Managing Older Workers

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

Careers, Business/management, Work, Advice, Harvard, Help, Mentor, Workplace, Business, Management, Challenges, Entrepreneurship, Hbr, Office, Business/careers, Business/entrepreneurship

4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2019

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are you struggling to manage people who are older than you? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of workplace consultant Lindsey Pollak. They talk through what to do when you’ve been promoted above more experienced colleagues, you’re not sure how to motivate older reports, or senior employees are skeptical of the technology you want to implement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research,
0:22.5	talk to the experts, and help you move forward. Today we're talking about managing older
0:34.8	workers with Lindsay Pollack. She's the author of The Remix,
0:38.0	How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace. Lindsay, thank you so much for coming on the show.
0:43.2	Thank you for having me. Are cross-generational challenges in the workplace worse or different than they have been in the path?
0:50.3	Definitely, yes. I'm myself at a gen Xcer, which I always out myself at the beginning of
0:55.5	conversations. And when I entered the workplace in the 90s, there were only three generations
1:01.1	in the workplace. Well, we've seen expansion on the older end of the workplace with people
1:06.3	working longer. And now we have millennials and now the new Gen Z is coming in. So in the 20 years that
1:12.7	I've personally been in the workplace, we've gone from three generations to five. And that
1:17.3	changes a lot of the dynamics. We do hear that generations don't actually have differences.
1:25.5	You know, I as a Gen X are, I'm not really that different at age 40 than
1:30.6	my parents were at age 40. Do you find that to be true? I actually disagree. You know,
1:35.7	just look at something like average age of marriage. It's gotten much older. So a 21-year-old in the
1:41.4	1950s has quite different expectations than a 21-year-old today. Retirement, so a 55-year-old in the 1950s has quite different expectations than a 21-year-old today.
1:46.4	Retirement, so a 55-year-old 20, 30 years ago, has very different expectations of their career than somebody today.
	...

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