Next-gen boards and side hustles: how multi-generational teams can “win together”

For the first time in history, companies around the world are employing teams that span five generations – Silents (born between 1928 and 1945), Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. Populations are ageing, and people are having (or choosing) to work longer, which means we may increasingly see 80-year-olds collaborating side-by-side with people fresh out of school. 

Your immediate thought may be of an unbridgeable gulf, if we are to listen to much of the prevailing discourse around generational stereotypes.

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But, according to the authors of Five Generations at Work: How we win together, for good, such thinking is the result of unhealthy – and deeply inaccurate – polarisation.

Lazy discourse

Rather than focusing on the many things that unite people, the mainstream (often media-fuelled) narrative is overwhelmingly obsessed with our differences – rather than on how we can maximise that difference and diversity. This may cost companies dearly as they seek to understand the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to succeed in an “age of flux”.