Leveraging the strengths of a multigenerational workforce | with Dr. Mary Collins

Sam. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to show 53 of this shortlist where I am in the world, which is in Ireland, in the Northern Hemisphere. It's summertime and with June arriving yesterday, I think as it was, so came summer. So welcome everybody to our summer show. The first of it's really just June is the summer in Ireland. It's Wimbledon month. It's when the kids break up from school. It's when the sun maybe shines for a couple of days in Ireland, as it has done the last few whiles and hopefully everyone's in a bit of a better mood. Welcome. Today we're going to be talking about leveraging the strengths of a multi generational workforce. We've got a fantastic guest who's going to be chatting with us about her insights in the multi generational workforce and we'd love to hear your comments and thoughts. If you're listening live, don't forget this is a live show broadcast each week on Wednesday at 4pm UK Irish time on on LinkedIn and YouTube. And if you're joining us live, please do join in. We always love hearing your comments, questions for our guests and whatever you want to put into the chat on LinkedIn or YouTube, we'll pick them up live. If you're not, don't forget that we are a podcast that is available on Spotify and Apple and we are up past our 50th show and there's a great back catalog of fantastic shows and interviews on the talent on the topics of talent over the last year or so. And you can find out more about the show, our upcoming shows, our previous shows, watch the videos, get the links@wsocialtalent.com the shortlist. But on to today's show. So the multi generational workforce. So we're living longer. Yay. Isn't it great? But that typically often means that we're working longer and we're also starting earlier as more and more individuals choose not to necessarily go down the university route. So at both ends of the workforce spectrum, we're seeing it stretch. You know, there's up to five generations working in the workplace today, from the traditionalist to the Gen Z, and it's often an overlooked area of diversity, equity, inclusion, but one that is becoming more and more important to large organizations and small organizations alike across the world. And whilst obviously each particular cohort typically has its own unique strengths, it can be a difficult task to try to understand how you can leverage a multigenerational team for success. So our guest today, I'm delighted to have on the show is Dr. Mary Collins. And Mary's a chartered psychologist and professional executive coach who is a leading expert in the field of engaging this multi generational workforce. And on this episode, Mary's going to be sharing with us advice on how to get the best from each generation and also to delve to delve into management strategies looking at how both empathy and emotional intelligence play vital roles in supporting and cultivating success and focus. Finally, she'll give us some insights into the impact the pandemic has had on all of this, but through a uniquely generational lens. And that wasn't good enough. Mary just recently released a new book called Recruiting Talented People, which we'll dig into and ask her a bit later on, which is a practical guide for small to medium sized businesses on the recruitment life cycle, offering tips and insights from everything from establishing employer brands, interview processes right through to induction. And we just discovered, Mary, it's available on Amazon and it falsely claims you're writing a whole bunch of other books that weren't yours. Mary, tell us about these false claims. Mary, what's going on and welcome to the show.

Well, thank you Johnny, and it's really lovely to be here. And hello to everybody listening in now and also to the podcast. Really, really delighted to have this opportunity and thanks for the plug about the book. It's literally hot off the press and delighted to hear it is on Amazon as verified by johnny 5 minutes ago. So it's been, it's been a real labor of love for the last three years and I'm delighted it's eight. And I've had the great honor and pleasure of working with thought leaders, including the very Johnny Campbell, who have contributed to the book. And it really is aimed at small and medium businesses who don't have that sort of big recruitment machine behind them and how they can manage each stage of the recruitment cycle and not just be reactive to their recruitment.

And it must be three, four years since we had our first cup of tea and conversation about this topic back in a Beaulieu's cafe on Graven Street. Mary, But I want to ask you about the multi generational aspect because on the same day you blew me away with insights around your observations at the time around what was Generation Z which was only beginning to come into the workforce, could have been five years ago even, and challenges around resilience and other topics. We what has made you passionate about this topic around multigenerational workforces and why has that become a thing for you over the last few years?

Yeah, well I'm just so delighted you picked this topic Social Talented, because I do feel it's the neglected child of diversity and inclusion. You know, we have such a strong emphasis on gender, race, disability, but we don't tend to focus on age on life stage so much. So I'll take you back Jonny, to when I was head of talent and leadership development and at the time 80% of the firm were under 30. So it was a really exciting time. Very young, dynamic, ambitious workforce. And I was doing a lot of psychometric profiling and I started to notice some really interesting trends that a lot of the young grads coming in when I looked at their career values using Edgar Schein's Career anchors tool, some viewers may be familiar with that. Essentially it's looking at what is most important to you in a career. And I started seen some really interesting trends. So the one anchor that kept reoccurring as the top anchor was pure challenge. And we know that people who have this as a career value, they want complex problems, lots of responsibility, lots of variety in their roles. And the second anchor that came up on a consistent basis was work life balance. Now I think you'll agree they're not always comfortable bedfellows. You want all this responsibility and you want work life balance. So I said I want to get under the bonnet of this, I want to just explore this. And under the bonnet I got. And I spent the next four and a half years doing my doctoral thesis looking at the younger generations in the workplace and how we can really engage and motivate and get the best from the younger generations. And I looked at engineers, lawyers and accountants as part of that study. But really there was very little difference between the professions. There was a lot of constraints, consistent messages coming through.

