Stop Talking About Your Generation

There have been thousands (tens of thousands? millions?1500382921100) of articles published by now about the millennial generation and how its members are different from everybody else. So when Laura Finfer and Lois Tamir, who run an executive coaching firm in New York called Leadership Excellence Consulting, found themselves struggling a few years ago to effectively coach a new wave of executives in their 30s,1500392632152 they wondered if it might be a millennial thing.

"We couldn't really put our finger on it, but it felt different," said Finfer. "It felt harder," said Tamir.

But Finfer and Tamir also happen to have psychology Ph.D.s from large Midwestern universities with reputations for quantitative excellence.1500394367970 This meant first of all that they could count, and thus see that, when they started contemplating these issues three years ago, most of their 30-something clients weren't even millennials (the first of whom were born, depending on which definition you prefer, either in 1980 or a year or two later). It also meant that they knew how to design a research study, which they then set about doing, consulting the rich psychology literature on behavioral differences by age and the spottier literature on generational differences, collecting data on their own coaching engagements, running a bunch of regressions and concluding that, naaah, it's not a millennial thing. People in their 30s are just different from people in their 40s, who in turn are different from people in their 50s.