Why We Should Quit Generational Stereotypes: Marcus Schögel (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Professor Marcus Schögel’s talk titled “Why We Should Quit Generational Stereotypes” at TEDxBerlin 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Generational Divide: A Closer Look

Generations. Do we need to talk about this? The media is full of the Xers, the Yers, the Zers, and everything. And we are clear what we mean with that.

And we know, yes, you’re a Z guy, you’re a Y guy, I’m an X guy. I would challenge this and give you a perspective on telling you there are no generations that help us to understand each other. And the generational divide is something that we’re just pushing forward with this. Let me start out with myself.

This is me. Where am I? Okay, this should be me. It should be a photo of myself in 1991 when I was here in Berlin doing my final thesis for my degree.

Personal Experience with Generation X

And I was very happy, you know, the wall came down, the city was buzzing, a lot of perspectives and we were all in high spirit and really had a good time, I think, to a certain extent. And then all of a sudden there came up a book called “The Generation X,” which told me, hey, you’re a guy, you grow up with no chance, no career, no job, you’re really in the midst, you should listen to grunge music, Nirvana should be your band, and you should love Cherry Coke.

And there, 1991, the book came out, “The Generation X,” and everybody was looking at the book and saying, this is what you are, Marcus, you’re a Gen Xer, you should listen to grunge music, your band should be Nirvana, you should be loving Cherry Coke. And I was looking at it, wait a second, there’s a little bit of a difference between the people in the States and in Europe.

And this haunted me for many years, and it came down to me in the last years when we talk about the Generation Z, that I think we need to change those perceptions, because they don’t help us, they’re stereotypes, and stereotypes are the basis for the worst decisions that we can take. So Generation Z is about always on the phone, never really taking it down to business, always dancing for the next 16-foot TikTok video, and they are lazy, they don’t want to do, but they’re very self-confident.

So if you take this stereotype, this generational thinking, you have a problem in understanding this generation, and by the way, understanding every other generation, because you’re just pushing it down to a very simplified perception.

The Inevitable Conflict

And this means, if we take it as a given that there’s a generation, and we stick to the whole stuff, the conflict is inevitable, it’s unavoidable, because they are so different. And when I talk to executives and to managers, they all think, yeah, you know the young ones, they don’t want to do it, and ah, we can’t take them, they don’t have any experience. You’re really running into the divide before they’ve seen each other.

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And from my point of view, to be very honest, I believe strongly this is not a problem that is new. So in many cases, when we draw back in history, we come back to Socrates, because Socrates once said, “The young ones, they are so arrogant, they believe they know everything, they don’t pay any credit for the elderly, they’re just doing their own thing, bah.”

So what is it that we have? We have a very simple challenge that’s a generational stuff between the old ones and the young ones. So there is nothing that is so special about it, right?

Historical Perspective

If you take it properly, or take even one example further, and look a little bit closer at the generation that was on the streets in 1968 in Europe, in the United States, where everybody was saying, wow, we’re different. Even a band made a hit out of it, talking about their generation. So this idea prevails for a long, long time.

And of course, some things have changed. Imagine the generation that will be 25% of the world population within 2025. That’s huge. That’s bigger than any other generation at the same point in time.

When we look at it, and what is then really challenging is, when we look as academics into research, and what we found out in a lot of cases, when we look at real data, not the consultants. Sorry. There are two points that you need to keep in mind when you talk about generational research.

Academic Research on Generations

It does only come up in a way that we see there’s one point that you differentiate. You just differentiate on the basis of birth date. That’s the only criteria that you use.

And when you think that this is going to make a huge difference, funny-wise, any kind of academic research that is really published in the major journals, they all come down to one real knowledge. There’s no substantial evidence that generational differences and commonalities are dominating our behaviors, our values, our beliefs. You don’t find them anywhere. And we academics, we’re really clear about this.

When we hear Generation Z, yes, of course, there’s somebody talking again. Because you can’t use it. Let me give you an experiment. A little one.

