Why smart leaders keep believing generational stereotypes (Part One)
Let’s be blunt.
Most “multigenerational workforce” commentary is pseudo-science wrapped in buzzwords and sold with remarkable confidence by people who haven’t done the reading.
It’s astrology with a corporate logo.
That may sound harsh. But if you’re building HR, recruitment, leadership or engagement strategies around Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z as if they are real, distinct workplace species, you’re not being “future-focused”.
You’re mistaking a marketing story for a useful explanation.
And that’s one of the most common ways otherwise intelligent leaders make bad decisions.
This article isn’t really about generations.
It’s about what happens when tidy stories become more persuasive than good evidence.
The comforting nonsense of categories
Human beings crave categories.
Our brains are prediction machines. They are constantly simplifying the world so we can navigate it without having to analyse every piece of information from first principles.
That’s enormously useful. Without shortcuts we’d never leave the house.
You don’t consciously evaluate every chair before sitting on it. You don’t inspect every spoon for structural integrity before eating breakfast. You don’t approach every Labrador as though it might be a wolf.
Your brain compresses reality into manageable patterns. Most of the time, that’s exactly what it should do. The trouble begins when we mistake the shortcut for reality.
People are not neat categories.
They are untidy combinations of temperament, values, experience, culture, education, role, health, opportunity, ambition, family history, confidence, relationships, timing and luck.
Which is inconvenient. Because real, complex humans require curiosity.
Categories don’t. So we reach for labels.
- Introverts are like this.
- Engineers are like that.
- Women want this.
- Men need that.
- Boomers believe this.
- Millennials expect that.
- Gen Z can’t handle this.
It feels like understanding. Mostly, it’s conceptual junk food. Easy to consume. Pleasingly moreish. Almost no nutritional value.
The popularity of generational labels tells us far more about our appetite for simple explanations than it does about the people they’re supposed to describe.
The oldest story in the workplace
Every few months someone confidently announces that:
- “Gen Z doesn’t want to work.”
- “Millennials killed loyalty.”
- “Boomers broke the system.”
The headlines change. The story doesn’t.
People have been complaining about younger generations for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers did it. Roman writers did it. Medieval scholars did it.
The only thing that changes is the wardrobe. Same old complaint. Different era.
Every generation quietly assumes it is the sensible centre of history, surrounded by reckless children and hopelessly out-of-touch elders. That observation alone should make us suspicious. If every generation thinks the next one is uniquely difficult, perhaps the problem isn’t the next generation.
Perhaps it’s us.
Yet instead of recognising the pattern, we’ve industrialised it.
Each new “generation” becomes another opportunity for conference themes, keynote speeches, books, consulting frameworks and leadership programmes promising to decode “what this generation really wants”.
An entire commercial ecosystem has grown around the idea that every fifteen to twenty years humanity undergoes a personality transplant. The promise is always the same:
Understand this generation – and you’ll know how to lead them.
It’s an elegant business model. Commercial success, however, has rarely been a reliable indicator of scientific validity.
Astrology has been around for millennia too.
A simple experiment
In workshops and keynotes, I sometimes ask two questions.
The first is easy: “Hands up if you went to school when you were young.”
Every hand goes up.
Then comes the second: “Keep your hand up if you had exactly the same values, beliefs, priorities and ambitions as everyone else in your year group.”
Every hand drops.
I’ve never had a single person insist their school cohort was a hive mind.
Then we repeat the exercise.
What about your brothers and sisters?
Your cousins?
People raised in the same family, by the same parents, in the same suburb, during the same years?
Again, the illusion falls apart. Everyone immediately recognises what they intuitively know from experience – people born at roughly the same time are astonishingly different. That’s why the next question matters.
If you can’t find uniformity within one school year…
…or one family…
…or one friendship group…
…why would you expect to find it among tens of millions of strangers born over a twenty-year period?
For most people, that’s the moment something shifts. They’ve spent years talking about generations. They’ve simply never stopped to examine the assumptions underneath the conversation.
Data vs headlines
Given the flood of articles, podcasts, conference presentations and “Leading Gen Z” workshops, you’d be forgiven for assuming there’s a substantial body of evidence supporting the popular generational story.
There isn’t.
Or at least, not the story most people have been sold.
The more careful work in organisational psychology, sociology and demography keeps returning to the same uncomfortable conclusions.
First, the categories themselves are arbitrary.
Nobody agrees exactly where one generation ends and another begins – it depends whose books you buy. Shift the cut-off by a year or two and someone magically becomes Gen X instead of a Boomer, or Millennial instead of Gen Z. If the boundaries are that elastic, perhaps we should be more sceptical about what they are meant to reveal.
Second, the stories attached to why each generation is so generic are remarkably selective.
