on. We're not taking them down. Even if you don't like them, don't understand them, or don't agree with them, this is who we are.
I clearly remember a conversation we had last summer at the ACUHO-I conference about the rite of passage of living in the residence halls as a residence director and whether or not you have to do that or if there is a benefit to that. There's something like that in every industry. I have done a lot of work in healthcare and emergency medicine in the last couple of years. Their tension is asking if doctors really have to work 120 hours a week as residents or if that is just a thing we used to do that was never a good idea, and it's time to get rid of it.
When a younger generation comes in and kicks the walls, older generations feel that their responsibility, instead of finding it disrespectful or threatening, is to say, “Oh, thanks for asking about that. Do you know why we do it that way? Let's talk about it.” Now, if it's a load-bearing wall, they shouldn’t get defensive. They should recognize that the younger generation just doesn't know. They just got here. That wall can be explained because it matters. In emergency medicine, the fact that it is a traumatic and difficult place to work is not a wall that we can take down because it's uncomfortable.
But some of the walls, per your question, that Gen Z is shaking are what I call those 1990s half walls. We built them back in the ‘90s because we thought they were cute or something. I don't know what we were doing, but you put the wall up and we've been walking around it for a couple of decades. No one's talking about it, but it really doesn't make sense to have a wall there. It's not serving us anymore. The great thing about Gen Z and every other young generation that's come before them is they're going to ask in some way, “Why is that wall there?”
The benefit is – if we let it be a benefit – they're pointing out walls. And if you're good at what you do and you're willing to create that climate and be the leader that's going to have generational diversity work for you, then you also look at the wall when they point it out and be willing to acknowledge that they’ve asked an excellent question. That leader says, “I am not sure why we do that, and that may not make sense anymore in 2025. Let me dig into that. I don't know if we can change it, but I'm really interested in how you would do it differently.”
I'm never an expert in the industry I go into, so I don't know whether working 120 hours as a resident is a half wall or a load-bearing wall. I don't know whether living in a residence hall is a rite of passage that's essential and we're never getting rid of it, or not. That's for the experts to decide. But the benefit Gen Z is bringing right now is that they're raising questions some of us wish we had been able to ask.
Transparency is part of it. This is a generation that grew up with unlimited access to information and explanation. So when Gen Z comes to work and something doesn't make sense and they ask about it, I hear people saying, “Well, nobody ever explained it to me.” We were told it was above our pay grade, and we didn’t need to worry about that. But wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had taken 10 minutes to explain it? We probably would have been better at our job, or those walls would have come down sooner.
They are bringing a boldness that is a little uncomfortable. It's being perceived as disrespectful, just the way the Millennials were perceived as disrespectful, but it's not meant to be in most cases. I think they're pushing for the “why.” I think that's healthy because then we think about it. That's how change occurs.
I'm fascinated by what I'm calling the shifting psychological contract at work. What do we expect, or what should we expect, work to provide to us? The way we're seeing this most notably is in terms of work/life balance or mental health support or whatever you want to call it. We're all feeling that, especially on campus. I had two emails this week from students saying their mental health isn't great and that they were going to take the next day off. A couple of weeks ago, I had a student email and say, “I'm really burned out. I'm not at my best. Out of respect for you and my classmates, I'm not going to come to class today.”
This is fascinating, right? I've been here 22 years, so I’m positive I've always had students taking days off to recharge. But in the past, they would have said they were sick or whatever. They wouldn't have said they were taking time to take care of their mental health.
I am actually in the middle of data collection on this topic. We always say that Gen Z has broken down the stigma about mental health. But we didn't find that in our first round of data collection. They seem to have the same amount of, at least, self-stigma about it, feeling a little bad about it as other generations have.
What I think is changing is their expectations that their organization is going to help them manage it. They may think, “Of course, Megan wouldn't want me to come to class if I weren't feeling my best,” whereas I think most older generations would say, “Out of respect for my classmates and my professor, I should come to class.” That's a very different way to frame that.
I see this in every industry. In emergency medicine, young doctors call off because they're burned out, or in the restaurant industry, people call off afternoon shifts because they need time to rest. This is not making sense to generations who are older. They learned that your mental health or being burned out is a personal problem. That's not a work problem. You take a nap this weekend when you're not scheduled to work. It's not your boss's problem.
