Understanding the Disconnect Between Generations: A Two-Way Street
A Q&A with Raven Solomon
DMEC welcomes Raven Solomon as the keynote speaker for the 2023 DMEC Annual Conference, Aug. 14-17, in San Diego. Solomon is the chief executive officer of Raven Solomon Enterprises, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm.
We asked her to set the stage for her presentation titled “Where and Why Generations and Racial Equity Intersect to Move Us Forward” during a recent podcast episode. We share a few snippets from that discussion below.
DMEC:
Is most of the disconnect that you see between generations coming from older people who manage younger professionals, or do you see a disconnect on both sides?
Raven Solomon:
That’s a great question, and quite honestly, it is definitely a two-way street when it comes to the disconnect between generations in the workplace — whether you have a baby boomer managing a group of Gen Xers and millennials, or you have a Gen Z who’s fresh out of college being responsible for managing or at least influencing baby boomers and Gen Xers or the like. It really is a two-way street. It runs across all four primary generations that exist within the workforce.
And the reality is we all are feeling the challenges that accompany those generational gaps. If you are managing a group of young professionals (or emerging talent, as I like to call them), you’re going to be met with some expectations that are fairly new to you, that are certainly going to be different than perhaps the expectations you had when you were two years into the workforce. And then if you’re on the younger end of the generational spectrum, if you will, you’re going to encounter folks who have just different values, have had to approach work in a different way in order to be successful. So I always like to have this two-way conversation with both sides, if you will, of the generational spectrum because it is something that we all (and by “it,” I mean the generational gap) will have to develop bridges of empathy in order to close.
As a Gen Zer, you’ve got to understand what baby boomers experience coming into the workforce and what they had to do and value along the way to be successful. And if you’re a baby boomer, you’ve got to understand what it is that these Gen Zers are experiencing on an everyday basis and why mental health is absolutely essential to their value systems as it relates to work. So it is absolutely a two-way street. And I get the opportunity to work with both sides of that street, which really does make my work so much fun.
DMEC:
You have talked about the need for organizations to shift their learning and development approaches and that changes will be required with management styles. Would you provide one or two examples of how companies should shift their learning and development approaches, and what kinds of management changes are recommended for success?
Raven Solomon:
Yeah, I think we’re referencing this generational shift, right? And how this generational shift, demographically speaking, is going to drive different expectations that then should drive changes in our approach in many different areas, one of which being learning and development, from my perspective, but another being leadership and the way that we approach leading teams and leading businesses. So I’ll start with the learning and development aspect of it.
There are a number of things that we see different about Gen Z in relation to how they learn, how they desire to be trained, how they desire to grow professionally and personally. So I’ll just speak to a couple of them really quickly.
One is micro learning. If you think about what perhaps an e-course might have looked like five years ago, 10 years ago, it’s probably this elongated video of content: a talking head just kind of downloading information. You may take a quiz every 20 minutes or so, but at the end of the day, it’s a pretty stationary perspective on learning. Well, today the expectation is kind of shifting to be more micro driven. So it’s the bite-sized pieces of content, followed by the application opportunity, followed by more bite-sized content, followed by more opportunity to apply what we’re learning, etc. It’s this idea that we’re taking content from this huge chunk and taking it down into bite-sized pieces and providing an opportunity to apply learning along the way.
If you think about the change in how we consume content across the board, socially, then you can imagine that this just makes sense from a learning and development standpoint. Think about the change from long-form video to something like TikTok or to something like Instagram Reels, where the maximum at one point was just 15 or 20 seconds. The attention span is being impacted by that very trend, and therefore the change in how we learn and develop must shift as well.
The other thing that I’ll point to is this idea of constructing versus being instructed. You and I grew up at a time in school where we were just instructed. We had a teacher in the front of the room. That teacher taught a lesson. You and I were supposed to retain that information. We were quizzed or tested on it in a couple of weeks and then we move on to the next subject. Well, this next generation of talent is really looking for the opportunity to be involved in that learning experience by way of helping construct versus merely being instructed. So the question then lies for learning and development professionals, “How do I create a co-learning opportunity or a co-collaborative learning opportunity for those who are on the other side of this table within a classroom?”