The Work Necessary To Lead Across Generations

The much-ballyhooed “multigenerational workforce” is frequently touted by leaders as a panacea for a great corporate culture. But where are the leaders who publicly discuss the friction that follows when four or five generations collide during meetings, messages, mental health, and the meaning of work itself?

Frankly, the latter is not happening nearly enough.

Dr. Megan Gerhardt, Professor of Management and Leadership at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business and coauthor of Gentelligence: The Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce, has been studying that tension for more than a decade. She argues that age diversity is not a communication nuisance to tolerate, but rather a form of intelligence to cultivate.

“Gentelligence,” she explained, “means we need to get smarter about the way that we are thinking about generational and age differences in the workplace.”

Spoiler alert: we’re not.

However, the context for Gerhardt’s work is slowly but surely reshaping our workplaces so leaders had better pay attention.

In 2024, about 20% of Americans age 65 and older were participating in the labor force, almost double the share from the mid-1980s. Add to that point, older workers now make up roughly 7% of all U.S. workers, and you can begin to the demographic disruption taking shape.

Leaders now manage teams that stretch from early-career Gen Z workers to people who qualify for state pensions but continue to work into their 80s. Soon, Gen Alphas will be hitting the organization. The question is whether leaders treat that age spread as a liability or a corporate culture advantage.

Gerhardt is clear about the current state of age appreciation in the workforce. “The landscape is pretty negative,” she said. “Gentelligence,” on the other hand, is the deliberate move away from that default age irritation toward something much more intentional and constructive.

Talking ‘Bout My (and your) Generation

Gerhardt points out that every generation quietly assumes its norms for work, authority, and success are correct. Anything that deviates becomes a story about decline.

That story is not new. “Whenever we get a new generation in the workplace,” she said, “we just don’t like it.”

She continued, “They bring norms that aren’t ours, and they’re difficult and wrong because they’re not doing it the way that we think it should be done. When we were writing the book, we found quotes going all the way back to Plato about what’s wrong with these kids, like they’re never going hack it.”

The names of our generations may change, but the narrative barely moves.

The risk for leaders is that this “chronocentric” lens—the belief that one’s own time period is the most important or superior one—turns structural or societal shifts into character judgments. For example, research conducted at Government College University, Pakistan, discovered that teams combining younger and older employees can improve both financial and non-financial performance, particularly when people are allowed to “craft” their jobs to fit strengths and interests. It is not the story that dominates social feeds and mainstream clickbait media about generational conflict, yet it is the one that should reshape your leadership behavior.

Global policy bodies have started to push in the same direction. For example, the OECD’s “Promoting an Age-Inclusive Workforce” report argues that population aging should force leaders to challenge myths about older workers and to design employment practices that support contribution at every age. In essence, organizations cannot afford to cling to Plato-era stereotypes.

Gerhardt hears the cognitive dissonance in her classroom and with her corporate clients, but remains optimistic.

“I will say I am hopeful,” she told me. “But I don’t think we can say we’ve cracked the nut yet.” Hope, in her view, hinges on whether leaders remain addicted to age-based assumptions or choose to replace the norms that underlie them.

But What About Those Standards?

At the core of Gerhardt’s book and thinking is a deceptively simple move: stop treating age differences as a referendum on who is right. We should be treating them as fodder for better cultural and leadership practices.

“Standards are fine,” Gerhardt insisted. “It is not that we have to reduce our standards or change them because the younger generation is not used to them or does not like them. It is possible that what one generation is going to need to learn or the kind of support they are going to need to get to your standard might be quite different from what it was for the last generation walking in the door.”

An example from her research around different age cohorts paints a clear picture.

“The younger generations said, ‘If you’re struggling with your mental health, out of respect, the responsible thing is to stay home,’” she recounted.

“And on the other camp,” she said, “Gen Xers and Baby Boomers said, ‘If you’re struggling with your mental health, the responsible thing, out of respect for your organization and team, is to get yourself to work.’”

Gerhardt joked that she will be plenty busy for the rest of her career helping leaders and professionals sort out these standards and different behavioral norms.

But this is precisely where leaders often flinch.

It is easier to label one side (e.g., Gen Z) as entitled or the other (e.g., Gen X) as rigid and missing Nirvana rather than doing the work of translating between the two norms. However, the research keeps pointing to the upside of that essential but often lost-in-translation scenario.

Studies of job crafting across age-diverse teams indicate that when employees can actively shape tasks and relationships, engagement rises for both younger and older workers, thereby supporting performance and retention.

For Gerhardt, that translation starts with curiosity rather than compliance. Her concept of “Gentelligence” asks leaders to drop the “kids these days” monologue and ask instead what each age cohort is trying to protect. It frames the question not as “Who needs to toughen up?” but as “Which norms are still serving us, and which ones need an upgrade so everyone can meet the same standard?”

Build Age-Inclusive Org Climates On Purpose

The most crucial part of Gentelligence is not the label itself; it’s the organizational climate.

“The linchpin on whether age and generational diversity helps or hurts is how it is led,” Gerhardt said. “That is what all the research says.” When leaders ignore the topic, age difference becomes a quiet sorting mechanism for opportunity, learning, and power. When they take it seriously, it becomes an asset.

She pointed to the idea of “age-inclusive climates,” where both formal policies and day-to-day narratives signal that contribution is expected at every age.

“If it’s not led proactively or well—if we do not put practices in place—we are not creating programs where we are endorsing these kinds of collaborations or opportunities or reinforcing them,” she warned. “It is not going to work. We are going to get tension. We are going to get clashes.”

By contrast, where organizations adopt age-positive HR policies like blind recruitment, equal access to learning and development, and visible opportunities for older as well as younger employees to contribute meaningfully, it flips.

“The research shows it does a 180,” remarked Gerhardt.

Real-world experiments back her up.

General Electric’s (and Jack Welch’s) reverse mentoring initiative in the 1990s paired junior employees with senior executives to teach them about the internet, an early attempt to channel generational difference into mutual learning instead of backstage sarcasm.

More recently, companies such as British Airways report that reverse mentoring programs, which now pair dozens of senior leaders with colleagues from underrepresented groups, are sharpening awareness of barriers and sparking ideas for inclusion across the workforce. The common thread is deliberate human capital design rather than wishful thinking.

That design doesn’t need to be complicated. Cross-generational project teams that rotate leadership, mutual mentoring pairs where roles of “mentor” and “mentee” switch in both directions, and learning budgets that do not quietly favor early-career staff all send the same message. Experience and fresh perspectives are both valuable, but neither is ever automatic.

Gerhardt’s term may be new—and is it ever creative—but the leadership work behind it is not.

Gentelligence asks leaders to do what they should have been doing all along: scrutinize their own chronocentrism, name the norms that no longer fit the workforce they actually have, and build climates where age difference is a source of creativity rather than a punchline in the hallway or a meme on a Slack channel.

Watch the full interview with Dr. Megan Gerhardt and Dan Pontefract on the Leadership NOW program below, or listen to it on your favorite podcast.