My youngest recently sat down beside me and, without being asked, completely reorganized the way I was using a tool I thought I already knew well. No judgment, no fanfare. Just a quiet, “Mom, here, let me show you.” And I sat there thinking: I have been doing this the hard way for two years.
That moment stuck with me, not just as a parent, but as a leader and someone who works with leaders every day. Because the same thing happens on teams. Someone younger teaches someone older something that changes how they work. Someone older hands down an instinct, a client read, a way of navigating a room, that no onboarding deck could ever capture. But we are often too busy measuring the gap to notice the exchange.
Right now, for the first time in modern organizational history, four generations are working side by side: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. And if we are being honest, we are not always doing it well.
The Stereotypes Are Loud. The Cost Is Real.
We all know them. The Gen Z stare. The Boomer who refuses to use the new system. The Millennial who wants feedback every five minutes. The Gen X-er who just keeps their head down and gets it done while rolling their eyes at everyone else.
Here is the thing about stereotypes: they are shortcuts. And shortcuts, in leadership, are expensive.
New research from Clari and Salesloft, conducted in partnership with Workplace Intelligence and released in early 2026, surveyed 2,000 U.S. employees in revenue-generating roles and found that generational conflict is costing U.S. employers an estimated $56 billion per year in lost productivity. The friction is showing up as 5.3 hours of lost productive work per employee, per week. Think about that number for a second. That is not a culture problem. That is a performance problem.
The same study found that 39% of Gen Z employees say they would rather be managed by AI than a Baby Boomer, while 19% of Boomers say they plan to retire early specifically because of frustrations with Gen Z. Both groups, pointing fingers, losing ground.
This is what happens when a leader tries to manage a label instead of a person.
Your Generation Shaped You. It Did Not Define You.
There is legitimate value in understanding generational context. Each cohort was shaped by the economic conditions, technology, cultural events, and workplace norms that existed when they were coming of age. That shapes expectations around communication, feedback, authority, and work-life boundaries in real ways.
A 2022 SHRM survey found that 65% of Baby Boomers preferred face-to-face communication at work, compared to only 34% of Gen Z. Flip that around: 55% of Gen Z preferred instant messaging, compared to just 28% of Boomers. Those are not personality quirks. Those are deeply baked communication norms. Knowing that matters.
But knowing it is a starting point, not a conclusion.
Research published in Psychology Today in early 2026 put it plainly: generational insight is a useful frame, but people are shaped by their generation, not defined by it. The moment you treat someone as a representative of their cohort rather than as an individual, you have already lost something. You have lost the nuance. And nuance is where good management lives.
The most effective leaders I know hold two things at once. They understand the generational lens enough to anticipate where friction might come from. And they stay curious enough about the actual person in front of them to throw the lens out when it does not fit.
What Each Generation Is Actually Bringing to Your Table
If you lead a multigenerational team and you are only focused on managing the differences, you are missing the real opportunity. Each generation carries something your team needs.
Baby Boomers built their careers in environments where you earned trust through longevity, face time, and results over time. They bring institutional knowledge, client relationship depth, and a long view that is genuinely hard to replace. They have seen the cycles. They know what holds and what does not.
Gen X is the generation that gets overlooked in almost every generational conversation, which is a mistake. They came up without much hand-holding, learned to be self-sufficient, and tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity. They are often your most quietly effective operators.
Millennials entered the workforce during two major crises (9/11 and the 2008 recession), which made them both adaptable and vocal about wanting their work to mean something. They drove the conversation around feedback, development, and purpose at work, and those conversations made management better.
Gen Z grew up online, navigating complexity and noise before they were old enough to vote. They are often more digitally intuitive, more direct about what they want, and more comfortable challenging systems they think are broken. That can read as difficult. It can also read as exactly the kind of energy you need when the way you have always done something is no longer working.
Deloitte’s 2025 research projects that Millennials and Gen Z together will make up approximately 74% of the global workforce by 2030. The leaders who figure out how to actually manage this cohort combination are not just managing well today. They are building the foundations of what their organizations will look like in five years.
A Practical Framework for Running a Multigenerational Team Meeting
This is where most managers get stuck. The theory lands fine. The table is where it falls apart.
Here is what I have seen work, and what we walk through in our manager training programs:
- Set the meeting agreement before the first meeting. Different generations have genuinely different expectations about what a meeting is for. Some see it as decision-making. Others see it as relationship-building. Some want the agenda in advance; others would rather just show up. Get this on the table explicitly. Ask your team: what does a good meeting look like to you? What is your biggest frustration with the ones we currently run? You will get different answers. That is the point.
- Rotate facilitation. When the same person runs every meeting, you get one communication style dominating every time. Rotating facilitation gives different team members a chance to set the tone, which naturally shifts how others participate. It also gives you, as the leader, a chance to observe your team in a way you cannot when you are at the front of the room.
- Build in multiple ways to contribute. Not everyone speaks up in the same moment or in the same way. A 60-year-old veteran and a 24-year-old first job out of school are not going to raise their hands at the same time. Offer a pre-meeting prompt people can respond to in writing, an open floor discussion, and a structured round where everyone speaks. You will get more from your team when you stop designing meetings for one communication style.
- Make decisions visible. One of the most consistent frustrations across all generations is leaving a meeting without knowing what was decided or what comes next. Write decisions and action items on the screen, in the chat, or in a shared note in real time. Do not let it live in the meeting leader’s head. This is especially important when your team spans people who live in email and people who live in Slack.
- Create explicit reverse mentoring moments. This does not have to be a formal program. It can be as simple as asking a team member who is stronger in an area to walk the group through something. Ask the Gen Z-er to show the team a tool. Ask the Boomer to share what they noticed about a client relationship that did not show up in the data. Both are knowledge transfer. Both build credibility across the generation divide.
Research from mentoring platform Together found that 78% of HR professionals say mentoring programs have improved individual development, and 72% say they have improved overall organizational performance. Reverse mentoring, where a junior employee guides a senior one, has been used effectively at companies like GE, Heineken, and PwC to close the exact gap your team is probably experiencing.
The Leadership Shift That Changes Everything
Managing a multigenerational team is not about being all things to all people. That is exhausting and ineffective.
The actual shift is simpler: get curious before you get frustrated.
When a Gen Z employee does not respond to your all-hands email, before you decide they are disengaged, ask how they prefer to receive important information. When a Boomer pushes back on a new process, before you label it resistance to change, ask what they have seen go wrong with similar changes in the past. The answer is usually useful. The question costs you nothing.
What you are really doing when you manage across generations well is the same thing good leadership has always required: seeing the person in front of you clearly, and finding out what they need to do their best work.
That is not a generational skill. That is a leadership skill. And like any skill, it can be developed.
This Is Work We Do at Plum
Managing across generations is one of the topics we go deep on in our leadership and manager training programs. We work with business owners, general managers, and their teams to move past the stereotypes, build real communication norms, and create the kind of team culture where people from every generation can actually contribute.
If you want to bring this kind of work to your team, we would love to talk.
Book a complimentary call with Plum
And if you want to keep thinking about this topic, check out an episode of the Grown to Lead podcast with Kelly Lannan from Fidelity Investments where we dig into what it actually looks like to lead people well across all the things that make them different.