As we have seen a shift in many businesses from a promotional system based on seniority (aka you’ve been here 20 years so you now become a manager…even though you have zero leadership skills or training on how to actually manager people) to one based on merit (aka you’ve done well at your current position and show the ability to lead a team, so we are making you assistant manager of your department). But how does this affect the multi-generational workforce when a 25-year-old employee who’s been with your company for less than a year is now managing a staff of 50-year-old employees who’ve been with your company for over twenty years?
According to research by European organizational studies experts, Florian Kunze and Jochen Menges, in a study of nearly 8000 employees at 61 different German companies, “their key finding was that in cases where there was a large gap between younger managers and older workers, the employee ‘tended to report more negative emotions, such as anger or fear.’” (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/11/18/young-bosses-supervising-older-workers-fosters-resentment-harms-performance/) In the basic understanding of career paths, many of us in the Baby Boomer and Generation X pool believe that it should be an upward progression. You start at the bottom with one company, and you stay there and move up the ladder. Our new friends the Millennials (and probably even more so with the younger Unknowns now entering the workforce) definitely don’t subscribe to this philosophy. Instead, they believe their success should move them places. They don’t believe in a certain amount of time you need to put in to “earn” a spot at the top. The millennials hold to the motto that whoever works the hardest or performs the best should be the top dog – regardless of seniority. This is almost exactly in opposition to the mentality of the older generations in the workforce today, which inevitably causes a bit of turmoil when the manager is young enough to the be employee’s child.
Although this study is based in Germany, I think a lot of the key aspects can transfer over to the U.S. business market as well. So how do we, as leaders in the field of hiring and employee engagement, help our clients to make sure that the company culture is not plagued by toxicity caused from these hiring and promotional decisions? Here are a few tips!
- Identify the problem area in your specific organization. Examine both groups to find out where the problem lies (with one group, the other, or both?)
- Make sure you’re making the right hiring decisions. Don’t make decisions based on age, ever.
- Don’t enforce strict upward movement in hiring. Lateral moves can be beneficial for employees, departments, and the organization as a whole too.
- Don’t make assumptions about age when making hiring decisions. Look for the best regardless of age.