Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success. I'm Ashley Milmteit.

This time, generational conflict between women at work. We all know it's there lurking, even if we talk about it behind each other's backs.

I had one assistant who wouldn't even, as ask the phone if she didn't recognize the number.

She was so used to screening calls. We have different attitudes to communication and perhaps to

getting ahead as well. All of the women I've worked with have felt like in their own way,

from their own perspective, are trying to help.

But they're trying based on the information they have and what things were like when they were coming up through the workplace.

Coming up, the first of two shows on different generational perspectives at work.

So I'm starting this show with the generational expert.

Anne Lear is a leadership consultant.

She speaks extensively about not only leadership but the future of work.

And as part of that, of course, she's talking about both incorporating women fully into the workplace and about managing across generations.

And like me, she's Gen X.

I'm smack in my mid-40s, right between two much bigger generational cohorts, the baby boomers and the millennials.

Anne spent many years living and working in Africa, and she says in some parts of the world,

in more traditional societies like a lot of African countries, there'll be far less of a pronounced difference in attitude between generations.

But in the West, we do have this stratification depending on when we were born and what was going

on in the outside world at the time. And the research shows that each generation was shaped by

three different types of events, political, technological, and societal.

And because of that, we each have a collective understanding, a particular way of thinking and being.

So although, yes, we are all Americans, well, some of us.

We have differences. We have more similarities than differences, but we do have differences in what shaped us.

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