By Alvin Aloysius Goh

A few weeks ago, a small physical interaction between an elderly man and a family with a young child escalated into something none of us would have predicted: a fractured back, a police investigation, and a wave of online commentary split largely down generational lines. Some saw a familiar, well-meant social gesture, while others saw a father protecting a boundary around his child.

I have been thinking about it ever since, not because it's a workplace story, but because it isn't one, and yet it explains so much of what could go wrong inside our workplaces with a multi-generational workforce.

Finger-pointing is too easy. We reach for "it's a generational thing" far too quickly. Older employees get labelled resistant to technology, while younger employees get called entitled or thin-skinned, the so-called "strawberry generation". It's a convenient explanation, but perhaps one that stops us from looking more deeply at what is really going on.

I found it interesting how quickly the incident became a conversation about generations: how older people behave, how younger people respond, whose values have changed, and who should have known better.

We do something remarkably similar in the workplace. When people of different ages approach feedback, technology, boundaries or authority differently, we are quick to explain the friction as a “generational thing”.

Intent and impact are not the same thing

Perhaps there is a deeper story and a higher calling towards understanding and managing a multi-generational workforce that will either plague our workplaces or help them thrive.

The clearest lesson from that street-level incident is one that we should bring into every coaching conversation and deliberate workforce planning discussion. Every senior leader should understand that what someone intended and what someone else experienced can be two completely different things, and both are real.

I see this constantly inside organisations:

• A leader believes they gave "direct, honest feedback." The employee experienced it as public embarrassment.
• A manager sends an after-hours message because an issue needs attention, without necessarily expecting an immediate response. The employee experiences it as an unspoken expectation to always be reachable.
• A younger colleague asks for context before executing. A more senior colleague hears that as a challenge to their authority.
• An experienced employee asks for more time on a new system. A younger manager reads that as resistance to change.

None of these people are wrong about their own experience. The leadership discipline is to avoid deciding immediately whose reaction is more valid, and instead ask two separate questions:

1. What was intended?
2. What was the impact?

Intent helps us understand the behaviour, while impact helps us understand its effect. Good leaders don't shame people for good-faith mistakes, but neither should they dismiss real impact simply because "that's not how it was meant."

Why "generational differences" is a diagnosis I no longer trust

I still find the generational lens useful at a macro level. It's a shorthand for real shifts in education, technology, family structure and economic conditions. It becomes destructive the moment we use it to explain an individual.

"Gen Z needs constant praise." "Older workers can't adapt to tech." "Millennials have no loyalty."

These labels may emerge from observable differences across cohorts, but none of them is a diagnosis. None of them tells you whether the real issue is unclear expectations, poor feedback delivery, thin learning support, blocked career mobility, unequal access to flexibility, or a manager who simply can't sit with disagreement.

Age influences a person's experience. It does not determine their capability, ambition or willingness to contribute.

The better question isn't "which generation is the problem?" Rather, in my humble opinion, it's this: what is it about how we've designed work that makes these differences hard to manage?

Most "generational conflict" is a design failure wearing a disguise

Take performance feedback, for example. A younger colleague may want frequent, informal feedback not because they're fragile, but because their work is fast-moving and still being defined. A more experienced colleague may prefer a considered, private conversation not because they can't take feedback, but because they value context and dignity.

Neither preference is wrong. The problem starts when a manager applies one style to everyone and reads any deviation as weakness.

In my performance management executive course, I often share that as line managers, we need to develop a library of reinforcing words and approaches that we can draw on in different circumstances and scenarios, so that we can better meet the needs of different workforce segments.

The same applies to technology adoption. When a seasoned employee struggles with a new platform, we're quick to call it resistance. Often, the real story is rushed training, an unintuitive rollout, no involvement in the change, and no protected time to practise.

And when a younger employee pushes back on a legacy process, we call it impatience, when they may simply be naming an inefficiency everyone else has quietly learned to live with.

