Generational Leadership

Peter Wang at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQy3L3VEr1M

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

No slides, and why generations are on my mind

[00:00:01] I have no slides today. I'm doing a little social experiment where I'm using no slides, because I figure over the last two and a half years I have looked at my monitor more than ever. Actually my eyesight got worse significantly, I noticed it, so I tried no slides today. I also bought some physical books, I'm now reading two poems from books. It's a little different. Also it's my very first time coming back to a physical event ever since COVID started. I'm used to seeing only 49 people at the same time, so this is a little overwhelming for me, honestly. You think I'm joking, I'm pretty nervous. It's also nerve-racking when your face is this big.

[00:00:52] Today I'm going to talk about something that I feel is not talked about in our industry as much. When I look at my team of a little over 150 folks of product managers, engineers, designers, data scientists and so on, I noticed in engagement surveys and different cuts and slices, the tenure, location, one thing that is different about them is the generational divide. And while I look at my team as an example, the majority of my team are millennials, followed by Gen X, then the Gen Zs are just starting. I know many of you probably don't think about yourself as, what generation am I in, so I'll define them real quickly.

[00:01:43] Real quick hands: how many of you are in Gen X, which is defined if you're born 65 to 80? Okay, hey, Gen Xers. Next is millennial. Okay, majority. You guys don't even wait for the year. Okay, all right, that's fine, I see the eager generation. I'm an old millennial, just for the record. I was born in 82, just turned 40, so I'm an old millennial. Actually, by the way, I'll say millennial is around 81 to 96, I'm sorry, I was reading the wrong thing.

[00:02:33] But in Gen X I was going to say there are a few notable folks. In Gen X we've got the Elon Musks of the world, Shaq, Sundar Pichai, Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed, Gen X Tiger Woods. And then Kanye, there's quite a few notables, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, LeBron James, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift. And then we have Gen Z. How many Gen Zs are in the house? We have 97 to 2012. Oh wow, a few. Okay, hello future. Welcome to the present.

[00:03:13] I have three kids. Actually my oldest daughter is just at the cusp of Gen Z, she's nine years old, she's actually the old Gen Z, if you will, in the future, which is pretty wild. And my two other kids, age seven and five, are going to be in the generation they call generation alpha. I guess it's a loop, Z to A, and so on.

[00:03:34] What's interesting about this is there are actually a few motivations why I started looking at this, not only the engagement surveys looking at my team, but also over the last two years I had made a COVID move from New York to California to help with my in-laws, and they have since moved in with us. So now we have a three-generational household between boomer, I guess old millennial in this case, and Gen Z, actually maybe Gen Alpha as well, so maybe four generations. And I definitely noticed over the last couple of months since we've been together, that having more positive role models in the house has really affected positively my own kids: the way they interact, what they learn, how to communicate. They're happy, have more connections, more stable during this period of very unstable times. So that got me interested.

[00:04:27] And the second one, you guys can probably all relate to, is, there are different words for this, the great reshuffling, the great resignation. I personally like to call it the great reflection, because the last two years or so, I guess going on three now, has given us more challenges, especially I think for managers. I really have respect for managers because you guys have managed through a lot of crises. Actually my last talk was about crisis. I'm glad I'm not talking about crisis this time. But both crises and also a lot of opportunities. Many people took the opportunity to reflect on what their values are, what their priorities are, what they want to do in life. They moved away, moved back home, moved out of their parents' house and back with their parents, new kids and so on and so forth. And that really got me interested. I started realizing the life stage, and I should probably buy data, just with my team itself, is a huge factor in how they make decisions, on motivations and their needs, and therefore how we can work with them.

[00:05:30] And the last thing is a little thing I'll throw out there. It's also not talked about as much, but I think maybe Gen Xers and old millennials can relate to it a bit more, is the concept of ageism. Discrimination against age, or for me it's less about discrimination but just misconceptions when you get older, in your 40s and your 50s. I talk to my friends, many of my friends are much older, some of them are in their 50s and some of them are actually in their 60s, and when we talk about our life and the season that we're in, or some of them a little beyond the current season, they often question their value over time. What's my value now, what's my value in the future? And as I enter my 40s myself, I want to think more about what is my value in the workforce, what's my value in my family, what's my value in life in general. So I think that made me think more about generational sense.

How the generations differ: Gen X

[00:06:23] I want to cover a few things. I'm watching the time here, sorry, I should look down here. A couple of things. One is it's very clear that the generations are quite different. If I had a slide today it would be a very messy matrix across different dimensions, across generations. I think I'll save you that. There are a few clear differences. First and foremost, technological and communication styles have completely changed between the Gen X and the Gen Z.

