Ok, Boomer. These are the things millennials would say to make fun of how old boomers are. While boomers would make fun of how spoiled and reliant millennials are on technology. The cycle keeps on going, and it will continue to go until someone puts an end to it. Instead of vilifying each other, we can come together and learn a whole bunch of new things. Barbara Randell, the Founder of Future Image Group, is joining your host, Stephen Jaye, to talk about bridging this generational gap at work. Join Stephen and Barbara as they talk about adopting the correct mindset that will bridge this divide. Learn how taking that first step can fix many of the other divides prevalent in our world and culture today.
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Bridging Generation Gaps At Work With Barbara Randell
One thing that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately is relationships. This pandemic has been hard on a lot of people, but one of the things I hope that we’re coming to the realization to over the course of the past year of being restricted and hold up at home is the importance of relationships in our lives. Sometimes, especially in work environments, we don’t get to sit and necessarily choose who we want to interact with. It’s not always this like attracts like, this mirroring phenomenon. We have to find an effective way to interact with the people around us regardless of who they are. Without further ado, I bring you Barbara Randell, the Founder and Leader of the Future Image Group, which helps a lot with work relationships. Welcome, Barbara.
“You can boil every single human emotion down to two things: love and fear. And if you’re coming from a place of fear, which means if you’re feeling insecure, you’re not going to ask. We all assume that we’re supposed to know everything. We’re all a work in progress.”
Thank you. It’s good to be with you.
Let’s begin by getting the readers oriented to Future Image Group. Tell us about what you do, what your mission is, and how you do it.
In my former life, I was a legal recruiter for many years. The reason that I was successful in that endeavor was because of relationships and the personal interactions I had with my clients. Towards the end of that phase of my career, I started noticing this alarming trend of the senior folks in the workplace complaining about the Millennials and Millennials complaining about the awful dinosaurs of Boomers, and how nobody was talking to each other. You have uniquely five generations all working together at the same time for the first time in history. Each generation looks at work and life through a completely different lens. Nobody was taking the time to get to know or get to understand which lens people are looking through. They were just vilifying each other.
You’ve got all of these generations all working together and all speaking different languages. Essentially, I started researching it. I found out that this is in fact, a thing. The generations are not communicating amongst themselves, they are tending to gravitate only towards people that are like them. When in fact, each generation brings an extraordinary, unique set of skills, tools, and brilliant gifts that each generation can learn from and grow from. Nobody was taking advantage of any of that because of a huge number of factors, social media, and technology. We’re losing the tools and the skills to communicate with one another and relationships rely on communication, curiosity and interest. How are we doing this? Who are you? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Asking people the questions that you asked me. I wrote a curriculum that teases apart the actual components of what it takes to develop, build, maintain and nurture relationships.
When was it when you first started noticing this generational divide, whether it’s Boomers saying those Millennials or the younger people complaining about the older people, whatever the predecessor to, “Okay Boomer,” was?
I have a good friend who’s a senior partner at one of the big national law firms. We were out to lunch and he was going on about this young guy who works for him who came in slightly torn cool jeans and a blazer. This guy was going on. He was saying, “This guy doesn’t know how to dress. He doesn’t know how he needs to present himself as a professional.” I said to him, “Mike, who’s your firm’s biggest client?” He said, “Amazon. Do you know that?” I said, “I do. You don’t think that young lawyer, if he walked into Amazon wearing a three-piece suit, he wouldn’t be paint bald?” That was a story that illustrates what I was seeing as a headhunter.
We’ve all heard about how these generational divides aren’t new and most of the Baby Boomers can even look back at their younger days when they were the younger ones being complained about by older generations. I’ve seen presentations where they say people talking about the younger generation on favorably dates as far back as the 18th century BC in ancient Greece. What I’m wondering is, if you’ve looked into these past ones and if you feel like what’s going on now, is it just a repeat of what’s happened in the past, or is there something new about it that’s unique and more dangerous?
Today, you have five generations all working together at the same time for the first time in history.
