How to Lead a Four-Generation Workforce
Join HBS alumna and McKinsey-Award-winning author Tamara J. Erickson for an evening of practical insights on engaging each generation of your workforce.

If their interactions with one another are leading your employees to ask, “What are they thinking?!!!”, you may be seeing the signs of a generational clash. The four generations in today's workforce have different assumptions about what they want and expect from their work experience.  Understanding those differences – and what drives them – is key to helping your employees work together effectively and to a creating a culture that engages talented individuals of all ages.
 
No one is better suited to help you navigate this landscape than Tamara Erickson, widely respected expert on building talent and enhancing productivity. Tammy was recently named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50.  Her work is based on extensive research on the changing workforce and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration. Tammy has authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles, including “It’s Time to Retire Retirement,” winner of the McKinsey Award, an MIT Sloan Management Review article, and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. She recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace:  Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation; What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead and Getting the Career You Want; and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work. Her blog “Across the Ages” is featured weekly on Harvard Business School Publishing Online (http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/).  Tammy is Managing Director of nGenera Collaboration Services and President of the nGenera Innovation Network.
 
During her evening with us, Tammy will discuss:
 

•  How to look at work behavior through the lens of an individual’s background and experiences – how those experiences have influenced the evolution of broad generational patterns
• Why our own assumptions and values often lead us to misinterpret others’ actions, with specific examples of some of the most frequently misunderstood generation conflicts emerging in today’s workforce
• How each generation’s experience with technology has shaped fundamental assumptions about how to get things done
• Practical approaches using each generation’s values in positive practices within the corporation
• Specific ideas that attract the changing workforce, including the role of lateral career moves, “task not time,” no “prove it” tasks, cyclic work, bell-shaped or even “carillon” career paths, and many others.

Event Details

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

6:30 - 8:15 p.m.

Hawes 101, HBS 

6:30 - 7:00: Check-in/Networking

7:00 - 8:15: Program

$20 per person for HBSWA Members & Each Guest

$35 per person for Non-members Alums and Each Guest

 
Please Click Here to Register

Please note that Harvard University Parking may charge $5 for parking at any event on campus based on parking space availability. HBSWA does not offer refunds to its events.

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and widely respected expert on collaboration and innovation – on building talent and enhancing productivity – and on the nature of work in the intelligent economy. She was recently named one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50, a biennial guide created by Dearlove and Crainer and published in The (London) Times. Her work is based on extensive research on the changing workforce and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration. Tammy has authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles, including “It’s Time to Retire Retirement,” winner of the McKinsey Award, an MIT Sloan Management Review article, and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. She recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace. Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation, What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead and Getting the Career You Want and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work. Her blog “Across the Ages” is featured weekly on HBSP Online.  Tammy is Managing Director of nGenera Collaboration Services and President of the nGenera Innovation Network.