[00:06:59] I'll go over real quick some of the characteristics, because there's not a lot of time. Gen X, you guys are known for the MTV generation. It's actually very interesting, as I was doing more research, the latchkey generation, because both your parents are most likely working, you probably get home from work, I mean from school, you go home by yourself, you wait for the parents, you turn on the TV. This is a generation that, because they've been left alone, they're more independent, more resourceful, more creative, self-reliant. They're known to be tough. Now, these are more stereotypes, I know there's a lot of different variations. Also there are negative attributes, you know, they're also known to be skeptical and overly critical.

[00:07:42] And from a work culture perspective, this is almost the first generation where the work-life balance is very important. There's a good phrase where they work to live versus live to work, which is actually really interesting to think about. They also go through a lot of challenges in their own lifetime: the 1980s recession, the dot-com bubble in 1999, the great recession in 2007 and 2009, and of course COVID and what we are experiencing. Also the entertainment is very different: MTV, mixtapes, Sony Walkman, the rise of video games. So we have you guys to thank for the rise of video games.

[00:08:24] Oh, I'm sorry, apologies, it's my own phone. I was waiting for the Uber and I didn't want to miss it, so sorry about that.

Millennials and Gen Z

[00:08:35] And the millennials. Millennials is fascinating. So we have the resourceful, creative, the millennial comes in. They're also known as generation me. When you first look up what are millennials known for, the first couple of ones are fairly negative: entitled, lazy, self-centered. These are books about you, The Coddling of the American Mind, that's very famous, as you read through the book. They're known to be bad at taking criticism. That's a meta joke. But they're also known to be open-minded, confident, self-expressive, because they are the first digital native generation.

[00:09:17] The regular presence of cell phones, I know I had one Nokia back in college, the iPhone in 2007, and also the technological advances accelerated during this period of time: the rise of 3G in 2002, 4G in 2010, 5G of course in 2020. And instant gratification wasn't possible until Amazon Prime launched two-day shipping. Do you know what year that was? Anyone? 2011, wrong. 2005, even earlier. It's amazing, right, how long it has been. But it doesn't feel that long. That's the interesting part about that, right? It doesn't feel that long, but it has been a long time.

[00:09:58] Also the golden age of social and video: Facebook oh four, YouTube oh five, Twitter oh six, Instagram 2010, Pinterest 2010, Snap 2011, Twitch 2011. That was incredible, just how many platforms emerged during this period of time. Always on. We're always on email, text and so on.

[00:10:20] But then, moving quickly to generation Z, they're known for, I guess, zoomers. I don't really relate to that as much, but to take that generation, we can all relate to TikTok. It actually started in China before, in 2016, and because of the acquisition of Musical.ly it has really become a sensation, taking over all of our advertising dollars, attention and so on. I recently read a study where average teenagers spend about three to five hours per day on TikTok. Pretty scary, actually. I have a few things to say about that.

[00:10:59] So this generation is known to be open-minded, just like millennials. There are a lot of similarities between millennials and Gen Z: open-mindedness, more and more inclusive, more politically activist, they stand for what they believe in. They're also known, on the flip side, to have shorter attention spans, because the content has switched from books and poetry to memes, to six second videos. They're also known to be poor in in-person communication, but I'm glad that we're here now to practice that a little bit more. I think actually many of us became worse at that over the last two or three years. So from a technology point of view, not beyond TikTok but also the rise of AR, VR and the metaverse all started during this period of time. So clearly there are huge differences between the generations.

The universal needs we all share

[00:11:47] But when I think deeper, despite all the differences, I think all of us share a certain set of universal needs that transcend when we're born, where we're from geographically, how we're raised. I'll just name a few. We all want to be loved. We all want to be respected, trusted. We want to feel appreciated and perhaps even admired. We want to feel safe, confident, we want to feel strong, we want to feel stable. We want to have a sense of agency, to make decisions that we believe are good for ourselves.

[00:12:22] We all want a sense of order, some sense of structure, not too much structure, enough structure to feel predictable but also leave room for wonder, for surprises, for the unknown. We all want to feel accomplished in life. Many of you are here because you want to learn, you want to get better at your craft, you want to open your mind. We all want to live up to our potential. No one goes to death saying I did not want to live to my full potential, all of us want to do that. And we all want to believe that our life is for a greater purpose. We all want to feel peace at the end, right, we want to feel content regardless of circumstance.

[00:13:04] So if you look at the differences that I could have put on the slide and the list of commonalities, I personally believe that the commonalities outweigh any difference we have. So when we look at workplace, we look at home life, we look at just day-to-day interactions, I think we should look at more of the commonalities but also adjust for the differences.

