People from different generations carry different values, traditions, beliefs and morals. Our workplace today now holds an unprecedented mixture of human resources from 4 distinct generations; Baby boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z.

This combination of generations has provided unprecedented diversity in the workplace followed by dynamism like never seen before, creating new management challenges for organisations. This diversity, if not properly managed, can quickly result in a workplace full of conflict. Managers now need to develop new management styles that create the enabling environment for communication and collaboration for all.

Here are 3 quick tips to help you effectively lead in a workplace of mixed generations.

1. Understand Your Demographics

Effective leadership of people starts with understanding the demographics of the people you lead. From an organisational perspective, it is important to make use of data and analytics to understand the generations represented in the organisation’s workforce. Leaders can gather insights about their team by looking at trends and behaviours from analytics.

2. Avoid Tagging

Although each generation is known for having peculiar treats, values, and work styles based on events and beliefs, avoid any stereotypes based on generation, instead deal with everyone as an individual. The idea of sampling those you lead is not to tag them but to have a grounded understanding of the generations that makes up the people you lead.

3. Use the diversity for cross-generational Learning

Create programmes or learning platforms where younger employees can learn valuable skills from older employees while the younger employees help older employees stay up to date with trends and digital skills they need to succeed.