Here's a task, choose only one challenge of working across generations and what people can do about it, and you could end up writing about the differences in loyalty, trust, attitudes, work patterns, learning, clothes, expectations and so much more. What I've done here is to narrow the focus to a single topic which is organisational change.

A standard complaint I hear (and I'm sure you have heard it as well) is that younger people think there should be large-scale changes in organisations yesterday! Whereas older folks believe that nothing should ever be changed. We were told that younger people are unwilling to wait, think that changes should be made as quickly as possible and that they don't want to take the time needed to think through the potential impact of the changes. We also hear that older people don't want things to change because they are afraid of the impact of the changes and that they will be less valuable or will be set aside if the changes are put into place. What we were told was that at the centre of much of the generational conflict is this fundamental difference in attitude towards change. But is it really true that younger people like and embrace change, and that older people dislike and reject it?

Over the past four years my team and I have been conducting a study at the Center for Creative Leadership entitled Emerging Leaders: Revolution, Evolution, or Status Quo?, which is focused on generational differences in the workplace. We questioned the different generations' attitudes towards change and based on over 3,000 responses, we found that people from all generations said that they were anxious, worried, stressed or apprehensive about any form of change. In fact, younger people were just as likely as older people to be thinking about what kind of impact change will bring to their work and position in the organisation.

What we discovered was that resistance to change is not an issue of age but it is an issue of what the change entails and how the change is going to be implemented. People of every generation think of change as a problem because they believe that:

1) The change is likely to reduce available resources;

2) It is likely that the change will create more work for them;

3) The transformation is probably unnecessary; and

4) Adjustments will probably be implemented poorly.

So if you can't count on younger people to be happy about any form of change that comes along any more than you can expect older people to resist any proposed adjustments, what should you do?

Regardless of the generation or age of the employees, executives need to work hard to convince staff that the particular transformation is in the worker's long-term best interests. Employees need to be told as clearly as possible, what the change is and how it will impact their future, in the group of employees own generational language. A team of older people may want to know how the changes will better the previous way of doing things whereas the younger ones may want to know how the change will help them in the future.

Often executives simply assert that people in the organisation need to trust that the change is a good idea, will work out and is for the best. But a proactive executive or manager needs to be able to sell the change on its merits by asking questions such as:

• Why is it going to make the company better?
• What is it going to do to make the employee's work better, easier or more productive?
• How is it going to lead to higher pay, more time off and better opportunities for the employee?

Both older and younger employees are going to want the answers to these questions before they can whole-heartedly embrace the change.

Fundamentally, people embrace changes that they think will make things better for themselves and dislike (in fact, dread) changes that they perceive will make work more difficult for them. Executives and managers need to figure out how the transformation is going to make things better for the employees then communicate that at the ground-level. Resisting change is about being threatened by the proposed adjustment and not about chronological age or the generation you were born into. So if change is in the air, don't assume that the younger people will automatically be for it and the older folks will just as instinctively be against it. It's your job to develop a case that convinces all that the change is for the best.

Dr Jennifer Deal, research scientist

Center for Creative Leadership

www.ccl.org