Are there real differences between the generations, and do we need to treat Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers all differently?  Certainly, there has been lots of ink spilled and pixels patterned to suggest that each of the generations has different attitudes toward work and life, and therefore needs to be communicated with differently when it comes to leading them, managing them, and inspiring them.

To suggest otherwise is to swim against a very powerful tide of articles, books, speeches, and management experts all suggesting that we cannot possibly succeed in the workplace without deeply understanding the successive generations of workers since WWII and how are they are motivated and incentivized.

Martin Schroder, a professor of Sociology at Saarland University, mined a huge database of 600,000 people studied over 40 years that asked about attitudes toward work and leisure time, values as applied to work and career, and the relative importance of factors affecting work satisfaction such as the amount of overtime, the congeniality of one’s colleagues, the difficulty of the job, how important, interesting, or responsible the position, and so on.

What he found was that the generational cohort did not determine the answers.  Rather, it’s how old you are that affects your attitudes toward work.  We all progress through stages in our work life – we like working less when we are young, we devote ourselves more to our careers as we age, and we find purpose in work when we start to look toward the end of our careers.

So, are millennials too obsessed with their lattes and salads, where Boomers are all about measurement and time on task?  No evidence supports this.  The generational differences are a mirage.  What’s really going on is that young people don’t have as strongly developed a work ethic as they do as they age.  What matters is where you are in your career, not what cohort you were born into.

And of course there are individual variations in all this.  Any generalization based on age is just that, a generalization.  But this evidence does comport with what I remember about my age group when I was first starting out in the workplace.  I was keen to get ahead, sure, but I was as idealistic as the current generation tells me they are.  I wanted to change the world, more than I wanted to work 9 – 5, specifically, in terms of the attitude toward war and the way the corporate world was treating the environment.  We were protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.  We were just learning about toxic waste dumps and the Bhopal disaster, and awareness was dawning that corporations would have to be held to account, to be forced to clean up their messes, rather than just trusting that all would be well.

The generation before me had Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to wake them up to similar issues, such as the persistence of DDT in the ecosystem and its effects on insects, birds, and animals of all kinds.

Then, as each cohort ages, has families, and deals with the issues that come with advancing years, its attitudes change and it focuses more on the personal issues of career and promotion through the ranks, whether it’s in government, academe, or the private sector.

So when we think about how to address the cohorts we must lead or manage or speak to in our workplaces, it’s better to think about the age of each person rather than lumping them in with one of the easy categories like Millennial that allows us to label them and stop listening to their concerns.  We were all Millennials once, and we will all one day be Boomers, at least in the way we respond to the workplace.