Generational Dynamics

The senior manager says it with absolute certainty: "Young people today don't want to work. They expect to be promoted in six months. When I started, I was at the bottom for five years and I was grateful for it." The intern hearing this thinks: "You bought a house on a single salary. I can barely afford rent with two jobs. We are not playing the same game."

Both of them are telling the truth. And that is exactly the problem.

The "pay your dues" philosophy made perfect sense in an economy where dues produced returns. If you spent five years at the bottom of a company in the 1980s or 1990s, you could reasonably expect a salary that kept pace with the cost of living, job security that lasted decades, a pension at the end, and a genuine path to the middle class. The loyalty was transactional — you gave years, the company gave stability. The contract worked because both sides honoured it.

That contract no longer exists. In today's Kenya, a young professional entering the workforce faces: housing costs that have tripled relative to wages, job contracts that are often temporary or informal, companies that restructure every two years and cut whoever was hired last, and the near-total disappearance of employer-funded pensions. When you tell this person to "be patient and pay your dues," they hear: "Give us your best years and get nothing in return." Their impatience is not entitlement. It is economic survival instinct.

What Older Generations Get Right

This is not a one-sided story. There are things that come with time that cannot be shortcut. The ability to read a room. The judgement that comes from having seen three business cycles. The capacity to remain calm in a crisis because you have survived crises before. These are real skills, and they are often invisible to someone who has never needed them. Young professionals who dismiss institutional knowledge as "old-fashioned" are making a mistake — they are confusing outdated methods with outdated wisdom, and those are not the same thing.

What Younger Generations Get Right

Equally, older professionals who dismiss younger workers as "lazy" or "entitled" are missing something important. The young worker who asks "why do we do it this way?" is not being disrespectful. They are often asking a genuine question that nobody has thought to ask in years. The intern who says "I could automate this in an hour" is not insulting your process — they are offering to save you time. And the graduate who leaves after a year is not disloyal; they are responding rationally to a market that punishes loyalty and rewards movement.

Finding Common Ground

The path forward is not for either side to "win." It is for both sides to stop arguing about whose experience is more valid and start examining the actual economics. The senior person needs to acknowledge that the rules changed. The junior person needs to acknowledge that some things take time regardless of the rules. The conversation should not be "pay your dues" or "I deserve more." It should be: "What does a fair exchange of time, skill, and compensation look like right now?" That is a question worth answering together.

The fifty-year-old writes a formal email. Subject line, greeting, body, sign-off. Six paragraphs. Proper punctuation. Sent at 8:47am. The twenty-three-year-old reads it, sighs, and replies on WhatsApp with: "Noted 👍." The fifty-year-old is offended. The twenty-three- year-old has no idea why.

This tiny interaction — repeated thousands of times a day in offices across Kenya — is the source of an enormous amount of workplace friction. And almost nobody stops to examine what is actually happening. It is not about respect. It is not about professionalism. It is about two communication systems that were shaped by completely different technologies, and neither system is inherently superior.

If you grew up writing letters and making phone calls, formality is communication. The structure of an email — the careful greeting, the measured tone, the considered sign-off — is not decoration. It is how you show respect, create clarity, and maintain professional distance. Skipping these elements feels sloppy, dismissive, even rude. It is like showing up to a meeting in pajamas.

If you grew up with instant messaging and social media, speed is communication. You have been trained by technology to value brevity, immediacy, and informal connection. A six-paragraph email about something that could have been a one-line message feels like a waste of time — not because you do not respect the sender, but because in your communication world, efficiency is the highest form of respect. You respond quickly because that is how you show you care.

Where It Goes Wrong

The problem is that each generation interprets the other's style through their own framework. The senior reads a short WhatsApp reply and concludes: disrespectful, careless, unprofessional. The junior reads a long, formal email about a simple request and concludes: bureaucratic, out of touch, wasting my time. Both are wrong. Both are applying their own rules to someone playing by different ones.

Bridging the Gap

The solution is not to force everyone into one style. It is to develop code-switching skills — the ability to change your communication style based on your audience. If your manager values formal email, send formal email. It takes two extra minutes and it buys you trust. If your team member prefers WhatsApp updates, use WhatsApp. It costs nothing and it makes them feel heard.