The difference now is technology. The fundamental difference is the fact that we have the ability to communicate in so many varying forms. When I was coming up and I had a question, I had to talk to somebody. I had to talk to a librarian, teacher, or parent. As a result of that, I got different perspectives, attitudes, and ideas. That broadened my perspective. Nowadays, if you have a question, you can Google it. When I’m talking about the skills that are involved in communicating, they’re not being practiced. We don’t have to get out of our comfort zone and talk to somebody that may be scary or somebody that I wouldn’t ordinarily talk with. We can Google it.
What we’re missing when we Google a question, is those perspectives. We’re missing those different approaches and ways of answering those questions. Things take practice, as do communications. We’re also becoming fearful of putting ourselves out there and maybe making mistakes, asking a question that may elicit some disdain from somebody. When I was coming up, I had to be vulnerable. I had to put myself out there and I learned. That’s how you learn, by practicing and making mistakes. The younger group tends to defer to communicating via technology. Therefore, they’re losing the communication skills and the practice opportunities that they have.
Technology has changed quite a bit about the way we work and the way we communicate with one another. It’s easy to say that this whole idea that like attracts like and people feel more comfortable around people who are similar to them, whether it be similar interests or similar ideologies. That seems fine when you’re looking for the people you want to sit around and drink beer and watch the Super Bowl. When it comes to the people to work with, whether it’s the organization to join as an employee and you’re assigned to work with the other people that they hired or even people who you choose to do business with, say you’re starting your own business, it becomes not sufficient?
Part of growing up and evolving as a professional is learning to navigate some of those situations. That goes back to practicing and being able to work with people that you might not like and figuring out, “We’re all here. We’re all aligned for a common goal. How are we going to get there?” That creates another neural pathway to being able to navigate those tricky situations. When I was headhunting, I ended up opening up my shop. One of the happiest days of my life was calling clients that I didn’t like working with and telling them, “I’m not going to be a good resource for you, but let me give you some people that would be.” I was in an advanced stage in my career. The backstory to that is for the first ten years of it, I needed to work with some people that I didn’t necessarily like. I needed to figure out how we were going to align ourselves with that common goal. Sometimes, I did have to suck it up and deal with people that I didn’t like much, but that’s part of the learning process.
You started your own headhunting firm and then transitioned that to Future Image Group. Tell me a little bit about that process. What inspired and what made you want to do what you’re doing?
In 2015, I had a very bad year. I got divorced, we ended up on trial, and then my back broke. I was 50 at the time. I look at that opportunity as my universe saying, “Let’s sit down and assess what do you want to be when you grow up?” What I always used to tell my candidates and my clients was do what you love and do what you care about. Looking back on my work as headhunting, it was great, profitable, awesome, but I didn’t like dealing with people when they were so miserable and didn’t want to find a solution. One of my core beliefs is you don’t get to complain if you’re not willing to do something about it. We did nationwide market research and couldn’t find anybody that was addressing this particular issue. That’s how it happened. I had time because I was recovering from my back surgery. I had the inclination and I was able to cobble together all of these elements of my career personally and professionally and do what I am most passionate about, which is people. We’re human beings. We don’t stop being human beings when we become employees.
That’s something I wish a lot more employers understood, to be honest. That your employees, they’re still human beings, not robots, at least not yet. They’re going to be people that have needs. It doesn’t seem like this whole Boomer versus Millennial thing was even new. By 2015, there was still no one that was looking into trying to find a way to solve this generational divide, at least in the workplace.
There’s an enormous amount of research from big institutions like Harvard and MIT. There are a lot of people that had identified this as an issue, but nobody was doing anything about it. As we do in this day of 24-hour news cycles, a lot of days people are saying, “This is happening. This is a thing, but nobody was doing anything about it.” I took that as my clarion call and I’m doing something about it.
The statement I want to reiterate to my audience is the statement that you made about, “You don’t get to complain if you’re not going to do anything about it.” I know that sounds like a pretty harsh statement, but it does sometimes feel like we’re living in a world where there are a lot of people who are good at complaining or identifying a problem but not doing anything. What do you think are the main barriers that people have? Let’s say someone has a problem, they’re observing something around them and they’re like, “This sucks. This is stupid.” What do you think is the biggest barrier between identifying and complaining to going into action, whether it’s starting a business or start something else?
