What does a Boomer to Millennial changing of the guard mean to your organization, and to you as a leader?
{This is a repost of an earlier article. The “School-Age Parent” series will resume soon. Enjoy!}
I have little doubt that my marketing-oriented friends are on this in one way every day, segmenting their message, targeting, reach, etc. in big and small ways to the generational cohorts. I’m not as sure my friends who are school leaders or other business leaders who have more “community” in the core life and mission of their company have considered it as thoroughly.
This changing of the guard is very pronounced now and for the next five years or so. This year, 2015, is when Millennials crossover and outnumber Boomers, and continue to grow for several years with immigrants. One huge generation of Baby Boomers ages 49 to 69 (71 MM strong -- We’ve lost some along the way.) are handing the reins across a generation (somewhat due to strength of generational influence but mostly because of simple population numbers) to another huge group of Millennials ages 18 to 34 (numbering 75MM and peaking at 81MM). Generation X – ages 31 to 50, numbering maybe 15-20MM fewer, of course, depending on defining years – doesn’t have the same sea change effect, though every individual one of those 30 to 50s better stay on our customer and community screens.
Four cautions and four calls to action. (You’re not imagining things if you feel some of these points tending to pull against one another. Together, maybe they form a somewhat accurate and useful view.)
Caution #1. Much of the descriptive hype on generational characteristics is pop, throwaway science of a most misleading kind. Someone has an article to write, and they grab a buzzword to turn it into a deep thought about the mind of a generation. People are mostly people – individuals and families and ages (not cohorts but just teenagers or young parents or active-retired or whatever). Don’t be misled by catchphrases to sum up a generation in a sentence.
Caution #2. There is something real to be said for the difference our shared experiences make on us as people. Growing up after World War II’s sacrifices and victories means something as does growing up in a connected, media-saturated, technologically pervasive culture past the millennium. As for what our shared experiences mean, you have to use a lot of discernment about those experiences – assigning different effects to a 60’s flower child (born near the start of the Boom) and a baby of 1964 not hitting 16 until the Aerobic 80’s. Some divide a Boomer I and Boomer II group for just this reason, but the equalizing force which makes sense of identifying Boomers as such is that those folks are 49 to 69 today and tending to see the world in some fairly similar ways. So, a generation is not understood only by when they were born or when they grew up, but how old they are now and where they find themselves in life today.
Caution #3. Have you thought separately about your organization and your leadership in terms of customers and community? If not, it’s worth a look. To the extent that generational cohorts have discernable differences, your customers will be listening for different messages and motivators but that won’t make nearly the difference that will come from your community having a sea change in common patterns of relationship, motivation, and perception. Your community may be almost everything about the place you lead – such as a school – or it may just be one of a few vital elements – like the employees, the customers if they have any interaction with each other, and the broader market or surrounding world if they have an opinion about what you do as a business. O.K., I admit it; I think community has a fundamental effect on every organization and on every leader. Nobody just has disconnected customers and a paid group of makers and sellers who produce things for and distribute things to those isolated purchasing units. We lead people, and people exist in community.
Caution #4. Statistics describe averages and quantify characteristics of the whole. Even when we acknowledge cohort characteristics, especially as leaders we have to stay aware that a 50% plus one majority does not make a community. An inflection point in statistics of the whole is significant, but those we lead and influence still hail from different attitudes and different latitudes. And, as leaders, we may be speaking across a divide of sorts when we relate to a generational cross-section amidst our employees, a strong plurality of our school parents, or a fast growing but still transitional majority of our customers. A Boomer-exclusive school is a dying one (maybe still rich, but dying nonetheless), but a Millennial marketer is still a pretty limited going concern. I do admit that startup culture can seem like Millennials selling to Millennials, and you may be able to launch and monetize a Unicorn without a grey head in the company or the customer base. But don’t let the perception cloud your reality. Most startups come from older Gen X and younger Boomers (because of experience and personal startup capital), and that new Intern movie with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway is more than just Hollywood-cute when it comes to the value of both youth and experience.
Call to Action #1. Make 70% of your commitment to communicate show itself in listening. How better to learn a language and a worldview which may vary somewhat across different groups, ages, cohorts, or communities?
Call to Action #2. Let memory give you principles for analysis and decision-making rather than fixed protocols for ‘the way we’ve always done it.’ One translates across time and from group to group, while the other divides even individuals but especially cohesively identified communities.
Call to Action #3. Don’t let multinationals or scalable units or the multiplicative power of networks or the lure of billion dollar capital stakes keep you from person to person relating. If your juice is in a trust fund, then maybe you can make it but you won’t do much of anything worth doing. If you want to see change and need to make a difference to make a dollar, you need people today in your life. You’ve got to know and connect with a wide range of people if you’re ever going to catch the nuances about how people and groups are similar and different.
A presidential candidate has to connect through the camera one person at a time much more so than through stadium rallies. The same candidate also has to have trusted and trustworthy personal advisors, and has to have rapport of some sort with some individual interviewers, and this is just the campaign. One who tries to govern without being able to connect with a king and a political whip and a union boss or Tea Party leader or mayor or Prime Minister or mother in mourning for her dead son or 70 year old or 20 year old or whoever is a sham. Trying to govern without real human connection is the game of a leader who really is deficient in the right stuff of leadership.
Call to Action #4. Amidst all this complexity, quite simply relax and be a human being. The leader has special responsibilities and must consider the effect on others for everything he or she does. But connecting with cohorts and communities really does come down to relating as a person to people. Analyze and strategize, but humanize and really care. That still makes all the difference in the world.