There’s a lot of talk right now about the resistance of mangers and older employees to Web 2.0 initiatives and the information-sharing that goes with them.

Kind of amusing that this big generational argument is happening during the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the start of the biggest generational fight most of us remember—we weren’t around for the Roaring Twenties, the rise of jazz, let alone rebelled with the suffragettes.

The Boomer theme of, “you can’t trust anyone over thirty” is being reprised today by the wired generation. The Boomers accused their bosses of being unwilling to change and when they became the bosses, they were accused in turn. Some things never change. Generational differences have always existed, with the younger generation blasting into the future and screaming that the older ones are holding them back, but it’s ridiculous to paint everybody over a certain age with the same brush.

In May I commented that I thought a lot of the problem was grounded in insecurity and I still believe that, but I’ve done a lot of thinking because the subject’s so prevalent and have some further thoughts.

It should be remembered that managers’ rigidity has as much to do as much with the corporate culture as with the individuals involved. Openness is based on trust and if the culture doesn’t foster that then you should expect people to be ultra turf conscious, not interested in sharing, and prone to spending large amounts of energy fighting every new thing that comes along. In 2007 it’s Web 2.0; twenty-five years ago it was telecommuting (and still is in many companies).

But if we’re going to talk about rigidity, then it has to be recognized that it’s on all sides—there are a lot of pretty rigid twenty- and thirty-somethings (and no one in their right mind ever called a teenager flexible). If you have any doubts about this, try getting to your twenty-something co-workers to approach a subject from any position other than the one they advocate.

It’s not so much doing it differently, as it is doing it my way and, unhappily, that attitude has substantially worsened. It seems that everybody has a group and while their group is OK, other groups, i.e., any that don’t agree with theirs, are rigid, inflexible and standing in the way of progress.

There’s value to be found in most approaches and when that value is tweaked and/or merged with other methods the result is usually worth far more than the original.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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