For teams, it helps to explicitly agree on communication norms. Which channels are for what? What requires an email and what can be a text? What is the expected response time? These conversations feel mundane, but they prevent weeks of accumulated frustration. The team that decides "urgent operational messages go on WhatsApp, formal requests go on email, everything else can wait until the weekly meeting" will spend less time annoyed and more time productive than the team that never has this conversation and assumes everyone operates the same way.

Generational communication conflict is not about who is right. It is about who is willing to adapt. And the professional who can communicate fluently across generations — who can write a proper email when needed and send a quick voice note when appropriate — is the one who will build the strongest relationships and advance the fastest.

The traditional model: the senior person knows everything, the junior person learns in silence, and knowledge flows in one direction — downhill. This model worked when industries changed slowly, when the skills you learned at 25 were the same skills you used at 55, and when institutional knowledge was the most valuable thing a person could accumulate. But we no longer live in that world.

In today's workplace, a twenty-four-year-old may understand digital marketing, data analysis, social media strategy, or AI tools better than their fifty-year-old director — not because the director is incompetent, but because these skills did not exist when the director was learning their craft. The junior person has knowledge that the senior person needs. And the senior person has judgement, relationships, and strategic thinking that the junior person needs. Neither is complete without the other.

This is the logic behind reverse mentorship — a practice where younger employees formally or informally teach senior leaders about emerging trends, technologies, and perspectives. It sounds simple. In practice, it is extremely difficult, because it requires something that most hierarchical workplaces struggle with: it requires the senior person to admit they do not know something.

Why It Meets Resistance

In many Kenyan and East African organisations, seniority is closely tied to authority, and authority is closely tied to knowledge. If the boss does not know something, it feels like a weakness. Being taught by a junior colleague can feel like a demotion, an embarrassment, a threat to one's position. So the senior person avoids asking. They pretend to understand. They nod in meetings when digital terms are thrown around. They delegate anything technology- related to "the young people" without understanding what is being done or why. And gradually, they become disconnected from the very work they are supposed to be leading.

What Good Reverse Mentorship Looks Like

The best reverse mentorship programs are not formal, awkward training sessions. They are structured relationships. A senior leader is paired with a junior employee, and they meet regularly — perhaps once a month — for a conversation that goes both ways. The junior person teaches: "Here is how this new tool works. Here is why our customers are behaving differently online. Here is what young talent is looking for in an employer." The senior person teaches: "Here is how to read a boardroom. Here is how to manage a budget through a crisis. Here is how to navigate politics without losing your integrity."

Both parties learn. Both parties feel valued. And the organisation benefits from a leadership team that is both wise and current — which is rare and extremely valuable.

If you are a senior leader: the bravest thing you can do is say "I do not understand this. Teach me." Your team will respect you more, not less. If you are a junior professional: the smartest thing you can do is learn from the person who has navigated thirty years of the same industry you are just entering. Their stories are not boring. They are data.

The older manager says: "These young people have no respect." The younger employee says: "Respect is earned, not demanded." They are both using the same word and meaning entirely different things — which is why the conversation goes nowhere every single time.

Here is the distinction that almost nobody makes explicit: there are two fundamentally different definitions of respect operating simultaneously in most workplaces, and they come from different generational experiences.

Definition 1: Respect as deference. This means treating someone with formality because of their position, age, or title. You call them "Sir" or "Madam." You do not challenge them in public. You follow instructions without questioning them, at least not openly. This is the version of respect that most older professionals (and most African cultural frameworks) operate from. It is rooted in hierarchy and social order, and it served important functions in communities where elders held accumulated wisdom and younger people genuinely needed guidance to survive.

Definition 2: Respect as regard. This means treating someone as an equal human being — listening to their ideas, valuing their contributions, and treating them with dignity regardless of their title. You can disagree with someone and still respect them. You can question a decision without disrespecting the decision-maker. This is the version of respect that many younger professionals operate from. It is rooted in individual agency and meritocracy — the belief that good ideas should be heard regardless of who says them.

When the Two Collide

The collision happens daily. A junior employee offers a counter-suggestion in a meeting. In their mind, they are showing respect by engaging honestly with the discussion. In their manager's mind, they are being disrespectful by challenging authority in front of others. The junior person feels silenced. The senior person feels undermined. Neither understands what just happened.