But suddenly it is. I think one of the things we're seeing is the tension of how to navigate it. When you ask what Gen Z is bringing that is good, I think they're raising the conversation. And I don't think we know yet where the load-bearing versus half walls are in this regard because, again, the work of Gentelligence is to have smarter intergenerational conversations and not necessarily be concerned about what should happen if someone wants to take time off whenever they are feeling burned out.
Let's say someone calls off and isn't going to come in for their afternoon shift because life's been hard, and they are genuinely in a mental health situation. As the leader, I might ask if they can help me understand the thought process. They were scheduled to work, and then an hour before they were supposed to come in, they called off, saying it's important that they take care of themselves.
That's the first conversation. I asked to understand better where this was coming from. For the second conversation, I'm going to say, “Thank you for sharing that. That's helpful. I absolutely want you to be healthy and well, and I care about you as a person. But on my end, I want to talk through what happens here when you call off an hour ahead of time. Because you weren't able to come in, we still had to cover your shift, whether that's at the ER, Burger King, or wherever. So I didn't get to go to my kid's soccer game that he was really hoping I'd make it to because somebody had to be here. Now that's not great for my mental health because I was really looking forward to it, and he was upset I wasn't there.”
That's where you could go to that power question: Given that we need to balance everybody's well-being and we have to get work done, how do you think we should approach this? Maybe they're going to have an idea I didn't have. Or maybe the learning is that they didn't think about how the dominoes fall when they make that advocacy decision for themselves.
I think what's really interesting from a campus standpoint is that we're part of a very important conversation. Yes, of course, the pandemic contributed to people prioritizing health over work. That is a big formative reason why this generation is probably shifting expectations. We can get that. If I were in my formative years and witnessed a bunch of people's health crash and burn, and their organizations were checking in on their mental health, I would get the memo that doing so makes sense.
This is a relatively new insight for me, but I think we are seeing the effects of the oldest members of Gen Z being three years old when No Child Left Behind was passed. Their entire educational experience has been in organizations invested in taking care of their challenges and needs. That is not a bad thing. I think it’s great that we've gotten more tuned into what a person needs to be successful and how we can support them. I had a librarian here at Miami pull the data for me, and it revealed that, in a decade, the number of accommodations granted to those K-12 students exponentially skyrocketed, 10 times as many, after No Child Left Behind. This is also when ADHD was being increasingly identified, as were different kinds of autism, anxiety, and learning disabilities. It was all so that we could figure out exactly how to help that person with what they needed help with.
That's all awesome. But if I think about my son when he was in high school, there were accommodations he was entitled to. He's 19 this year, so he goes to college, and we have a conversation with the person there who says, “Well, in high school, you were able to have this, but in college, some of these aren't reasonable anymore. This is what is reasonable here.” Well, nobody has that conversation when they start to work. Nobody says, “Well, you had time-and-a-half to get your work done when you were in college, but you don't have time-and-a-half to get your client report done.”
I had this talk with a colleague, and she explained that her direct report needs to break down their work into smaller pieces and tasks. And she's thinking that’s not her job. So, we have this clash of realities. This person has been supported in that way for their entire developmental existence, and now, at work, it’s not there unless it's a legal accommodation for something that is reasonable, or for ADA-type things. But what's a reasonable accommodation for ADHD in a professional workspace? I'm not sure. Maybe it seems weird to people that they can’t just call off work to take the time they need to have the things that will help them perform better later. I don't know. There are some interesting things Gen Z is forcing us to think more about.
This topic is fascinating to me on multiple layers, and I'm confident that I could continue to just think about things and talk with you. But recognizing that you will be joining us in a few weeks for our conference, what is a small teaser that you can leave us with?
What I’ve been asked to do on my encore visit is to dig into the application piece. We will do a quick refresher and catch everyone up on the framework we want to use, but we really want to go further, let people identify with their colleagues, and give them the opportunity to share how these generational differences are showing up. We want to hear about the most pressing generational challenges or differences that people are seeing. Then we're going to go through some classic tools, some new tools, strategies, questions, and things to think about. I want to give people an opportunity to apply those tools to the challenge they've identified. I want to give attendees a chance to see, if the idea makes sense and the tools are interesting, how they can dig into the issue and apply the tools. I want them to see how they can bring it back to their work, their campus, and their challenge.
Brenda Ice is assistant vice president for residential community living at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She currently serves on the ACUHO-I Executive Board as the Workforce Development Director.
