Six Steps to Deal with Generational Change in Your Organization

Resource
Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit

Contents
The Six Big Actions
    1. Include generational issues in planning
    2. Mentor and discuss among generations
    3. Target market by generation
    4. Age down
    5. Meet techspectations
    6. Ask
Summary

From Vince Hyman, former Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:

IN PREVIOUS issues of Tools You Can Use (February 21, 2007 and March 7, 2007) we dealt with the trends that are impacting the nonprofit community—whether through board of director roles, the administration of foundations, nonprofit fundraising plans, or nonprofit marketing and public relations—as well as the impacts these trends will have. This issue focuses on steps nonprofits, associations, and grantmakers can take to deal with these trends and impacts.

As a quick review the six nonprofit trends were: financial stress, technological acceleration, diversity of population, redefining the family, MeBranding, and work-life balance. The four nonprofit impacts were: Boomers coming in the door; Boomers going out the door; Whatever happened to GenX and Gen@; and Unintended consequences.

Finally, the generations we’re talking about are:

• The Greatest Generation, (born 1901–1925)
• The Silent Generation (born 1926–1944)
• The Boomers (born 1945–1962)
• GenX (born 1963–1980)
• Gen@ (born 1981–2002)

This issue of Tools is excerpted from Chapter 3 of our new book by Peter C. Brinckerhoff, Generations: The Challenge of A Lifetime for Your Nonprofit. Generations is an in-depth analysis of the change the nonprofit community is undergoing as it prepares to retire its Boomer generation (which largely built the nonprofit sector and still runs its largest institutions). It also includes questions, examples, and other tools to help you explore your organization’s preparedness for this challenge. If you’ve not met or heard Peter, or read something by him, you’ve missed some great stuff. He has won two of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s prestigious McAdam Awards; he is a regular conference speaker, and he is author of many books (including our own award winning Nonprofit Stewardship, and the Mission-based Management Series, available on his popular web site, MissionBased.com.)

The Six Big Actions
While there are many things you might do to prepare for the change upon us, six stand out. Peter calls these the “Six Big Actions” because taking them will smooth your ride through the coming transition:

1. Include generational issues in planning
2. Mentor and discuss among generations
3. Target market by generation
4. Age down
5. Meet techspectations
6. Ask

These six big actions (and their many spin-off actions) form the core of Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit. Here they are in a nutshell.

1. Include generational issues in planning
If you don’t already have a strategic plan, a marketing plan, and a financial plan,  and a fundraising plan, generational preparedness is a great reason to get them in place. While generation change is not an immediate crisis, it certainly will become one without adequate preparation. So, you must incorporate generational change into your planning at all levels, sooner rather than later.

Consider, for example, an organization that provides meals, housing, and transportation to ex-offenders, as well as some job support for parolees. This agency did a generational assessment and found that while the average age of their service recipients had been steady for ten years at between twenty-five and twenty-nine, the average age of their staff had risen to forty-four, and their board’s mean age was fifty-six. The management team (four people) had an average tenure of twenty-three years, an average age of fifty-seven, and only their Social Security and whatever they’d been able to save in their personal IRAs to count on in retirement. Thus, when interviewed, management felt they could not afford to retire in the foreseeable future.

The board and staff concluded that they needed three things: First, a younger board to stay closer to the age of their key service recipients; second, a leadership development and succession plan for their staff; and third, contributions to the retirement funds of employees with more than five years of service, with a temporarily higher rate of contribution for employees who were both over fifty and had worked for the agency for more than fifteen years. You can imagine that these decisions had major repercussions throughout the organization.

2. Mentor and discuss among generations
Conflict or resentment is one of the outcomes of actively seeking generational diversity among staff, board, leadership, and volunteers. Mentoring and open discussion is crucial to solving intergenerational conflict. Set up both formal and informal mentoring and discussions to break down barriers between generations. Whether with staff or in your volunteer cadre, mentoring passes on knowledge and perspective, both of which are crucial. A young person might well wonder why a Greatest Generation board member is so frugal (stingy? cheap?), and could look at them negatively. But when they hear stories of living through the Great Depression, the board member’s perspective becomes much clearer.

You can facilitate informal discussions, lunches, coffees, roundtables, and get-to-know-you sessions that will open doors. In terms of more formal mentoring, remember that it should NOT always occur using older mentors and younger mentees. In fact, you should expect that younger staff should be mentoring older staff around issues in technology, understanding the culture and expectations of younger clientele, and so forth. A classic example is the choice of then GE CEO Jack Welch to choose a 24-year-old staffer as his technology mentor. The choice helped Welch move GE ahead of the competition in the early days of the Internet.

The GenX and Gen@ employees and volunteers at your organization have lots to tell you, so don’t prejudice the discussion by assuming that older is always more learned.