There's a lot being talked about out there on in the press and articles increasingly becoming more focused. Think you're right about it is the forgotten child. And that's not to take away from the importance of the other areas of diversity, but you know, it's. And it has a lot of intersectionality as well around those other area diverses. We've noticed an increase in the amount of talk about it online. And Mary, surprise, surprise, for the shortlist we found some news articles for us to dive into. Niall, over to you for the news. The first one I wanted to look at and get your thoughts were a piece that was published in Forbes Last month on 5 Ways to Lead the multi generational workplace. I wonder if you could maybe take us through if you can. You know what you got from this article, a summary of those five ways and what your thoughts were on Benjamin Lakers, who's the writer here, his kind of opinion on this area.

Yeah, sure. Jonny. I thought this was a really interesting article. I also thought it can be a little bit simplistic. So the big health warning I always start with when I talk about this is how important it is not to stereotype and not to assign or assume that if someone is of a particular generation. So for example, one of the most common ones I come across in my work is, oh, someone in their 20s is really good with technology. We have a 25 year old on the team, give them all the tech stuff and then you have a 25 year old going, I don't know how to open Excel or you know, making these assumptions all the time. So again, I think, you know, it's important that we don't simplify this topic too much and there's a lot of pop psychology out there around it as well. So just to say that. So I thought this article was yet highlighted the benefits of a multi generational workforce. And we know that gender and age diverse teams that back to the multifaceted approach you mentioned, Jonny, are 80% more effective at making better decisions. So gender alone, teams who have gender diversity are 73% more effective at making better decisions. So I think that's quite, quite an interesting fact. The article also talked about the importance of collaboration between the generations and how that leads to innovation and high performance. And it is also, if you have a multi generational workforce, it, it should be reflective of your market in most cases. Most of us are working in multigenerational consumer markets as well. So the big message for me around how to lead multigenerational teams from this article was really using emotionally intelligent leadership leaders who are aware, who can flex and adapt their style and really show empathy to people at all life stages.

Yeah, it's kind of something that I think is not just applicable to the multi generational workforce. If you'd agree. You know, this is emerging as a theme across the board, particularly as we've had such a focus on leadership and what good leadership looks like in the last year. Mary Right. You know, it's, you have to be very aware of who is in your team, what's happening in their lives really take an interest. But this points to understanding what are the different strengths of each member of the team, making sure that you are leveraging all the individual strengths to make the team better as a whole. I didn't really offer much practical advice as to how to do that, you know, very short five bullet points, which is kind of a bit high level for me. But I think there's a lot of. You take each of those points and you go further. There's a lot of good research and there are great instructional kind of courses and programs you can go on that teach you each aspect of that. You know, having psychological safety in a team, being open to feedback, trying to get everyone to participate. A challenge sometimes on zoom calls these days where we're on zoom meetings and understanding the difference between a facilitator and a leader on a call and these different things, I guess we're. It's probably not just multi generational really that the advice would apply to. It's kind of like how do you get the best from people? Would you agree?

Absolutely, Jonny. It really was, it was quite generic and you find a lot of research or a lot of articles in this field can be a bit generic. What I did think was interesting though was the UN data around ageism and how ageism tends to be polarized towards older workers and younger workers. And just to mention a really interesting study I came across Angelica Ruskin University in London, where they did a longitudinal study. They had the CV of a 50 year old and a 28 year old, so with very similar skills and attributes and they found that the 50 year old was 4.2 times less likely to get called to interview. 4.2 times less likely. And a female, a 50 year old who was a female was 5.3 times less likely. So double whammy if you're older and you're a woman. So I think these are the type of things we need to tackle and we hear a lot about younger workers and having to adapt our style. I'm very interested in the whole area of older workers and I think there's a huge opportunity, particularly with baby boomers in our workplaces that have so much wisdom to offer. Dorothy Leonard in Harvard talks about deep smarts which are as close as you can get to wisdom. Like boomers have this rich experience and wisdom to share. And we know from the research on boomers, they want to give back, they want to mentor, they want to really be part of the organization.

That's funny because you mentioned the attitudes to ageism and you know, my career started recruiting back in my early 20s. I was 20 when I started recruiting and it shames me to admit this, but it's important to admit it. When I was a recruiter and I recruited accountants, I know the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland are the publishers of your latest book. I recruited qualified accountants for large organizations and I would run my search in my database and we had a filter of age and I would source by age and above 35, I just remove, I'd remove them and financial control rules or whatever they were. I was like, well, they're too old to be doing this job and I couldn't tell you why I had that, that opinion. I just felt from a 20 or 21 year old's perspective that surely they should be doing something else at that point in their career or whatever it might have been. And whilst I'd love to think that that doesn't happen anymore, I do fear it does. And the data you shared there, I think probably proves out that this stuff still happens. We still have this age bias. And I know that a lot of people I've spoken to, again, I'm mid career, mid-40s, mid career and therefore I get to speak to folks on both sides of where I am. I see, I talk to a lot of people who perhaps are related in their career and they share with me the challenges of things like LinkedIn where you don't want to reveal your entire career because people are going to estimate your age. They're worried about the photo you put up there because that will give an indication to your age. This is a, this is a thing, you know, when you're looking for a job that if you are in that older generation and you have experienced this in your career and most of us have, you're going to be very conscious of it. And arguably the online tools don't work in your favor when they're showing photographs encouraging you to put your full career history, give dates for the university that you went to, etc. Etc. Like, what's your kind of view on what, you know, what recruiters can do or individuals hiring managers can do to try and mitigate that or to reduce that.