The supposedly defining events are usually cherry-picked, heavily US-centric and treated as though everyone experienced them in the same way.
They didn’t. Growing up during a recession doesn’t affect every person equally.
Neither does a war. Or the internet. Or social media.
Context matters. Culture matters. Family matters. Opportunity matters.
Third, the research itself becomes much less exciting once the data is analysed more critically.
When researchers properly separate age effects (how people change as they move through life), period effects (what is happening in the world) and cohort effects (the influence of being born at a particular time), many of the dramatic generational differences shrink dramatically – or disappear altogether.
Age matters. Life stage matters. Historical context matters. But ‘generation’, as it is usually described in leadership books and conference presentations, often contributes remarkably little.
That’s an awkward finding if your business takes generational stereotypes seriously.
The US National Academies of Sciences has been refreshingly direct. Their conclusion? There is no evidence to support using generational labels to understand worker needs or to guide workforce management.
David Costanza’s landmark meta-reviews of the literature reach much the same conclusion. He argues that many generational assumptions are not merely weak – they encourage management practices that are unsupported. And they are not benign, they are potentially harmful.
Andrew Clements, an organisational psychology researcher at Aston University, is even blunter.
Generational labels, he argues, have “no basis in reality.”
Good evidence should make us revise our stories. Too often, we revise the evidence to preserve the story.
Horoscope HR
Suppose someone announced they recruited by star sign. Or birth order. Or favourite colour.
We’d probably smile politely before backing slowly towards the nearest exit.
Yet when someone says they recruit, communicate or lead differently because a person belongs to Gen Z or Gen X, and now, Gen Alpha, we may nod as though we’ve just heard something profound.
If you’re recruiting and managing around generational stereotypes, you might as well start hiring by star sign and birth order. The predictive value is much the same.
At least horoscopes don’t come with consulting fees.
The language changes. The confidence doesn’t.
- “Millennials need purpose.”
- “Gen Z craves constant feedback.”
- “Boomers resist flexibility.”
- “Gen X values independence.”
We need to stop and ask:
- Compared with whom?
- By how much?
- According to what evidence?
Those questions are inconvenient. Stereotypes are easier, faster. The cost of that short-cut, however, is real. We institutionalise prejudice under the banner of insight. We begin interpreting perfectly ordinary human behaviour through a distorted generational lens instead of genuine curiosity.
The labels become the explanation. While the real explanation quietly disappears from view. And we stop asking the only question that actually matters.
What is going on for this person, in this role, in this situation?
Everything else is marketing in cosplay.
Why we keep believing the story
By now you might be wondering – if the evidence is this weak, why does generational thinking refuse to die?
Because it tells a story our brains desperately want to believe.
Human beings evolved to spot patterns quickly.
For most of our history, it was safer to mistake a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick. The cost of seeing a pattern that wasn’t really there was usually much lower than the cost of missing one that was.
That instinct helped us survive. It also makes us remarkably susceptible to simple explanations for complex phenomena.
Generational thinking scratches exactly that psychological itch.
It gives us tidy categories. Neat narratives. Ready-made explanations. Most importantly, it gives us the comforting feeling that we know people before we’ve actually taken the time to understand them.
That’s why these stories are so persuasive. And it’s precisely why we should be suspicious of them.
The danger isn’t ignorance. It’s certainty.
Generational thinking isn’t popular because leaders are unintelligent. It’s popular because it’s convenient. It offers speed and certainty where curiosity would require more time and effort.
Why does that younger employee want flexibility? Oh, Gen Z.
Why does that older employee seem cautious about change? Boomer.
Why does that mid-career employee sound cynical? Gen X.
Why does this particular person want autonomy, meaningful work, security, flexibility, fairness, purpose, regular feedback and enough time to see their children?
Apparently because they were born between the right two dates.
The story becomes the pathway forward. That’s the appeal. Not because it’s especially accurate. Because it relieves us of the burden of deeper thinking.
Good leadership is demanding. It asks us to hold uncertainty a little longer. To ask another question. To resist the temptation to leap to the first explanation that feels satisfying.
Generational stories encourage exactly the opposite. They reward premature certainty.
You can’t read the label from inside the jar.
Lazy thinking rarely announces itself. It almost always feels like common sense. It sounds like something everybody knows. It spreads through anecdotes. Conference keynotes. Management books. Podcasts. LinkedIn posts. Long before it ever reaches a peer-reviewed journal.
That’s what makes it dangerous.
The more familiar a story becomes – the less likely we are to question it.
We stop asking, “Is this actually true?” And start asking, “How should I apply it?” Without ever noticing we’ve skipped the most important step.
Embracing uncertainty as a learning moment. Leaning into the discomfort of not knowing.
Which is why evidence matters. Not because evidence always gives us certainty. Because it interrupts certainty and helps us think.
