How’s your GQ?
This week I participated in McCrindle’s virtual event on cultivating healthy intergenerational teams.
As a training facilitator, I thought the event was rich in the insights provided by McCrindle’s speakers! Afterall, with four distinct generations in the typical Australian workplace today, it is extremely challenging for a manager to align their teams.
Consider how you currently harness your team for generating Baby Boomer wisdom, GenX pragmatism, GenY innovation, and GenZ digital ability.
Generational preferences
According to McCrindle’s social-research team, each generation has its own preferences. Actually, McCrindle call them ‘the challenges of having an intergenerational team’! And these preferences include:
- how each generation prefer to communicate
- how they prefer feedback – praise and conflict resolution
- their respective flexibilities in the workplace
- their technical proficiencies, and their overall work ethic.
Generational Intelligence (GQ)
But to truly foster synergy within an intergenerational team, McCrindle advises effective managers to develop their generational-intelligence (GQ*).
GQ is your ability to understand, appreciate, communicate, and collaborate effectively across the different age groups in your workplace – that place where humility meets empathy.
GQ is being aware of the generational differences, perspectives and behaviours in your team, AND adjusting your communications to better engage with this team.
And GQ is especially important for managers today, because it helps you to future-proof your business.
Summary
To summarise, a manager with GQ (generational intelligence) has humility and empathy for members of their team. They understand that their team has preferences determined by the generations present in that team. And they appreciate that their team’s GQ is based on how they develop their communication, cohesion and alignment together as a team.
So, how many generations are currently in your team?
If you’d like to talk more about your team’s cohesion or discuss topline findings from this GQ event, please get in touch!
Australia’s Workforce 2024 vs 2034
*Source: McCrindle. See also Cultivating Healthy Intergenerational Teams on McCrindle’s ‘The Future Report’ podcast.
For more information on Edmonds Facilitation:
