Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
When Leah Georges, PhD, BA’06, first entered the workforce after college nearly 20 years ago, she knew exactly how society perceived her generation. And it wasn’t favorable.
“I remember thinking, ‘everybody hates me already,’” Georges said. “Because I was seeing the same things that these folks that are hiring me are saying, which is, I'm lazy, I'm entitled, I don't want to work hard, and I want to raise right away — and I haven't even started.”
Georges recently joined the From the Mall podcast for a conversation about a significant moment in time: Five generations are working together.
Twenty years after Georges started working, she’s noticed that the negative connotations around our differences haven’t really dissipated. Boomers still can’t adapt, millennials are still lazy, etc.
But Georges wonders if we’re exaggerating these generational stereotypes or perhaps even misinterpreting each other altogether.
“A generation's part of our conversation. It is part of who I am,” Georges said. “It explains maybe how I was raised and maybe the lens that I come to work with. But it doesn't predict who I will be at work.
“When we use generational differences to make predictions and to make decisions about policies or assumptions, that’s when it becomes a little bit more challenging.”
Listen to the full From the Mall episode to learn more from Georges, including:
- Why we’re using words like “chaos” and “battlefield” to describe the workplace — and why that’s wrong
- How to explore each other’s “onlyness”
- Why Georges runs from people who say, “to fix this, do the five following things...”
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Below is an excerpt from the episode. The following questions and answers have been edited for space and clarity.
Why is this moment so significant in the workplace?
Well, I come from a place of practicality, but I'm also an academic. So, the things that I come to this conversation with are based on my own experience, the things I hear about in the real world outside of the academy — but also I dig into what the literature tells us and some of these ideas.
We do have five generations interacting in the workplace — for the first time, in modern history at least.
It’s really easy to assign meaning to something that's simple. If I see a difference in the workplace around technological expertise or even the way we speak to each other, we're very quick to try and figure out why that difference exists. And for whatever reason, we've gone to a difference in the year we were born, if you will, to explain why these differences exist.
Then we assign meaning to them. Typically, that meaning isn't particularly positive. “I'm really happy to work with so many boomers or millennials or Gen Xers!” Anytime we see a challenge, we like to assign a meaning to it to make sense. And for whatever reason, we've really latched onto this idea that these differences in ages are creating chaos. I'm not entirely sure that's the case.”
You’ve talked before about humility in the workplace, about being curious about others and being willing to learn. How do we inspire our coworkers, colleagues and our supervisors to embrace that concept at work?
Well, if you figure it out, let me know. That's tricky. But humility isn't a new idea. I think about humility as not thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less. It's considering the perspective of others.
Humans are 99.9% exactly the same. Now, that does not mean we are going to say, “See, it doesn't matter. These differences between us aren't real. They're no big deal. Let's just find the common space.” I would argue the 0.1% that does create that distinction. Difference doesn't mean bad, it means different. It’s where the magic happens. That's where we get to share space with other people from our generation or otherwise and say, “What makes you tick?”
Explore it with curiosity, not criticism. Oftentimes, kids teach us a lot about this, and I didn't think about this much until I had my own kids. We’ll see something different, and we’ll say, “Ugh, I hate it. What is it?” As my kids explore new foods, they say that.
Well, what if we look at that difference or distinction with joyful curiosity, asking about it — as opposed to saying, it's different and so it's wrong. That curiosity, that 0.1%, where we can say, I'm going to explore it. But I do not have a goal of deciding whether I like it or I don't. It frees us up to say, I'm just going to explore it.
Creighton seems like such a great place for you to explore this topic.
It is a great place. I am thinking about this often. Oh, I know it's a gift. It's a privilege I get to play in this space.
Creighton has a lot of bright and outstanding students that are walking campus, so we get to see them. They're not necessarily at work, but then again, they kind of are, it's their first introduction to responsibilities. And then there’s all the talented faculty and staff.
I think about a university as sort of a hotbed of generational conversations. I don't have to go very far to find a place where every generation is represented. Most organizations don't have every generation there for whatever reason. If you come to this institution, we've got Gen Zers starting college, we've got millennials here working. We've got Gen Xers, we've got boomers, and we've got some from the Veteran generation that are with us in brilliant capacity. This is the most wonderful place to practice some of these things because they're all here. It's a gift.
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Listen to more From the Mall.