Bobby Duffy and the inconvenient evidence
This is where Bobby Duffy’s work is so valuable. Rather than collecting anecdotes about generations, he did something considerably less exciting. He looked at the meta-data. Across countries. Across decades. Across enormous datasets. And his conclusion in The Generation Myth is deeply inconvenient for people selling generational certainty.
Once you properly separate for age, period and cohort effects, many of the dramatic “generation gaps” become surprisingly insignificant.
Most disappear altogether.
Some remain – but are nowhere near large enough to justify the sweeping claims made in popular leadership literature.
That’s an important distinction. Duffy isn’t arguing that history doesn’t shape people. Of course it does. He’s arguing that history doesn’t divide humanity into neat psychological tribes.
Reality is messier than that.
The “Millennial learner”
Joshua Jauregui and colleagues reached a remarkably similar conclusion while examining the idea of the “Millennial learner” in medical education. Their verdict was refreshingly direct. The “Millennial learner” is not a meaningful educational category.
It’s a socially constructed archetype. A story.
One that collapses enormous diversity into a cartoon, reflects the anxieties and assumptions of older educators, reinforces stereotypes and encourages people to interpret behaviour through generational clichés rather than evidence.
Their proposed alternative deserves far more attention than it receives.
Generational humility.
That’s an important phrase. Because humility is exactly what’s missing from so much workplace commentary.
Humility says, “Perhaps I don’t understand this person yet.” Humility stays curious. Asks another question. Treats people as individuals instead of categories. And you don’t have to work in medical education to recognise the wisdom in that.
The same criticism applies to every “Leading Gen Z” keynote, every “Millennial engagement strategy”, and every consultant who promises to decode an entire generation in forty-five minutes before morning tea. Perhaps the biggest divide in today’s workplace isn’t between Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z.
Perhaps it’s between leaders who think in stereotypes – and leaders who remain curious.
One group sees labels. The other sees people.
The real problem
We smile at “OK Boomer.” Roll our eyes at Millennial side parts. Share TikToks about Gen X being forgotten again.
It all feels harmless. After all, stories and humour are part of being human.
The problem begins when we confuse stories with reality. The problem compounds when stereotypes become strategy. When a manager thinks they understand someone because they know their approximate birth year. When a leader explains behaviour with a label instead of a question. When certainty replaces curiosity.
That isn’t insight. It’s a form of culturally sanctioned ageism.
If your first explanation for behaviour is
“That’s just Gen Z.”
or
“Classic Millennial.”
or
“Typical Boomer.”
you’ve probably stopped asking better questions.
And better questions are where good leadership begins.
Intent vs impact
Organisations say they want diversity of thought. Then they reduce millions of individuals to marketing categories and call it insight.
They say they value inclusion. Then they explain people through stereotypes.
They say they want evidence-based leadership. Then they buy frameworks that would sound ridiculous if we replaced Gen Z with Aries.
The multigenerational workforce is genuinely complex. People are wonderfully unique. Their motivations are elaborate and personal. Each life, an intricately woven tapestry of experience, context, culture, memory and emotion.
The challenge of leadership has never been to eliminate that complexity. It’s to become more skilful at navigating it.
Generational tag-lines promise the opposite.
They offer certainty where uncertainty is more honest. They offer simplicity where curiosity is more useful. They offer stories where evidence asks us to think harder.
That’s why these labels are so seductive. And so risky. Because once we believe the story – we stop seeing the person.
Perhaps the biggest mistake organisations make isn’t believing in generational stereotypes. It’s believing that understanding people was ever going to be that easy.
And human beings are always far more interesting than the stories we tell about them.
Stay curious a little longer
Good leadership has always required humility.
The humility to admit that another person’s behaviour may have dozens of causes we cannot yet see. The humility to replace assumptions with questions. The humility to say, “I don’t understand this person yet.”
Curiosity begins there. So does wisdom. And genuine bids for connection.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson hidden beneath all the noise about generations. The quality of our leadership is determined less by the answers we have on hand – and more by the questions we’re willing to keep asking.
That’s a choice we all have the freedom to make.
I have a few ideas about what that might look like. Coming up in Part 2…
References
Dr A J Clements, A critical review of research on generational cohorts, Work and Organisation, Aston University, Birmingham, UK (June 2023)
David P. Costanza et al, Acta Psychologica Journal, ‘Are Generations a Useful Concept?’ (November 2023)
Cort Rudolph, Rachel Rauvola, David Costanza & Hannes Zachr, ’Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Myths in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward’ Journal of Business & Psychology (Sept 2020)
Joshue Jauregui et al, “Generational ‘Othering’: The Myth of the Millennial Learner” Medical Education Journal (Jan 2020)
Bobby Duffy, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think, Basic Books, 2021.