If you are leading a young company today, you are almost certainly managing several different ideas of what “doing a good job” looks like. One colleague believes real commitment is staying online until everything is finished, even if it means late nights. Another takes pride in tight project planning and polished deliverables. Someone younger on the team cares about meaningful impact, flexibility, and mental health in the same breath. None of these views are wrong, but when they collide without structure, they turn into constant low level friction.
It is tempting to frame this as a generational problem, as if age alone created the conflict. In reality, what often fails is the operating system of the company. Tension appears when people who grew up in very different work environments are told to collaborate, yet never receive a clear and shared definition of what “good work”, “ownership”, or “urgency” mean in this specific organisation.
When that definition is missing, everyone falls back on the habits they already know. Older teammates may equate dedication with being physically or visibly present. Younger teammates may equate professionalism with delivering work within agreed hours and protecting their personal time. Each group then judges the other through its own lens. The seniors conclude that the juniors have weak work ethic. The juniors conclude that the seniors are unreasonable or out of touch. The founder ends up mediating conflicts that feel personal, but are actually symptoms of vague systems.
That is why it helps to stop thinking of culture as a mood and start treating it as a system. A mood depends on personalities and daily emotions. A system is made of choices about what the company rewards, protects, and tolerates. Once you adopt that lens, conflicting work values across generations become design questions instead of moral debates.
Think of a situation where a senior engineer complains that a younger hire “disappears” after six in the evening. At the same time, that younger hire tells you they are simply following the agreed working hours and feel blindsided by last minute demands. Both experiences are real. The underlying issue is that no one has explicitly defined where flexibility ends and reliability begins. Without that line, each person assumes their own version is the default.
The starting point is to make your cultural ideals concrete. Many founders like to say they want high ownership, low drama, and no politics. These phrases sound inspiring but do little to guide daily behaviour. Ask yourself what high ownership would actually look like if people from different age groups tried to act on it. Does it mean replying to messages at all hours. Speaking up early when a risk appears. Taking initiative to fix a broken process even if it is not part of your job description. If you cannot describe it in observable behaviour, your team will rely on their past experience to decide how to behave.
Next, examine the places where reality is already drifting away from your stated ideals. Where do you see side conversations, unspoken frustrations, or passive aggressive remarks that never reach a formal channel. Where are people making jokes about age that are not really jokes. The senior colleague who refers to younger staff as “kids”. The younger colleague who calls older teammates “dinosaurs” in private chats. These are not isolated slips. They signal that your values around respect and collaboration do not yet have strong anchors in process or in consequences.
Your own patterns as a founder or leader are part of this system as well. Reflect on the behaviours you consistently praise in public. Do you only celebrate those who pull late nights and save failing projects at the last minute. Do you quietly appreciate colleagues who manage boundaries well but never mention them as role models. Do you welcome bold questions from senior leaders but react defensively when a newer or younger employee challenges an old way of doing things. The team learns more from these signals than from any value statement written on a slide.
To turn generational tension into something more constructive, you can introduce a deliberate practice of “culture translation”. This can take place during onboarding, during quarterly retrospectives, or in a dedicated workshop. Bring people from different age groups into the same room and choose a few key words that matter in your company, such as “responsive”, “respectful”, “flexible”, “urgent”, and “ownership”. Then ask each person to describe, in simple terms, what they expect under those words in a normal week of work, not in a crisis.
You may discover that a younger team member hears “responsive” and thinks of a reply within a few working hours, mainly during office time, with any late night message acknowledged the next day. A more senior team member may interpret “responsive” as “reachable whenever a client or investor needs something”, regardless of time. The point of the exercise is not to decide who is right or wrong. The purpose is to place the different expectations on the table where everyone can see them, and then agree on a company standard that is explicit and realistic. Once you reach that standard, you document it, share it, and refer back to it whenever misunderstandings happen.
You can go a step further by creating a simple matrix that distinguishes between non negotiable practices and flexible practices. You cannot please every preference, but you can clarify where the line is. For example, meeting regulatory requirements, safeguarding client data, and hitting agreed external deadlines are likely non negotiable. Working hours on quieter days, camera rules for internal calls, or preferred tools for deep work can sit in the flexible category, with clear guardrails. When employees know which areas are open to negotiation and which are fixed, conflicts shrink. People stop trying to renegotiate the fundamentals and instead focus on tailoring the zones where they do have control.
There also needs to be a reliable way to raise and resolve values related tensions. In many teams, younger employees keep quiet because they fear being labeled as difficult, while older employees hold back because they fear being labeled as resistant to change. Resentment grows in the silence. You can design a simple rule. If someone feels a pattern has crossed a line three times, they bring it to their manager with specific examples, and the manager is expected to organise a joint conversation within a clear time window. This sets an agreed trigger and response, so that escalation is not based on personality or courage alone.
Role clarity is another quiet source of generational conflict. When roles and decision rights are poorly defined, people fall back on age based assumptions. A senior colleague may step into decisions that belong to a younger product owner, simply because they associate seniority with final authority. A younger colleague may hold back from making a call and instead wait for consensus that never arrives, because they were taught to defer. The solution is not glamorous, but it is powerful. For each role, you spell out what decisions they own, where they must consult others, and where they simply need to inform the rest of the team. Whenever the organisation changes shape, you revisit these definitions.
You can support this with a habit at the start of any major project. Before discussing tasks, ask out loud: who owns the overall outcome and who owns the key decisions. Once this is clear to everyone, it becomes much harder for generational assumptions about hierarchy to override the structure. People may still disagree, but at least they know who is accountable and who has the right to decide.
Feedback systems are another area where generational expectations diverge sharply. Many older professionals built their careers in environments where feedback was infrequent, top down, and often linked mainly to mistakes. Younger professionals, especially those who grew up in more participative cultures or tech driven workplaces, expect regular feedback, both positive and corrective, and they often assume that feedback can flow in both directions. If your company relies only on one annual review, you increase the risk that each generation feels ignored or misjudged.
A more balanced approach has several layers. One to one conversations between managers and team members create a space for coaching, correction, and alignment. Peer feedback sessions allow colleagues to talk about working styles and collaboration without always pulling hierarchy into the room. Occasional notes from the founder or senior leadership about what they are observing in the culture and where they hope to steer it signal that values are not frozen documents but ongoing choices. This compound structure makes it easier for people of different ages to feel heard and to adjust without waiting for a crisis.
Ultimately, a useful test is to imagine yourself stepping away from the company for two weeks. Would your team have enough shared language, norms, and processes to handle conflicting work values across generations without you acting as referee in every disagreement. If the honest answer is no, then your culture still relies too much on your presence and too little on systems.
Multigenerational teams are now the default in most startups and scale ups. Labour markets, demographic shifts, and global hiring mean that different life stages and work histories will sit together in the same Slack channels and meeting rooms. You can treat that reality as a permanent source of friction or as an asset that needs proper design.
When you take the time to define behaviour clearly, separate what cannot move from what can, and build simple yet robust paths for feedback and escalation, the sharpness of generational conflict softens. Differences in values become data about range rather than reasons for blame. People learn to translate instead of judge. In that environment, culture is no longer an invisible tug of war between past and future. It becomes what it was meant to be from the start, a set of deliberate agreements about how you choose to work together, regardless of which year you were born.
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