The workplace you and I inhabit today is awash with the conflicting voices and views of the most age-and value-diverse workforce this country has known since our great-great grandparents abandoned field and farm for factory and office. At no previous time in our history have so many and such different generations with such diversity been asked to work together shoulder to shoulder, side by side, cubicle to cubicle.
We"re in an era where even the most profitable businesses are striving to run ever leaner and meaner, there are three very distinct generations vying for position in a workplace of shrinking upward opportunity. They will soon be joined by a distinct and yet again different fourth generation. The old pecking order, hierarchy, and shorter life spans that de facto kept a given generational cohort isolated from others no longer exist, or they exist in a much less rigid, more permeable manner. Merit is overcoming time in grade, or any other variable, as the deciding factor in advancement. One"natural" flow of resources, power, and responsibilities from older to younger arms has been dislocated by changes in life expectancy, increases in longevity and health, and disruption of a century-old trend toward negative population growth, as well as changes in lifestyle, technology, and knowledge base. A world that once seemed linear is no longer. Life for every generation has become increasingly nonlinear, unpredictable, and uncharitable.
In times of uncertainty and anxiety, differences between groups and sets of people, even generations, become tension producing and potential flash points. We increasingly live and work in a world of high stakes, winners, and losers, high tensions, diminishing commonalities in values, and changing social contracts and compacts. Ironically, we increasingly live and work in a world where the sheer numbers of us and the interdependent and virtual nature of the work we do often depend on and demand collaboration and compromise, not just independence and virtuosity.