It’s easy to complain if something’s pissing you off or is annoying you. With all of the massive deluge of social media that we’re all drinking water out of a fire hose viewing, it’s very easy to get on somebody’s bandwagon and either fights them or complain about them, but taking that next step to figuring out, “How are we going to reach a common goal?” That goes back to practice. The skills of dealing with somebody that you may not agree with. Personally, I love talking with people that don’t align with my social, political views. It’s fascinating to me because I like learning. Until you engage and you have a discussion with somebody, you don’t know where the disconnect is. That is probably the single largest issue is we don’t engage and we don’t ask questions. That’s what my curriculum is about.
With the coming of Gen Z, the pendulum is swinging back to the center when it comes to social media.
It’s about getting people to talk to each other and getting comfortable talking to each other. We live in a society where the expectation of perfection is rampant. You don’t post yourself up at three o’clock in the morning with a vomiting child on social media. You take a hundred selfies, you can get the most perfect one, then you post that. That is completely false. As human beings, we are 99.9% imperfect. Being able to feel comfortable with that imperfection and to feel comfortable with misspeaking or having spinach in your teeth. I make mistakes a hundred times a day, but I know how to get myself out of it. It’s simply saying, “My bad. I’m so sorry human.”
It’s interesting that the whole Instagram culture, as I put it, and it reminds me of the one time I truly rebelled against this culture. It was New Year’s Day in 2019 at 10:30 AM. The first thing I did was go to Taco Bell and I got a meal that required me to fill a large Mountain Dew. I posted on Instagram an image of me holding up this cup, filling up a large Mountain Dew with the phrase, “New year, new me.” That was my one small way of rebelling against painting a picture-perfect version of yourself on social media culture. I do have to admit, usually, I’m falling prey to that. We talked about these different divides that we have, whether they be based on ideologies, race, or generation. It seems like Future Image Group focuses on the generational divide, is that the most pressing one, or is that the best gateway to address the other device we have?
It’s a component of it. I always go back to we’re human beings and we, as a species, require personal interaction, connection with people. We require being hugged, being seen, being recognized, being loved, being appreciated, and being valued. Those are all human skills and are the things that wind up digging into when I work with clients. That piece, it’s like we’ve all become these techno robots thing. We forget that we’re human. There is zero that is unique in my curriculum. We talked about things like justifications, boundaries, intention, and relationships. I wrote a blog that was coming out on Thursday about relationships. It’s one of those words we throw around a lot, but what does it mean?
For those that want to check out your blog and your business, how would people go about finding you? What’s the web address?
It’s FutureImageGroup.com.
When you’re working with the people you work with, what do you think is the biggest challenge that the people have to overcome in order to start becoming better at forming these relationships?
Fear, frankly, is one of the biggest. You can boil every single human emotion down to two things, love and fear. If you’re coming from a place to fear, which means if you’re feeling insecure, if you aren’t self-authenticated, and don’t know what you don’t know, you’re not going to ask. We all assume that we’re supposed to know everything. We’re not. We are all a work in progress. We are all learning every single day hopefully. It goes back to human things, to what do you want to accomplish out of it, but we’re so pressed for time these days. Everything happens so quickly and we don’t create the space to think about what are our intentions. What is the purpose of this conversation? What are we trying to accomplish? Who is this person? “This person is painful.” How am I going to deal with this painful person in a way that’s going to move whatever it is I need to do to get forward?
Have you found that with your clients, once they overcome this fear, whether it be talking to someone saying in a different generational group, that generally can be applied to some of these other divides and people are more open talking to people that are different in any way, that someone can be considered different?
A big part of what I do is I give people the language to be able to say, “I have this one young person who I’m working with. She is vilifying all the old folks and they’re all stupid.” I say, “Why don’t we look at it from his perspective and the way you are presenting?” Invariably, almost 100% of the time they all go, “I never thought about how my behavior might be pissing somebody off.” So much of it is raising awareness of how do we present to communicate? Are we passive-aggressive? This is another big default technique that so many people use, “I’m not going to say what I mean because that’s going to require some time to think about how am I going to say it, who am I saying it to, and what do I want to accomplish by saying it?” We don’t take that time. They don’t and then they default to poking the bear and being odious. If you create that time for yourself an
d are able to think through, “What am I trying to accomplish?” I believe you can say absolutely anything to anybody as long as you choose the right time, use the right tone, do it with the right intention, and choose the right words, which is something else that we have gotten very lazy, in thinking about the words.
