Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young and Old Can Find Common Ground

Principle 2

Everyone Wants Respect;

They Just Don’t Define

It the Same Way

We’re sure everyone has heard someone complain that there is too

little respect shown in organizations. The typical complaint is that

younger people are disrespectful of the people they should be

showing respect for—mainly older employees and people in au-

thority. Others complain that older people are just as bad, that

older people have respect only for older people or for people

higher in the hierarchy. The complaint is that older people appear

to think that people deserve different amounts of respect, pri-

marily depending on how much gray hair they have or how much

money they make.

A few years ago, I was in Australia talking about how the different generations

had roughly the same values. After the presentation a man came up to me and

said that I was wrong because he had a specific example that demonstrated

how different the generations’ values were.

The man said, “At my company there is a young man who obviously

doesn’t respect others. You can tell this because he is no more polite to the

president of his company than he is to the receptionist at the front desk. How

can you say that there is no difference between the generations when this

young man shows no more respect to the president of the company than he

does to the receptionist?”

So I asked him, “Is the young man rude to either the receptionist or the

president?”

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“No,” the man said, “he isn’t impolite to either. He just treats the presi-

dent of the company with the exact same amount of respect that he does the

receptionist.”

“What I’m hearing,” I said, “is that he is just as polite to the receptionist

as he is to the president of the company. How can you say he is being disre-

spectful, when he is respectful to both? Are you saying that if he were less

respectful to the receptionist than he is to the president, that would be a better

indication that he was a respectful person?”

Through this conversation (which went on for some time), it became

clear that the older man took the equal amounts of respect being shown to

people at all levels in the organization as an indicator of disrespect to the peo-

ple higher in the organization. Therefore, he thought the younger man had

“no respect” (his words) for the president of the organization.

A similar theme—and similar language—shows up in the mu-

sical My Fair Lady, when Eliza Doolittle accuses Henry Higgins of

treating her like a scullery maid rather than like a lady, to which

he replies that he treats a lady no better than he does a scullery

maid, so what does she have to complain about? From his per-

spective, the only problem would be if he treated one better than

another; if he treats them equally badly, then it shouldn’t be an

issue!

So what does “showing respect” really mean? Does it mean that

you are more polite or subservient to someone who is more pow-

erful than you are to someone who is much less powerful? Is being

obsequious required to show respect? Is being curt to someone in

a lower position required to show respect to people higher? When

we looked at what people were saying and writing about respect,

what we found was both revealing and frustrating.

There is, it turns out, a huge amount of discussion and dis-

course on the topic, most of which seems to conclude that the

basic structure of organizational life is about to fall apart because a

generation (or two) of younger employees is not appropriately re-

spectful. There is not, however, much in the way of current litera-

ture that attempts to define respect or clarify what it means in

practice, in the context of work.

We found this gap between chatter at Starbucks and research

results to be an irresistible one. So, we decided to try to find out

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