There have been thousands of articles published about the millennial generation and how its members are different from everybody else. So, when Laura Finfer and Lois Tamir, who run an executive coaching firm in New York called Leadership Excellence Consulting, found themselves struggling a few years ago to effectively coach a new wave of executives in their 30s, they wondered if it might be a millennial thing.
“We couldn’t really put our finger on it, but it felt different,” said Finfer. “It felt harder,” said Tamir.
But Finfer and Tamir also happen to have psychology Ph.D.s from large Midwestern universities with reputations for quantitative excellence. This meant first of all that they could count, and thus see that, when they started contemplating these issues three years ago, most of their 30-something clients weren’t even millennials.
It also meant that they knew how to design a research study, which they then set about doing, consulting the rich psychology literature on behavioral differences by age and the spottier literature on generational differences, collecting data on their own coaching engagements, running a bunch of regressions and concluding that, naaah, it’s not a millennial thing. People in their 30s are just different from people in their 40s, who in turn are different from people in their 50s.
Finfer and Tamir published their results last year in the journal Consulting Psychology, and in shorter, footnote-free form earlier this month on the Harvard Business Review’s website. Their main point was that people in their 30s are less self-reflective and less open to change than their elders, and thus demand a different coaching approach – which is pretty interesting in itself. They also, and this is from the HBR article, “found that executives’ behavior in coaching differs by age, not generation.”
There is nonetheless, of course, a bounteous literature on generationally based differences in the workplace and elsewhere. Most of it is nonacademic, as with those millions of articles about millennials noted above, or the collected works of Neil Howe and the late Andrew Strauss, a pair of Washington policy wonks who converted an interest in generational differences into a lucrative (and influential, with superfan Steve Bannon now chief strategist in the White House) career as authors, speakers, consultants and all-around gurus.
In academic finance, there’s been a bit of a rethinking in recent decades. A 1998 re-examination of newspaper heir Alfred Cowles Jr.’s 1932 research by three prominent finance professors reversed his conclusion that Dow Theorist William Peter Hamilton’s predictions were worse than random. Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been on a years-long quest to rehabilitate technical analysis, which relies heavily on cycles.
So what about generational differences, and generational cycles? There’s surely something to the idea that the economic conditions, political events and cultural fashions of a particular era shape the attitudes of those who grow up or come of age in that era. Also, especially large age cohorts such as the baby boomers and millennials shape society by simple virtue of their bigness. Right now, for example, the U.S. population is quite heavy on people in their mid-20s and mid-50s. That’s got to have an impact, and it will continue to do so as these cohorts age.
Finfer and Tamir, for their part, are perfectly willing to believe that generational differences exist and have an impact in the workplace. It’s just that, for the particular issue that they were studying, maturity level – and thus age – mattered much more.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist.