All this passive aggressiveness or not thinking about how we’re presenting ourselves or how other people may be perceiving us, do you see this as a problem that has gotten worse in the age of social media? I generally consider the age of social media ever since about 2007, 2008, when Facebook, the original one, originally went mainstream around the same time that the iPhone started going everywhere. Since that time has the problem gotten worse, do you think?
Absolutely. Because we’ve become much more narrow in our peer groups, in the people that we interact with. We are not expanding, we align. We follow with people that agree with the same things that we agree with. Our whole scope and worldview are getting narrower, sadly.
One of my favorite movies from last year was The Social Dilemma. The one where they talk about the impacts of social media on our lives. When I saw that, I started realizing some of these impacts. I read a book called Distracted by Maggie Jackson, which came out in 2009. Even over the last several years, I feel like there have been more people aware of how social media is impacting some of our psyche, communication, and relationships. I wonder if you see this as a problem that’s going to get better or at least, stop getting worse in the next several years?
What we’re starting to see with the Z Generation is a lot of them are pretty aware of how toxic and challenging so much of social media can be. The pendulum swung from the Boomers who didn’t do any social media to the Millennials who cut their teeth on. My son is 26 and he’s never known life without a phone. He’s on the younger end of the Millennials, but he can’t stand social media. He doesn’t do it. Granted he’s my son, so I’ve been beating this into him his whole life. My point is that the pendulum seems to be swinging back to somewhat of a center. Technology and social media are brilliant. It’s wonderful. I’m not against it, I don’t hate it, but like everything else, moderation is important. Being able to be discerning and to think and know what you’re doing and understand that, “The only people that I communicate with are people that are mirror images of me.” We can get into that in another episode. That’s an interesting thing from a psychological standpoint because introspection is failing these days.
I’m speaking to you as an older Millennial, probably the end of the Millennial spectrum that’s possibly the most guilty of this whole overuse of social media thing, because we do have the memory of the world before it, and then it came out to us, but it was at an age where we’re still young and impressionable. One of the things I have been hearing a lot around is a greater interest in things like meditation and journaling. I’ve started doing that regularly a lot. On Thanksgiving, I rode my bike around town just looking for Thanksgiving lights because everyone was already onto Christmas.
They started putting up Christmas lights in October. I met someone who offered to go inside and put up the Thanksgiving decorations. She talked about her family doing gratitude journaling every single night. Not even just general journaling, which is what I do. Gratitude journaling, which is a whole different animal as far as awareness, and also focuses on more positive things every single night. One of the things I always think about in our culture is we have problems and then we solve them, there’s a different problem to solve that comes from it.
Whatever problem social media solves, which keeping in touch with old friends and family members, seeing people’s baby pictures, I love seeing people’s pictures on Instagram, whether it’s their babies or what hike they did. “We are in Colorado.” That’s what most of your Instagram feed is going to end up being. They’re all starting to say, “I need to take a deep breath.” Through journaling and meditation, is that one way more people could have that awareness that you’re talking about? I’m aware that I’m maybe coming across as passive-aggressive when I say this comment at this time, in this way?
You raised a bunch of important points. First of all, social media is not a conversation. People are going to read whatever it is that you write in whatever mood that they happen to be in. You could be saying something totally innocuous and if somebody is in a bad mood when they read it, they’re going to think, “That’s a terrible thing to write.” I laugh when people say, “I’m having a conversation with somebody over texts.” I say, “No, you’re not. You’re texting. Call it what it is.” To your point about meditation, that to me is one of the most promising trends. Most people I know are talking about it and some that I don’t know are talking about it on social media. What that is, is creating time for yourself, you’re creating time to think. Make no mistake about it, the technology companies and social media platforms have done a brilliant job of creating the next shiny object. What do you need to do, how are we going to track you, how are we going to keep a monitor of what you’re doing, who you’re interacting with, and what ads are you clicking on?
Each generation looks at life through a different lens.
