Or, Why Old School Personality Tests Miss The Point.
Today’s white collar workplace has become a melting pot of generations, each bringing different perspectives and work styles. From Baby Boomers who value tradition to Generation Z workers who prioritise mission-driven impact, today’s managers are navigating uncharted territory.
But much of what we read about generational conflict might be missing the fundamental issue. Perhaps the real challenge isn’t that different generations can’t work together – it’s that we haven’t invested enough time in understanding each other as humans.
Have We Forgotten How to Connect?
Recent headlines paint dramatic pictures of generational workplace tensions. Stories of San Francisco employers hiring etiquette coaches to teach Gen Z workers basic office manners. Stories of workers FaceTiming friends from their desks or bringing parents to job interviews.
Maybe these stories represent a symptom of a deeper problem. Perhaps the issue isn’t that younger workers need etiquette training – it’s that some leaders haven’t learned how to communicate with people who are different from them.
As Peter Treloar from TALY suggests, “If you don’t know someone, you can’t lead them. If you don’t know what motivates them or how they process information, you’re just throwing stuff out there and hoping something sticks. And we tend to throw out the same stuff that would stick with us, assuming everyone else responds the same way.”
The One-Size-Fits-All Leadership Problem
Too many new leaders fall into the trap of one-size-fits-all leadership. If they’re super driven, they assume everyone else should respond to the same motivational approaches. If they learn by jumping in and figuring things out, they expect your team members to do the same.
But as we all know deep down, people are different. The extrovert wonders why the introvert can’t just whiteboard a solution together. The introvert wonders why the extrovert can’t shut up occasionally and give everyone some space to think.
Neither approach is right or wrong – they’re just different. Without understanding these differences, friction might build, and miscommunication happens. In turn, this means we start attributing performance issues to generational problems when they’re really communication problems.
The Remote Work Complication
Remote and hybrid work has made understanding people even more critical. When conversations become transactional – about deadlines, targets, reports – you might lose the informal moments where you naturally get to know someone.
A whole cohort joined the workforce around 2021 who have never sat next to colleagues or learned by osmosis. Soon they’ll start becoming leaders themselves but with fewer role models showing them how to connect with teams.
When your main interaction is through digital messages, communication becomes everything. Whether you put an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence determines whether people think you’re being passive aggressive or friendly.
Moving Beyond Assumptions
The most successful teams recognise that every person wants to feel seen and understood. People are actually pretty simple – they just want someone to say, “I recognise that I do things differently to you, and I want to try to meet you in the middle.”
When someone feels seen and understood, they’re more likely to stay. Research shows that around 80% of people leave roles because of their leader and their team. It’s not structural stuff – it’s the human connection.
The Overlooked Truth: We’re More Similar Than Different
Across all generations, people want to feel engaged with their work, receive fair compensation, achieve their goals, and be respected. Most employees want work-life balance, growth opportunities, and to feel their contributions matter.
The frustrations are similar too: feeling overworked, underpaid, or undervalued, transcend generational boundaries. When we focus on shared experiences rather than supposed generational differences, we create stronger foundations for collaboration.
Action Items: Where to Start
- Start with curiosity, not assumptions. Instead of thinking “this Gen Z employee challenges everything,” try “this person asks questions – what’s driving that?” Maybe they need more context to feel confident.
- Add “for this person” to your leadership decisions. How do I give feedback to this person? How do I onboard this person? That small addition forces you to think about individual needs rather than generic processes.
- Create space for different communication styles. Don’t assume everyone wants to brainstorm in groups. Give people time to process information. Mix up how you gather input.
- Focus on outcomes, not methods. If results are good, does it matter if someone prefers email whilst another uses Slack? Resist trying to make everyone work exactly the same way.
- Address real behaviours, not generational stereotypes. If someone’s not meeting standards, address that specific behaviour. Don’t attribute it to their age. If someone needs coaching on workplace norms, provide it without making assumptions about why they don’t know.
- Minimise needless friction. Much of what we label as generational conflict might actually be misunderstanding. The sales manager who assumes their new hire should “just go out and start conversations” without realising that the person needs more preparation first – a prime example of the power in taking time to understand people.
