The Insidious New “Ism”

In your chain of command, you may have “Baby Boomers,” some “Gen Xers,” some members of “Generation Y,” and probably some “Why Nots?” or whatever names have made their way into the books since I started writing this.

These books are filled with advice about how you must manage and lead the people in your organization based solely on the year their birth happened. Apparently you will automatically understand all those who share your generation but remain flummoxed by those who don’t.

This new, pervasive, insidious “ism” is sweeping the country, if not the world. People who would never dream of engaging in sexism or racism don’t hesitate to jump on what I call the “generationalism” bandwagon. Because authors have created both a new set of worries for leaders and then magnanimously offered to solve the problems, scores of books have cropped up to explain how managers should handle each generation differently.

Consider this: Bill Gates, Bill Clinton—Baby Boomers. Tom Hanks, Michael Jordan, and Jay Leno, also Baby Boomers. Osama Bin Laden, and my cousin Fred, who is a proud member of the village Idiot’s Association—also Baby Boomers. Can somebody tell me what these men have in common with each other?  If this much diversity can exist in this short list of Baby Boomers, doesn’t it make sense that uniqueness and variety exist within each generation in your organization too?

Generationalism offers the lazy executive an excuse not to appreciate the unique contributions of each person. Aside from wasting your time studying this never-proven theory, you will engage in biases that will certainly stand in the way of you identifying your stars.

 Top performers know no generational, gender, race, or religious lines. But they do share three traits: They are smart enough to do the job; they are driven to do it well; and they have integrity. Throughout history all the great leaders who positively influenced the course of humankind embodied all these traits. Certainly each came from a different generation—often separated by hundreds if not thousands of years.

 Instead of investing time and money on books that won’t really help you lead your stars anyway, try an easier method—listen to them. Theorists, researchers, and authors of every stripe have filled  the bookstores with volumes about how to motivate, but the simplest and easiest way to motivate, or at least to avoid de-motivating already motivated people, is to ask them about their preferences and then to consider their responses.