3. Target market by generation
Rethinking your nonprofit marketing and public relations by generation is crucial to dealing effectively with generational change. While the traditional marketing process is the same, the emphasis and sensitivity analysis is significantly different.

For example,  Gen@ (born 1981-2002) simply isn’t interested in what Boomers consider traditional marketing and advertising venues. “The network evening news? What’s that? I get my news on Google, or learn about stuff from blogs, or from The Daily Show. . . . Newspaper? Yeah, I read the New York Times online. . . .”

4. Age down
This is both the simplest and most difficult action to take. It is simple, in that you compute the mean age for your board, management, volunteers, and donors, and actively seek to reduce that age. This is difficult in that you must balance your efforts to reduce the mean age against the principle of nondiscrimination and the huge value of Boomers and Greatest Generation members to your organization.

You can plan this, or it will just happen helter-skelter. The Boomers are turning sixty. They will turn sixty five, then seventy. They will retire and die. But if you wait for the natural occurrence of things, you’ll be behind the curve.

This is not advocating age discrimination. You can’t fire people, or reject job applicants based on their age. Age discrimination is flat out illegal, and you should not even think about going there. But you can think about aging down in other nondiscriminatory ways.

As you age down you will meet the rising tide of the next generations directly, incorporate them into the mainstream of your organization, and prepare the organization to move beyond its current fixation on Boomers.

5. Meet techspectations
Technology is so important to your mission effectiveness, organizational development, marketing, fundraising, and management that it is essentially ubiquitous as we think of our organizations. The problem with the word “ubiquitous” is that it often morphs into “invisible,” which means we don’t think about it enough.

As we deal with generation change, we need to actively deal with technology. Gen@ (those born after 1981) have the highest expectations around technology. As staff, as board, as funders, as users of our services, they are experts in technology. GenX is not far behind. Boomer workers coming in from the private sector in a second career will also have high techspectations. Additionally, they are likely to have greater accessibility requirements because of hearing, vision, and motor problems.

The key here is to look at ways to use technology to bridge the generation divide, to accommodate the wants of different age groups, to make your organization more efficient and effective as it goes through generation change.

6. Ask
Whenever you cross into new territory, it is smart to ask, observe, and listen. When you go to a new country you do that. When you go into a new neighborhood you do that. When you start at a new school, or in a new job, you do that. But in each of these cases you know you are on new ground because it is physically under your feet.

With generation issues, we are often on new turf as well, but we just don’t realize it. We need to be asking, and asking constantly. Our past experience may be helpful, but there is so much to learn in this new area.

Here’s an example wherein the failure to ask is a source of conflict:

Boomer manager to Gen@ worker: “I need you to come in this weekend. We’ve got some work that needs to be done.”

Gen@ worker: “Oh, sorry, I’d love to help, but I have a family obligation this weekend.”

Boomer: “Well, I’m sorry, but this has to be done. I’ll be here all weekend, and I’d appreciate a little help.”

Gen@: “OK, well, I can’t come in, but I’ll get it done during the week next week. That way I can make the family thing and still help out. How’s that?”

Boomer (grumpily as he walks away): “I guess that will have to do.” Boomer thinks: The guy has no commitment to us. He just doesn’t care.

Gen@ thinks: The guy needs a life.

And both are frustrated. But if the manager was more aware of Gen@’s motivation (work to live) and if Gen@ was more aware of the Boomer’s motivation (live to work), while they still might not agree, they would understand more about the other, and hopefully be a bit more forgiving. The failure to ask turns different expectations into conflict.

Summary
Key questions to push your organization into the future:

• At your agency, is it hard or easy to relate to older (younger) employees and volunteers? Why?
• What have you learned recently from older (younger) workers or volunteers? How did you learn it?
• What bugs you most about people of a different age group?
• What do you value most about working at our agency? What one thing would you change to improve things?
• Where do you see yourself in ten years?
• Have you considered how the generation you need to reach gets in information
• Are you seeking to recruit younger board members, people in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties?
• Do you include generational thinking in your skill set for board recruitment?
• Are you seeking more college-age and twenty-something volunteers?
• Are you looking among your younger staff to groom the next generation of managers and leaders
• Do you know what the technology expectations of staff, board, volunteers, and clients?
• Have you examined the role technology can play in facilitating a better work environment?
• Do you regularly ask staff, clients, customers, volunteers—everyone—what they think, want, need, and care about? Do you listen to their responses?

Generational change has always been with us. But as the first Boomers move into retirement, we can expect greater change than ever. Wise nonprofit are preparing themselves now.

Sincerely,

Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance

April 18, 2007

 

Copyright Fieldstone Alliance. For reprint permission, click here.