They’ve done a yeoman’s job of developing all of those things. We’re curious human beings. We’re like, “That’s cool. Let’s try that,” but what you’re talking about is not biting for the shiny objects. What is meditation? It is creating a silent place for yourself to think. In this constant deluge of information that we’re all getting every single day, every single minute, putting it away, creating time for yourself, journaling, and getting to know yourself. It all begins with us, with the individual. What do we want, and what do we want to accomplish, how do we want to accomplish and develop relationships?
For anyone reading out there, what do you think is the biggest challenge for people to create better relationships right now? Is it a different challenge for each of these five generational groups?
Sure. Each generation looks at life through a different lens. One of the biggest challenges is being intentional. Wanting to talk to that 80-year-old somebody with a million years of experience, learning from it, being curious about it, and engaging people, then you go right back to fear. “I’m not going to talk to that guy. He’s mean.” Some of the most curmudgeonly people I learned, absolutely the most frank because so many of that curmudgeonly behavior is just frustration, but if you stop and treat them like a human being and say, “You are amazing. You may be a grumpy old monster, but I want to know how you got to where you are and why did you keep coming back for seven years, and what is it that interests you?” It’s the same for the old folks. My favorite people to work with Millennials because it is so fascinating to me. You guys are wired in ways that I will never, ever be wired. I try really hard. We are trainable, mostly. I just had lunch with my son. His brain has worked at a million miles a minute. He misses nothing. A lot of that can be attributed to the onslaught of information that he’s been getting for his whole life.
I occasionally joke that the only way I can ever shut my brain off is a substance that was legalized in Colorado. To wrap up, I want to get your take on what trends in the workplace you are seeing and expecting over the next five years. We all know about the whole technology’s constantly going to evolve, but do you see this awareness of people as human beings becoming more of a trend or this focus on building relationships a little is becoming more of a trend, or do you see it moving in a different direction?
What I’m seeing is the people that get it and that resonates with me. When I say employees don’t stop being human beings when they become employees, if that resonates with people, there is a curiosity and interest there. They just don’t know that there’s a solution. However, there are other people and industries that are strictly transactional, which is very well-suited for the technology-driven model. The people that get it and are interested in meditating, journaling, making time, or creating, this is the other big piece of it. The Millennials and Generation Z’s represent 170 million of our next generation of leadership.
If that group doesn’t know how to communicate with people, interact, engage and develop their staff, that’s a problem because we require it. The forward-thinking businesses who recognize that key element and recognize the importance of investing in developing their personnel, there’s a huge trend towards that, and that gives me an enormous amount of encouragement. I walked away from a giant hedge fund here in town because they didn’t get it. They’re like, “Whatever. These people know how to do relationships. They know how to do all of that.” No, they don’t actually.
When I look back on the year that just was, all the things have happened. One of the messages I get from all the events is to stop avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Whether it be the protest, movement, the pandemic itself, or the election, everything seems to boil down to stop avoiding uncomfortable conversations.
It’s very easy to avoid things. Your point is very well taken. We’ve got to get over ourselves. That person may be scary, but we’ve got to quit avoiding things. The way you do that is by having the tools, language, ability, confidence, and the intention of knowing what it is that you want to accomplish. “No, I’m not picking a fight with you. I just genuinely want to hear your perspective.”
The overall message I’m getting from this conversation is we have a potentially better future, but we got some work to do.
I love my job. I love doing what I do and I love seeing the lights come on with people because human beings, all of a sudden this starts to resonate and they’re like, “That was easy.”
I don’t know the exact percentage of people who don’t like what they do, but still, it seems way too high, whatever that number it is.
That’s another topic for another thing. The World Health Organization did a study and found out that 80% of all doctor’s visits are the physical manifestation of stress in the workplace. No joke.
There is never a shortage of topics. We’ve covered a bunch of places. That’s a good interlude to encouraging all my readers. I hope you enjoy this conversation and I hope you join me next time because I will be having more interesting conversations with people who are not just complaining but doing something about whatever it is they personally have come to care about. Once again, Barbara, thank you very much for joining and doing this show.
Thank you, Stephen. I appreciate it. It was fun.
I hope you all have a good day.
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About Barbara Randell
After 15 years as a “head hunter”, Barbara Randell noticed that no other organization was working to tackle the issue of generational divides in the workplace. Now there are five different generations in the workplace and Barbara’s Future Image Group helps organizations improve their relationships for a happier and more productive work experience.