What we can do for ourselves: create white space

[00:13:26] So what can we do for each other? I have three areas. I would say these are my hypothesis areas. I welcome any criticism or additions, just not on Twitter. No, I'm kidding, you can just ping me, actually I would love to hear more how you think about them. The way I've broken this down is what we can do for each other. The first one is what we can do for ourselves. The first one is actually, because of our technological advances and always on, I think what we all need to do for ourselves first is to create more white space.

[00:13:56] How many of you open your calendars and you can literally see space? If you're in management, many of you are meeting to meeting, beginning to end, catch up on Slack. I now have a queue of unread messages that I sometimes save, sometimes I mark unread and I forget about them, and I come back, set reminders, scheduling new messages. It's pretty nuts. White space, more stillness.

[00:14:25] The reason I say I want to mention space first is because without creating space a lot of things cannot happen. And we also tend to fill space. If you have space, with noise: you put on Netflix, YouTube, platform of your choice. But the reason I want to mention it is because I want you guys to imagine, and this is how I describe it to my wife, sometimes it works, I'll try it with you guys. When I think about my mind, it's almost like a stream. It's clear water, you have some pebbles and sand at the bottom. As you read more, consume more, you're throwing things into the stream. It gets muddied, it's a little hard to see through what it is. Until you stay still for a few minutes, until you really stop doing something, does that stream become clear, does that clarity start to emerge. And that's why a lot of times I had to take time outside of work, or creating new habits that allow my mind to be more still. Does that analogy work for you guys? Okay, cool.

[00:15:50] So a couple of things: how do you create space? There are routines, you can read a lot about morning routines. One thing I definitely have, and these are things I have not mastered, so it's not something mastered, I'm telling you something I'm writing for myself too. So for example, in the morning when I wake up, and when I go to bed, no devices. Books instead. And actually I bought more physical books again. I feel like I'm going in a cycle, I read all my books Kindle only, I'm going back to books because I find that I need to have that focus. Don't doomscroll right before bed. When we wake up, go outside in the morning, even just 10 minutes makes a huge difference, you connect with the world.

[00:16:32] And the last one, I want to give a little mini challenge. I'm a huge fan of little habits, like Atomic Habits or the book Nudge. It's about starting small. And you might think this is silly, but I want to challenge you to do this: when you go to the bathroom, don't take your device with you. How many of you have been sitting on the toilet and sending out messages? Yeah, at the office, and you're there 10, 20 minutes and you're like, why am I still here, I was done 10 minutes ago. That little thing actually matters, because it's a habit you cannot even leave. I call it doing business while you're doing business. Don't do that. So it's a little challenge.

Fill that space with skill: writing, speaking, thinking critically

[00:17:14] I'll move on from that one real quick. Second area. So the first one's about space, creating the white space for you, to clear your mind and get clarity. The second one is to fill that space with skill. And the particular skill I'm going to talk about is about the ability to write well, to speak well, to think critically. I probably think about Gen Z and younger millennials, because I think the way they learn, the way they consume, is very different. The reason I say these three things is I do think that this is a necessary skill.

[00:17:53] And good writing takes time, and it's especially hard if your attention span is shorter. I feel like as much as we can learn about the various tactics and so on, there's nothing that really replaces good writing. It forces you to clarify what you're trying to convey. It forces you to critically examine the evidence, not just take what's presented, what's available, at face value. It could be things reported on news, could be data on your dashboard, it could be your feelings. You have to examine your feelings a bit more.

[00:18:28] I think this is actually a big topic, so you could just spend 30 minutes on feelings. I believe that feelings are a very compelling thing, and I think social media and a lot of platforms really rally about feelings. But I think if you spend time to write, you're forced to examine your feelings, to say, is my feeling accurate? What does it mean, what does it tell me? It's not always reliable, right, it can mislead us. By thinking about your feelings more, examining them, you can avoid a lot of the common cognitive distortions that we all succumb to.

[00:19:01] It could be about emotional reasoning, where you let your feelings guide your interpretation of the world, of reality: I feel depressed today, I just don't think this job is for me. You could be overgeneralizing, where you perceive a global pattern based on a single negative event. It could be like, I made a mistake, and you can say to yourself, I'm the kind of person who makes a lot of mistakes, but you just made one mistake. You're generalizing about yourself. It could be about negative filtering. I think this is a big one in today's generation, we only focus on the negative, not the positive. I understand media doesn't really help with that, there's a lot of negativity in the media. So I think cutting back and having that space is important. Blaming is another cognitive dissonance, where you tend to place responsibility on someone else versus on yourself.