In Kenya and East Africa, this collision is amplified by strong cultural norms around age- based hierarchy. "You do not argue with your elders" is not just workplace culture — it is taught from childhood, reinforced in family structures, and embedded in language (the way you address someone older in many African languages literally changes based on age). Young professionals who challenge this norm are often seen as having been "spoiled by the internet" or "corrupted by Western values," when in reality they are simply operating from a different definition of what it means to show respect.

A Way Forward

Both definitions are valid. The question is not which one is correct — it is how to make them coexist. For older professionals: asking for deference without earning regard will hollow out your authority over time. The team that follows you out of fear or obligation will never give you their best thinking — only their compliance. For younger professionals: showing regard without showing any deference can isolate you. Cultures change slowly, and the fastest way to be heard is often to show that you understand the existing norms before you challenge them.

The workplace that thrives is the one where both forms of respect operate: where experience is honoured and fresh thinking is welcomed, where you can disagree without being disloyal, and where age earns you listening — but not immunity from being wrong.

Your best analyst also runs an online shop. Your marketing coordinator makes content on the side. Your receptionist tutors on weekends. You see this and think: they are not committed to this job. But they see it differently. They are not disloyal. They are diversified. And they learned that strategy from watching your generation get retrenched.

The rise of the "side hustle" and "portfolio career" is one of the most misunderstood generational shifts in the modern workplace. Older professionals often see multiple income streams as a sign of divided loyalty or lack of seriousness. Younger professionals see it as basic financial self-defence. And once you understand why, the judgment usually softens.

Consider what young Kenyan professionals have witnessed: parents who gave thirty years to one company and were retrenched with a month's notice. Organisations that announce "restructuring" every two years and eliminate whoever is most expendable. A job market where "permanent" contracts are rare and "temporary" has become the default. In this environment, putting all your financial eggs in one employer's basket is not loyalty — it is risk. And young people who grew up watching that risk materialise made a rational decision: never depend on one income source.

The Economics of the Side Hustle

Let us be honest about the numbers. An entry-level salary in Nairobi, for most industries, does not cover the cost of rent, transport, food, and basic living expenses — let alone savings, healthcare, or supporting family members. The side hustle is not a hobby. It is the difference between surviving and sinking. The young person working their corporate job during the day and their online business at night is not distracted. They are doing what their salary forces them to do.

What Employers Should Actually Worry About

If your employee is doing good work during work hours, meeting deadlines, and contributing to the team — what they do outside of work hours is their business. The company that tries to control its employees' after-hours activities will lose talent to the company that only cares about results. That said, there is a legitimate concern: if the side hustle is competing with the employer, creating conflicts of interest, or causing the employee to underperform during work hours. These are real issues that deserve direct conversation — not blanket policies that treat all outside work as disloyalty.

The smarter approach is to acknowledge reality. Your employees have side hustles. They are not going to stop. What you can do is make your company so compelling — in terms of growth opportunities, fair pay, and meaningful work — that the side hustle stays a side hustle and does not become the main hustle. Because the moment your best people realise they can earn more and feel more valued outside your organisation than inside it, you have already lost them. The resignation letter is just a formality.

The new project management software was installed on Monday. By Wednesday, the twenty-six- year-old had mastered it, set up her dashboard, automated three workflows, and was training her peers. The fifty-two-year-old was still trying to log in. He asked the IT person for help twice. He returned to his spreadsheet. He felt stupid. He did not say anything, but he stopped volunteering for projects that required the new tool.

This scene plays out in organisations every time new technology is introduced. And the way it is handled — or, more often, not handled — creates a quiet but devastating divide that damages morale, productivity, and generational relationships.

Here is what needs to be understood: the speed at which someone adopts new technology is not a measure of their intelligence. It is a measure of their exposure. The twenty-six- year-old has been learning new apps since she was ten. She has an intuitive understanding of how digital tools work because she has used thousands of them. The fifty-two-year-old learned to work with paper, telephone, and face-to-face meetings. His skills are real, valuable, and hard-won — they just do not happen to include navigating a new cloud platform in three days.

The Cost of the Eye Roll

The most damaging thing that happens during technology transitions is not the technology itself. It is the judgment. The sigh from the younger colleague when the older one asks how to share a document. The eye roll during training. The whispered "how does he not know this?" These tiny moments — individually insignificant — accumulate into a message that says: you are obsolete. And that message does real harm. It causes experienced professionals to withdraw, to avoid new tools, to become resistant to change not because they cannot learn, but because the learning environment feels hostile and humiliating.