An Experiment in Generational Thinking

It’s a little bit black and white, but maybe it gives you the idea of what we are talking about. So, take two persons born in 1948, okay, a little bit more context, they’re born in the United Kingdom. They should be in the same cohort. They should be having the same beliefs.

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They should have the same ideas, the same values. Okay, for you guys that are very young, the one is King Charles, you know, waited long to get the job. And the other one was overwhelmed by having that job and taking drugs, a lot of them.

But the basic point is you can’t put them into that same bucket.

It doesn’t work. If you do this, what comes out of it is that you talk about something that we call generational thinking is nothing else than talking about stereotypes.

And when we know one thing in management, we know that stereotypes lead to biased decisions. When you judge people upon how they are by their age group, you will never get them the chance to really perform on their best. You will never get down to the real core of who they are.

The Changing Context

And this is what haunts me so much that I was working with a lot of companies in the last years. And of course, some things have changed. Of course, it’s a different time we’re in, but the context is different.

And the old and young stuff is still there, but we need to talk about the context that we’re living in. And the context that you see is that technology has changed so transformational, so exponential that the use of technology in the workplace and in the markets with consumers and with employers, coworkers, employees, and talents is something that we do much more confident, much more often. You all have your smartphones and you’re doing photographs, you’re distracted by this.

But this is true for all of us. But the younger generations, they grew up without knowing that there was a phone that had a dial on it. So this is different, but this doesn’t make a generation different.

Experience vs. Technology

Second point, and this is one thing that you find in research over and over again. In former times, we are saying, whoa, he’s old, he’s got experience. So he’s the successful one.

There’s a huge, you could do talks on this as well for many hours, because the idea behind it is that there is no connection between those three, especially when we talk about the newer times. People about 15 years old, 10 years ago started out wearing Oculus Rift for playing. Now they’re 25 and they’re in a job.

They are the better ones using that technology than me, because I get seasick of that stuff. So why should I neglect them when I have to start a project? Because they are the ones that might have the knowledge and the experience that is much more important than the seniority.

The Employee Market

And the last point, I think, is the one that we need to get acquainted to very strongly. And this is, we need to move from employer markets to understand that we’ve got employee markets. There’s a shortage in jobs, not only in Europe, everywhere.

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And we’re trying to look for new people, new talents. These talents are in the driver’s seat. They can select. So they’re getting louder. Of course they get. They can choose by themselves. They don’t have to walk and rub on their knees to get a job. They can choose.

Playing Your Aces

So this makes them so confident. So if we take those three points and try to assemble what we can do, I came down to a little abbreviation, do the aces. Play your aces. And they’re very simple, I think.

And they’re not too hard to do. But they help you to get around this challenge of this generational conflict and forget it. The first thing is, accept each and every one that you see as a person, as an individual.

Don’t judge them on the basis of generation. Never do this. Give them the chance to show themselves. Don’t do it the other way around and say, you’re a generational X. I don’t like you. Go. Happens very easily.

Take that one out. Second one, I think for me the most important one, get challenged by the others. Take them as an opportunity to show you a different perspective.

We see a concept, reverse mentoring is very successful, where students are mentoring executives and tell them how they see things. Then it’s not about the generation. It’s just about the different perception that they have.

Do in businesses, do lunch lotteries, which is nothing else than helping them, yeah, to meet for lunch and exchange ideas across generations. One thing that you can institutionalize is the exchange that you say, bringing them in. Build youth boards, as crazy as it sounds.

Give them the chance to speak up, listen to them, and do this exchange on a constant basis. Not only one time. Install periodically meetings that you are really aware what the other perspective is.

If you’re really in a situation where you need to generalize, and you need to do stuff that makes it more generalizable over different persons, segment. Use data that is far away from age, but really relevant for behavior. Then you can segment markets and employees much better than just going by age.

My recommendation for you, play your aces the next time when you think about generations. Thank you very much.