[00:19:50] So I think examining your feelings, clarifying your thoughts, and also using writing to synthesize different viewpoints is a very important skill. I value it very, very much. I really like people who are able to listen to different viewpoints, synthesize them, and say, here's where the various viewpoints are, is it on the spectrum, is it perpendicular to one another, is there some overlap or is it very different? And also take the time to articulate in writing, to articulate a complex problem space. It's very challenging but a very valuable skill to have. Distill down the problem space into the one question that you can pose to a group. It's a very hard skill. I know if you guys have tried facilitation, how do you distill it? It's really hard. Very valuable.

[00:20:40] And the last one in terms of skill-wise, I want to encourage, I guess, all generations, but it's slightly different for each generation, is to think longer term, instead of the immediate thing in front of you. Not just about your first order effects. First order means that there's an action, there's a consequence. Think about second degree. Second degree means that for every consequence there's a consequence. Skills in this realm would be scenario planning: what happens if we lose one person on the team versus five, what happens if the metric comes back in this way? Scenario planning requires you to think much further than just first degree, and that's a very valuable skill to have.

Your tribe: the rock, heroes, and invisible hands

[00:21:25] Okay, and I think I'm running out of time. Let me do a last one really quick. I'll skip back to one point. The last one is about tribe. What I mean by tribe is that I believe there are three kinds of people that are critical in your journey in life. The very first one I call the rock. A rock is some people that you can always count on, no matter what the storm is. They keep you grounded your entire life. People you feel safe with all the time, people who are not judging you. Sometimes it's your parents, your mother, your father, or your spouse. Sometimes your coach, sometimes your childhood friend. That rock is really important. Sometimes for people it's God, right, that's their rock. Having a rock in your life.

[00:22:12] The second one is what I call heroes, and this one I've thought about for many years, but particularly for Gen Z, I want to make sure I point to it, because heroes are people you can look up to, people you can emulate. I think young millennials and Gen Z especially have a hard time with their identity, because they're exposed to so many kinds of possible identities, career paths, life choices, and they also define themselves largely based on people's perceptions of them, expectations of them. And many of them don't feel like they're enough, because they're seeing so many paths out there. Actually I was going to read a poem, but I'll skip that one.

[00:22:55] So the important part for the hero is, do you know who your heroes are? And I think when you think of heroes, think about different aspects of your life. For example, I play many roles. I could be an executive at BuzzFeed, I'm also a father, I'm also a husband, I'm also a son, I'm also a neighbor. As a manager, Andy Grove is kind of my hero. He wrote High Output Management. Lara Hogan recently, I guess the recent generation one, has come up with a lot of great management practices. As a father, I thought about this, I don't actually have a lot of great father heroes. My father wasn't around a whole lot when I grew up in Taiwan, and I started to seek out more intentionally who is a good role model for me in terms of fatherhood.

[00:23:46] Anyway, I think the hero, and I think that's also where older millennials and also Gen X come into play. You guys have a lot of experience in life, and some of you may not think my experience is worth storytelling, to be told to someone. It is, no matter how little you think about your experience. You have overcome a lot to be where you are today. You're actually the generation that has adapted the most to the number of technological changes, career changes, work changes, the most number of crises. I think you should share. You don't have to go on TikTok to share, just share with people next to you. And actually I think that's something that we miss in this remote first world, that we don't have as many serendipitous story sharing amongst us. Because I think if we do that more and more, there are probably more heroes amongst our peers in our own work life that we can look up to, without having to go to TikTok or elsewhere.

[00:24:42] Lastly, the last group. So we talked about the rock that keeps you grounded, we talked about heroes that you look up to and emulate, and I think this is where Gen Z, be careful about who you emulate on TikTok, right, do your critical thinking to examine who, if you should follow them. Lastly, I call this group invisible hands, that nudge you forward along the way. What I mean by invisible hands is because we don't often recognize them when they are in our life. It could be a small thing, it could be the smile you give to someone to give encouragement. It could be in a one-on-one where you're very prepared. Maybe it's one where you listen instead of giving advice. It could be the book that you send to someone because that topic is interesting to the person and that helped them. It could be that you help someone proofread their email before they send it out. It could be that as a manager you set aside budget for your new employee to fly out to meet the team, because you know in this new world you need to have that kind of setup that's different than before. Little things like that, that are oftentimes taken for granted. You can be that invisible hand for someone throughout your entire day, and also you can start paying attention to who's helping you, nudging you forward in the right direction, and say thank you.

[00:25:54] So in close, I'll close real quick. I believe generational differences are something that we should be aware of, but I think a lot of the reporting about them is very exaggerated, and I think that we have so much more in common with one another. I want to encourage us to have more stillness in our life, slow down to get more clarity. I will encourage you to be better writers, clear thinkers, and learn to speak in public. I also encourage you to choose your heroes very intentionally, so you have the right people to emulate. And also encourage you to be invisible hands for others so that you can help them along the way. So cheers, thank you very much for listening.