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70 Retaining Top Employees

Boomer relationships with their managers tend as a result to
be somewhat “easier” (in the social sense)—less prickly or con-
frontational than relationships between Gen-Xers and their man-
agers. On the other hand, Boomers (as we’ve already seen)
expect leadership, guidance, and authority from their managers.
They typically deem it important that their managers act as a
role model; even when top performers have moved beyond the
need for role modeling from their managers, they will still
expect it from them as an outworking of the corporate culture.
Work Relationship with Peers
The same factors impact the Boomer relationship with their
peers. A Boomer is more likely to have a strong overlap between
business colleagues and “buddies” than Gen-Xers, who more
typically have several categories of friends, with little overlap.
Boomers also have a stronger inherent commitment to team
work and therefore tend to work together more naturally, pool-
ing resources and ideas. Indeed, in an environment that doesn’t
provide such an opportunity of collaboration (preferably face to
face—this is not the Internet generation) Boomer top employees
will feel alienated and uncomfortable.

Virtual Working
A good example of the Boomer attitude in work relation-
ships with peers is the pendulum effect in recent years of
the move to virtual working—working for an organization,but from
home or a home office or permanently on the road.
Although employees of all ages originally embraced virtual working
as a freeing,empowering concept,many Boomers have in recent years
returned to the more classic work environment,largely because
they’ve realized that the asocial nature of virtual working doesn’t suit
their personal needs.
Contrast this with the Gen X employees who have probably
already spent half their adult life alone in front of a computer screen
and for whom virtual working is a perfectly natural activity. For them,
going into work every day and working face to face with team mem-
bers is much more unnatural.