Intergenerational Collaboration

Roughly 30% of the US population today hadn’t been born on 9/11. Nearly half weren’t born to see the stock market precipitously crash in 1987. And even fewer felt the fear of the most contagious years of the AIDS epidemic.

What can we learn from a Grammy winning guitarist? Recently a client was envisioning his evolving role in the organization. His goal was to develop younger leaders to grow and flourish in responsibility and authority.

My children are my favorite teachers. The other day, we were coloring when I mentioned to Summit that he should try to draw inside the lines. He replied, “Dad my lines are perfect,” and it stopped me in my tracks.

Necessity is the mother of invention. And, midlife (and later) is the midwife of intergenerational collaboration. I want to point out an interesting trend that may warm your heart. I was recently talking with my friend and entrepreneurial mentee, Dana. She told me the following:

It’s been said life is like a sandwich—the more you add to it, the better it becomes. But that was before the Sandwich Generation came along, a cohort of overextended midlifers who would prefer less, not more.

From my perspective, mentorship is defined by who is asking the questions, which can be categorized into one of two roles:

I’m beginning to think I should have renamed my recent book, “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder,” with “How Boomers Boo-Boo With Millennials.” How often have we seen older workers lecture younger workers on how the world works? The irony is that nearly 70% of those in their mid-50s have a boss younger than them today.

In an era when “digital natives” (Millennials and Gen-Z) seem to be ruling the world, it’s easy to forget the internet was created by a bunch of Boomers, who forever changed the way the world communicated with each other. Today, I’m calling for a new network, led by the same individuals.

An MEA alum Jeff wrote me this, “When we shift from ‘can do it’ to conduit, we're not working anymore. We're flowing.” Wise words and a good reminder that we need to get out of our own way, and shift our mindset from that “kick down the door and plow through anything” mentality and allow ourselves to become a fluid channel for supporting others. How can you become more of a channel supporting others and less of a rugged “I can do it” individualist?

As I say in this two-minute clip from a speech I gave at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, I never met my two most profound mentors: Southwest Airlines Founding CEO Herb Kelleher and management theorist Peter Drucker. But, I carried on a pen pal relationship with the former for ten years and tapped into the latter as I was writing my first book.