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Dr. Tim Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders. His work grew out of 20 years of serving alongside Dr. John C. Maxwell. Elmore has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, Psychology Today and he’s been featured on CNN’s Headline News and Fox and Friends. Tim has written over 35 books, including Habitudes: Images That Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes and his newest book A New Kind of Diversity: Making the Different Generations on Your Team a Competitive Advantage.
Will and Tim discuss some takeaways from A New Kind of Diversity:
- Who are today’s clashing generations?
- Giving guidance to leaders when working with multi-generational teachers and staff.
- A little over half of the workforce is made up of people from the millennial generation.
- Managing preferences, tensions, and expectations: conflict expands based on the distance between expectations and reality.
- Having assumptions about individuals of different generations can lead you to miss what they bring to the table and to a missed opportunity.
- It’s in the best interest of a school leader to learn how to encourage the innovation and creativity of younger educators, creating a space where “Yes” is a more common answer than “No”.
- Some ideas that leaders should keep in mind in order to be flexible while still maintaining the direction they want their organization to go are:
-Recognize how the brains of people from younger and older generations are different and embrace those differences.
-Stop stereotyping and ditch the niche. Find someone from another generation and have them share their superpowers with you.
-Senior veterans on a school campus need to meet with a rookie teacher and have both of them mentor each other.
- Leaders need to be listening as much as talking.
- Mixing generations to get timely and timeless advice.
- The Generational Quotient Assessment: A resource recommended by Tim to help leaders learn the language of generational diversity.
Now it’s Your Turn:
What are some ways that you recommend to bridge the generational gap between teachers and staff at your school? Listen in for more takeaways!