The pattern I keep returning to is that the real variable usually isn't age. It's whether people have voice, support, clarity and enough psychological safety to say what's actually going on.

A few questions I ask leaders when "generational friction" comes up:

Is the feedback actually unclear, public, or delivered without respect?

Has this person been consulted, trained and given time to adapt to change, or simply told to adapt? This becomes especially important when organisations are undergoing tremendous transformation and the demands from our stakeholders are increasing with every quarter.

Are decision rights genuinely clear, or is challenge being mistaken for defiance?

Is the workload sustainable, and are different life-stage needs being treated fairly?

Does the culture reward genuine contribution, or does it quietly reward sameness?

A shared operating system beats a set of shared preferences

Diverse teams don't need identical working styles. They need explicit, common expectations.

This doesn't have to be a policy document or another playbook nobody reads. At the team level, it can be a short, practical conversation covering how feedback is raised and received, what warrants a call versus a message, what a reasonable response time looks like, how decisions get made and challenged, what professional boundaries mean around humour, language and after-hours contact, and how disagreement gets handled without public shaming.

Yes, it's tough. But these are starting questions that should provoke thought about how we work together.

When these rules remain unspoken, the people with the most seniority or cultural influence quietly get to define "normal", and everyone else is judged against a standard they were never invited to help set.

Making the operating system explicit is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and it costs nothing.

Are there sacred cows that cannot be sacrificed? Are we too afraid to rock the boat?

Boundaries are legitimate. So is proportion.

People need to be able to say: I would prefer feedback in private. Can we clarify what requires a response after hours and what can wait until the next working day? I understand your intent, but the impact on me wasn't positive.

These are early signals that, if heard, can prevent resentment from hardening into something worse. At the same time, boundaries and preferences have to coexist with legitimate organisational and role requirements. Both leaders and employees need enough self-awareness to recognise their own triggers and understand where the other person is coming from.

Not every discomfort or disagreement needs to escalate straight into confrontation. I think of it as proportionate response: raise it directly where it's safe and appropriate to do so, bring in a manager if that doesn't resolve it, and use HR or grievance channels when the issue is serious, repeated, or shaped by a power imbalance.

Facts should guide the process, not assumptions or a social-media-style narrative.

Reciprocal learning, not one-way mentoring

Many organisations still treat multi-generational strategy as a one-way transfer: senior people mentor the junior ones. That model is only half the picture.

Experienced employees carry institutional memory, stakeholder judgement and pattern recognition that no process manual captures. Younger employees bring digital fluency, sharper instincts on inclusion and boundaries, and a genuine willingness to question inefficient routines.

The answer isn't a "reverse mentoring" programme with a trendy name. Rather, it's reciprocal learning built into the work itself: cross-generational project teams working on real problems, pairing people on transformation assignments, communities of practice where expertise is demonstrated through contribution rather than title, and knowledge-transfer sprints before role changes or system rollouts.

Careers are multi-stage, not age-defined

A 25-year-old and a 55-year-old can both want rapid development. A 62-year-old may want to lead a transformation or move into project-based work, not quietly retire into the background.

Singapore's own labour market direction, supporting longer, multi-stage careers and age-friendly job design as our workforce ages, reinforces this as a business imperative, not a concession.

The better career conversation isn't age-based. Rather, it's: what do you want to do more of? Which capabilities do you want to build or pass on? What conditions help you do your best work?

Where I land

Stop letting generational labels do the work that real diagnosis should be doing.

Build explicit team-level agreements instead of assuming everyone shares your definition of "normal". Redesign access to learning, mobility and flexibility around capability and contribution, not age or tenure. And hold managers accountable for creating conditions where people can set boundaries, disagree constructively, and still be heard.

Good leadership was never about making everyone the same. It's about designing the conditions for genuinely different people to do good work together, with dignity intact on both sides.

I would like to hear from other HR and business leaders on this: when "generational conflict" shows up on your team, what's usually the real issue underneath it, and how are you helping your managers diagnose it properly?