Better Approaches

For organisations rolling out new technology:

• Train in private, not in front of the team. Nobody wants to be the slowest learner in a room of twenty people. Small group training or one-on-one sessions remove the performance pressure and allow people to ask questions without shame.
• Pair people across generations. Not as "the young person teaches the old person" — but as mutual support. The tech-savvy person helps with the tool. The experienced person shares context about why certain workflows exist. Both learn. Neither feels patronised.
• Give time. Not everyone learns new software in a day. Build a realistic adoption timeline — weeks, not hours — and check in regularly. Progress, not perfection, is the goal.

For younger professionals: the person struggling with the new tool built the systems you inherited. Their knowledge of clients, processes, and institutional history is irreplaceable. Helping them with technology is not charity — it is an investment in a relationship that will teach you things no app ever will.

For older professionals: the discomfort of learning something new is temporary. The cost of refusing to learn is permanent. You do not have to love every new tool. You just have to be willing to try. That willingness alone earns enormous respect from younger colleagues who are watching to see whether you are adapting or surrendering.

Imagine a team where the sixty-year-old's deep industry knowledge combines with the forty- year-old's operational discipline, the thirty-year-old's digital fluency, and the twenty- two-year-old's creativity and comfort with ambiguity. That team would be extraordinary. It would have perspective, speed, wisdom, and innovation all in one room.

Now imagine the reality: the sixty-year-old feels irrelevant, the forty-year-old feels squeezed from both sides, the thirty-year-old feels overlooked, and the twenty-two-year-old feels unheard. They sit in the same meetings. They rarely collaborate. They complain about each other in separate WhatsApp groups. The dream team exists in theory. The dysfunction exists in practice.

This is the opportunity and the challenge of the multigenerational workplace. The potential is enormous. The execution is almost always poor. And it is poor not because the people are wrong, but because nobody intentionally designs the team to succeed across generational lines. It is left to accident, personality, or individual tolerance — none of which scale.

What Gets in the Way

Three things reliably sabotage multigenerational teams:

• Assumptions about competence. The assumption that young means inexperienced and old means out of touch. Both are lazy shortcuts that prevent people from seeing what each individual actually brings.
• Unspoken norms. How do we communicate? When is it okay to disagree? Who speaks first in a meeting? These norms are rarely discussed — they are absorbed, and different generations absorb different ones.
• Competition instead of complementation. The instinct to prove that your way is better, rather than to ask what happens if we combine approaches.

What Works

Teams that successfully leverage generational diversity share a few common practices:

• Explicit norms. They name the rules. "In this team, we challenge ideas, not people." "Disagreement is welcome; dismissiveness is not." This removes the guesswork and makes it safe for everyone to participate.
• Role clarity based on strength, not seniority. The person who leads a project should be the person best suited to lead it — regardless of age. Sometimes that is the most senior person. Sometimes it is the most junior. The team that can flexibly assign leadership based on the task, not the title, outperforms every time.
• Structured knowledge sharing. Not the occasional "lunch and learn" but a regular practice of sharing expertise across the team. The senior finance person explains how to read a balance sheet; the junior designer explains how to use the new analytics platform. Both are teaching. Both are learning. Both are respected.
• Generosity of interpretation. When the older colleague takes long to adopt new tools, assume they are trying rather than resisting. When the younger colleague pushes back on a process, assume they are curious rather than arrogant. Giving each other the benefit of the doubt is the cheapest, most effective team- building strategy that exists.

The Prize

The organisation that cracks multigenerational collaboration gains a competitive advantage that is almost impossible to replicate. You get innovation grounded in experience. You get bold ideas tempered by wisdom. You get speed combined with caution. And you get a culture where people feel valued at every stage of their career — which is the single best predictor of retention, engagement, and performance.

It is not easy. It requires intention, patience, and the humility to accept that no single generation has all the answers. But the team that learns to fight well — to disagree productively, to challenge respectfully, and to combine strengths instead of competing — that team will outperform every homogeneous group every time. The diversity is not the obstacle. The diversity is the superpower. You just have to choose to use it.