- Build understanding partnerships. Pair people from different generations as mutual learning partners. Make it reciprocal – older workers share institutional knowledge whilst younger colleagues offer fresh perspectives.
The multi-generational workforce isn’t a problem to be solved with etiquette training. It’s an opportunity to build better human understanding.
The most successful leaders won’t be those who learn to “manage” different generations, but those who see each person as an individual and adapt their communication accordingly. This isn’t complex;
it’s about being intentional with conversations, being more considered rather than just blowing into interactions the way you’ve always done them.
The workplace challenges we’re attributing to generational differences are often just basic communication issues that affect people of all ages. The solution isn’t more training on what’s supposedly wrong with each generation – it’s developing the curiosity and skills to understand the humans in front of us.
The next 4 newsletters are sponsored by TALY.
Founded in 2016, TALY solves a key problem: while personality drives how people connect and perform at work, most businesses don’t use these insights because traditional profiling has been complex, expensive, and buried in lengthy reports.
TALY delivers instant, practical guidance for onboarding, performance reviews, and team building across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.
I built my TALY profile last week, and it was, surprisingly, very accurate. I think it described me well, and the key elements seem to mirror how I think of myself.
This is part of my report 👇🏻
What I really like is the AskTaly Insights. I really hadn’t thought of what my personal blind spots might be, do any of us? This is a great feature.
This was actually very thought-provoking for me. It’s given me some things to consider in my interactions with others. I think I’ve always seen myself as a team player and outcomes-focused, which is confirmed in this report, but I’m apparently less emotional than I realised.
In early-stage businesses, where so much is at stake and where missing deadlines or targets is felt the most strongly, communication and understanding with your small team is imperative.
In this episode of the StartUp Hiring podcast, I speak with Peter from TALY about why this space is so misunderstood, yet so important. I hope you enjoy it.
What I learned from speaking to Peter.
Peter has clearly spent years in the trenches of human behaviour, first helping big brands like CUB and Mars figure out how to sell more stuff to people, then pivoting to help companies understand their own people better. And in TALY, he’s trying to drag the whole industry away from tick-the-box exercises toward something actually useful.
What I like about Peter’s approach is its practicality. He’s not selling you on personality tests as some mystical insight into the human soul. He’s talking about reducing friction in teams, helping managers have more effective conversations, and preventing good people from leaving because they feel misunderstood.
Here are three things that stuck with me.
1. The real problem isn’t the science, it’s the execution
“There’s always been this latent hidden value in personality data that hasn’t been tapped into by many businesses, particularly startups, because it’s time-consuming and expensive and really hard.”
Peter’s blunt about why personality profiling gets a bad reputation. It’s not because the underlying science is wrong; it’s because most implementations are terrible. Companies use it as a yes/no filter in hiring, or they generate massive reports that no one has time to read.
The real value comes from understanding how to work with specific people in specific moments. But that requires tools that give you actionable insights when you need them, not academic reports you’ll never look at again.
2. One-size-fits-all leadership is broken (and always has been)
“If you don’t know someone, you can’t lead them. If you don’t know what’s going on inside them, how to connect with them, then you can’t lead them. You just keep throwing stuff out and hope something sticks.”
Peter makes the point that most managers default to leading the way they’d want to be led. If you’re super driven, you assume everyone else responds to being pushed harder. If you’re detail-oriented, you give everyone detailed briefings.
But people are wired differently. Some need structure before they can take action. Others need to jump in and figure it out as they go. Understanding these differences isn’t rocket science, but it requires being intentional about how you communicate.
3. Remote work makes this stuff more important, not less
“The way that we build our relationships now is whether I put an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence or not. That’s how people work out whether I’m being passive-aggressive or friendly.”
Peter’s observations about remote work ring true. When most of your interactions happen over Slack or Zoom, you lose all the informal ways you’d normally get to know someone. No watching how they work through problems, no coffee chat insights, no reading body language.
That makes intentional relationship building more critical. You can’t rely on osmosis to understand your team anymore.
Final thought
Peter sums it up quite well;
“People are pretty simple, and they kind of just want to feel seen and understood. Even taking that first step and saying ‘I recognise that I do things differently to you and I want to try to meet you in the middle’ gets you 90% of the way there.”
This feels like a form of practical wisdom that every leader could use more of.
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