Yeah, and it's, it's. Thank you for being so honest, Johnny. I'm sure you don't think 35 is else now, but 20. It comes back really to the whole inclusive piece. And what are, what's the business case? You know, what does that, you know, having the wisdom and the experience of older workers in the workplace. Really interesting research from Ashridge, a report called don't leave Baby Boomers in the Corner, like a play on Dirty Dancing. And when they surveyed HR leaders, what are your views on baby boomers? It was actually quite negative. It was like, oh, cruising towards retirement, slacking innovation, you know, These types of companies comments and then they interviewed the boomers themselves and it was really quite different. There was comments like I've never felt more comfortable in my own skin. I'm feeling really creative, I want to give back, I want to mentor. And you know, all that stuff I had going on, the childcare and the elder care issues in my 30s and 40s, I don't have that anymore. So I have a lot more time and energy to give to my career. So for me this is around really seeing the benefits that having the multi generational mix can bring to your organization. And just to add as well, Johnny, I did hear from last month there's a technology company which will remain nameless, have their European head office in Ireland which doesn't really discount many of them. And I was quite shocked when I heard this that they were looking for executive coaches to bring in, but they were only looking for coaches under 30 years of age.

Seriously?

Yeah. And I just thought, wow, you're missing out on a whole cohort there.

Well, I'll counter that with another technology story and I'll name them because I think it's a really positive thing. A good friend of mine who is in his late 50s recently joined Google in his senior leadership role and he was kind of surprised he got the role because he's from a very traditional industry. He'd been 20 odd years in the same company and you know, he's older. And I asked him about it, I said like that's, he brought it up. I said that's fantastic. What's going on? He said actually it's something that he observed has been a thing Google have been doing for the last four or five years in recognition of the fact that they will be better as a company, have more innovation, better decision making if they have both older, a mix of more older individuals because they were skewed very young for several decades, but also that they had other industries coming in. And again it points to this diversity piece around diversity of thought, drives better innovation, drives better decision making. And to your point, the research around when you add multisectional diversity onto into teams, you know, older individuals from different minorities put that all together in a group. All of a sudden you just have more voices that have different backgrounds which, which cannot be a bad thing. You know, I think that's what large organizations are waking up to. I have no doubt that the big organizations that do it aren't doing it at the goodness of their heart. Mary, there's a huge amount of evidence that says you have better decisions you will, you will be better off having more different, more voices. It makes sense, right? You go back to the Beatles 1000 hours type, you know, experience, the more times you've done something, the better you are at it. And by nature, you know, age is one of those proxies for experience. If you've been. It's not always a good one, don't get me wrong. But chances are, if you're working with teams, if you're managing longer than somebody else, there's a higher chance you've got just more experience that you can pass on. It just makes sense, doesn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely, Johnny. And also we need mentors in organizations. Really interesting fact from Deloitte great millennial studies that those millennials intending to stay more than five years in their organizations were twice as likely to have a mentor. So if they said they were intending to stay more than five years, they were twice as likely to have a mentor. And we know the best mentors are going to be for millennials. The best mentors are baby boomers. So we need more of them.

And speaking of Deloitte, your former employer as well, I'm going to go to our second news article because this was a pretty long one and it was again published a couple of months ago. And it's entitled Wrong Numbers and it comes from Deloitte Insights why a Focus on Age Can Mislead Workforce Development. And this I found is there's actually huge amount to unpack in this one, Mary. And this was kind of, it was in summary, kind of pointing to the danger of having that, you know, here are the five generations or four generations and here's how they think and what they do. And I'll get to the COVID element, which I thought was fascinating. It came up later in the article. But, you know, what is your take on this in terms of the initial data and perspective shared by this Deloitte research around the dangers of having this generational approach to how we look at the workforce?

Yes, and I think it is valid to have that challenge. There's a lot of challenge in the academic literature. Well, and some people prefer to talk about life stage, which I think is just a different perspective on us looking at different life stages. I think what is important, Jonny, is that we acknowledge the universal human needs. So, you know, we all have a need to be respected, recognized, appreciated, and even if we look at, you know, self determination theory in psychology, that need for autonomy, for competence and relatedness. So there are sort of universal needs to be motivated in a workplace. And I think that transcends the generational stuff. But what I would say is we can. You know, there were certain fundamental factors that have influenced different cohorts in the workplace. Two of the biggest drivers in recent times have been.