Your Cheat Sheet For The Generational Divide

If I could be you And you could be me For just one hour If we could find a way To get inside Each other's mind . . .

-Joe South, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes" If I were to guess, your legal department is managed by Boomers and Gen-Xers, but many of the lawyers in your group are millennials. The law firm world is no different, although I believe we are mostly boomer-led. Have you caught yourself telling your millennial direct reports, "When I was your age, we never (or always) . . . "? (P.S. Are you sounding more and more like your parents every day?) Or maybe you love working with millennials, but there are moments when you clearly have trouble seeing the world from their perspective.

Millennials, do you feel that your boss places too much importance on face-time in the office? Are you having trouble getting regular feedback on your performance?

On the surface, these may seem like first-world problems. Don't marketing people invent these generational labels anyway? Isn't it all just a matter of people doing good work and trying to get along with one another? Well, yes . . . and no. No one wants to work on a dysfunctional team or even an unhappy one. Also, retention is important because recruiting and training good people is very expensive. As we've written here before, our feelings about our work and the people we work with impact our productivity, and negative interactions can sap our sense of mission and motivation. Perhaps above all else, we all learn a great deal from people with different perspectives.

We have all experienced profound changes in our working lives in the past 20 years, primarily due to technology and globalization, but I would wager that the legal profession is one of the more extreme examples of change. Take, for instance, the change in the sheer number of lawyers in the country in 1980, which was 500,000, and compare that to today's number: 1,000,000. Another powerful work trend is our 21st century 24/7, always connected mentality. Lawyers have always worked long hours, and technology has exacerbated this tendancy. Many lawyers expect...

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