Leading intergenerational teams: when the leadership map no longer fits

The real challenge of leading intergenerational teams

Most conversations about leading intergenerational teams start in the wrong place.

They begin with the easy stereotypes:

• Gen Z want this.
• Millennials need that.
• Boomers always come at things this way…

It all sounds very sensible. It’s also a distraction. The real leadership challenge isn’t understanding different generations. It’s recognising when you’re using an out-of-date map and mistaking familiarity for truth.

Why traditional leadership signals no longer work

When leadership advice uses the wrong landmarks

Remote and hybrid work didn’t just change where people work. It changed which leadership signals still mean anything. Visibility, responsiveness, presence, tenure. These used to be reliable landmarks. Leaders could look around, read the room, and feel confident they knew what was going on.

Now those signals are weaker, noisier, and often misleading. So leaders compensate. More meetings. More updates. More presence on screens. And when things still don’t quite work, generational explanations can rush in to fill the gap:

• They’re disengaged.
• They don’t have the work ethic.
• They need more structure.

Often, what’s actually happening is much simpler. Leaders are navigating new terrain with old signposts and blaming the people who don’t respond to them anymore. Behaviour is the terrain now. In distributed, intergenerational teams, leadership doesn’t sit in role or title. It shows up in behaviour. In practice, this shows up in the everyday moments leaders rarely think about.

In intergenerational teams, leadership shows up in small, repeatable behaviours such as:

• Who speaks first.
• How silence is interpreted.
• Whether disagreement feels safe or risky.
• How decisions are really made.

These micro-behaviours form the ground your team walks on every day. When leaders step in quickly, fill gaps, or over-explain, they often believe they’re being helpful. What they may be doing instead is narrowing thinking, increasing dependency, and signalling that judgement still lives at the top. That effect cuts across generations. Younger team members may back away. Older ones may defer. The outcome looks like a people issue.

It’s a design issue.

Visibility is a false comfort in modern leadership

One of the most seductive traps for leaders right now is visibility.

• Being present.
• Being active.
• Being seen to be involved.

Visibility feels like leadership because it once was. But in remote, multi-generational teams, it tells you very little about impact. You can be highly visible and still slow decisions down, crowd out thinking, and train people to wait rather than act.

Real impact is quieter

It shows up when teams make good calls without you. When progress holds in your absence. When judgement travels through-out a team, rather than sticking to hierarchy.

If your leadership only works when you’re present, it’s not working as well as you think.

The generational question leaders rarely ask

Most leadership writing stops here. We ask leaders to be curious about other generations, but we rarely ask them to interrogate their own starting point. Every leader is shaped by the conditions under which they earned credibility.

Maybe it was being first in and last to leave.
“Of course I don’t need to be anywhere else except in this deck of slides at 7pm…”

Having answers.
Mastering detail.
Moving fast.
Being visible in the room.

Those behaviours may have been exactly right at the time.

The problem comes when leaders unconsciously treat their formative experience as neutral, rather than as one version of how work used to operate. That’s when bias creeps in. Not because leaders are uncaring. But because they assume what worked for them should still work for everyone else.

Age isn’t the issue in intergenerational leadership

Age isn’t the issue. Assumptions are.

This is the part that rarely gets said. You can be a young leader with very old assumptions about control and presence.
You can be a highly experienced leader who adapts beautifully to ambiguity and distance. Intergenerational tension is often less about age, and more about unexamined belief.

Beliefs like:

• If I can’t see it, it’s not happening.
• Silence means disengagement.
• Experience equals judgement.
• That worked for me, it’ll work for them.

None of these are universally true anymore. Holding them unquestioned doesn’t make you demanding…it makes you misaligned.

Re-reading the map

Anyone who’s spent time with a map knows this moment.

You’re following a path that looks right.
It’s clear.
Familiar.
Reassuring.

But the ground tells a different story and you’re up to your knees in bog.

Leadership now requires the same humility. Not abandoning everything you know. But checking whether the landmarks you trust still tell the truth. That means asking better questions of yourself before asking more of your team.

• Where do I default to presence when clarity would help more?
• What do I interpret as resistance that might simply be thinking?
• Which of my instincts come from a different working world altogether?

These aren’t generational questions. They’re leadership ones.

What matters when leading intergenerational teams

Leading intergenerational teams isn’t about becoming an expert in age groups.

It’s about designing conditions where judgement can surface, contribution isn’t tied to volume or visibility, and people aren’t forced to perform versions of work that no longer fit.

That work starts with the leader.
Not their age.
Not their intent.

But their willingness to examine the map they’re using and adjust before asking everyone else to.

If you recognise this pattern in yourself or your sales leadership team, this is exactly what we help with at Sales Untangled.

Speak to us about leadership capability development.