Lindsey Pollak, Multigenerational Work Expert, Author, Speaker
Lindsey Pollak is the leading expert on the millennial generation and today’s multigenerational workplace. Often called a “translator,” she advises organizations and individuals on how to thrive in today’s unprecedented five-generation workforce.
Lindsey is also the New York Times bestselling author of Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders and Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World and The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace
Her speaking audiences and consulting clients have included over 250 corporations, law firms, conferences and universities, including Citi, Estée Lauder, Facebook, GE, J.P. Morgan, LinkedIn, PwC, Shearman & Sterling, Yale, Harvard, Wharton and Stanford.
https://www.lindseypollak.com/
Grab Lindsey’s books here: https://www.lindseypollak.com/books/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:58] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services, I’m Bruce Eckfeldt I’m your host. And our guest today is Lindsey Pollak. She is a multigenerational workplace expert. We're going to learn a little bit more about her and her background. She's also an author. She's written a couple books, New York Times bestselling book, Becoming the Boss. She also wrote Getting From College to Career. And most recently. Her new book is The Remix How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace. And we're gonna talk a lot about that and about what we can learn as business leaders and service based companies about what it means to run a multigenerational workplace. So I'm excited for the conversation. Is a great topic for our audience with that. Lindsay, welcome to the program.
[00:01:34] Thanks for having me, Bruce. Glad to be here.
[00:01:35] So why don't we start with your background. How did you get to become the multigenerational workplace expert? What was the experience that you had and how did you get into this role?
[00:01:44] It is a great question. And I love to tell the story because I think it's a sign of how when you follow your interests, kind of wild things happen.
[00:01:53] My first job out of graduate school was at a magazine called Working Woman, which was launching a website at the time. And it was my dream job. I loved career advice. I loved learning about my own career. It was like the perfect way to start in New York City. I grew up in Connecticut and it was unfortunate that the Web site went bankrupt about 18 months after I joined. So the dream job included in the dot com bust, and I use that as an opportunity to start freelancing while I was job hunting. So I was writing career based articles. I was editing. I had some connections in the book industry. So I was working on book proposals and kind of book doctoring and just really any kind of writing work I could get my hands on. And I accidentally never found a job. And that was beginning of my business. So it kind of grew. And the surprise I really thought I wanted to be a writer. I was really enjoyed writing, especially long form. But what happened was I started to get work teaching, writing classes, corporate writing, business, writing through various friends and colleagues that I had in the writing world. And I really loved the speaking piece. And because I was young, I started speaking on college campuses about how to get a job in the new digital workforce.
[00:03:04] I started blogging about how I was building my career and my business. I was writing newsletters for women's business clubs and giving speeches. And that led to my first book, which you mentioned getting from college to career, which led to the attention of LinkedIn, who hired me as their very first campus ambassador. So they hired me to go speak to college students about how to build LinkedIn, profile somebody. Always, always, always. Thank LinkedIn for that amazing opportunity. I was such a fan of the site and it really gave me my platform and I really thought that was the business. And here's where kind of fate intervened, which is that the word millennial sort of exploded on to the scene around 2008 around the Obama campaign was when it really started to gain prominence and companies started to call me out of the blue and say, you know, we hear that you teach college students how to build their careers. Could you teach us how to hire and understand these college students who we want to recruit? And like any good entrepreneur, I said, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm like busily writing up a, you know, a sales team. And that really transitioned me into the corporate world. And I was sort of known as one of the very first millennial experts. It was unintended.
[00:04:16] But I kind of grew and I did that for about 10 years, wrote my second book, Becoming the Boss, to help millennials move into leadership. And then I noticed this other shift a couple of years ago, which was OK. Millennials have been here a long time. They're in their 30s now. They're running for president. They're running companies, their partners. They're you know, they're not kids. And while Gen Z is are coming in and we can talk about them, what really started to interest me, partly because I'm getting older, too, is that millennials are here, but so are all the rest of us. And companies started to talk about the multi generational work environment. And I'll wrap up with this, that it's not just that young people are coming in, but the rest of us are working longer and later in our careers. So the remix, my most recent book and most of the work that I'm doing as a speaker now is really helping people not just talk about millennials and Gen Zeese coming in, but how to maintain a workplace where we have five generations working together for really the first time in history. And I've just found the whole topic fascinating. And I've been really fortunate that I've been able to keep building my business through all of these different transitions.
[00:05:17] Yeah. No, it's been an interesting kind of point. Is that. Because.
[00:05:21] Because our older generations are actually staying in the workforce longer than we kind of, I guess, originally planned or originally thought they may be in the workforce. It is, or at least historically they're in there longer, which creates a much broader sort of span of generations that are actually interacting and working together. Nervous, I imagine, too. Just the nature of work is so much more kind of team based and collaborative that it's even forcing the issue even more in terms of what's happening in terms of dynamic workplace cultures.
[00:05:47] Absolutely. And work is a lot less physical than it used to be in previous areas. So a stat that I like to share is with more Americans over the age of 85 in the workforce today than ever in history. Double the number than a generation ago. So people are working longer. Not just because they need to perhaps financially, but also because they're healthier and the jobs don't require lifting things up and ready made big machinery. So the collaborative nature, but also the knowledge based work is really affecting the age of people as well.
[00:06:19] So why don't we sort of baseline some of this in terms of what do we mean by generation? What do we mean by millennials?
[00:06:25] They give give for people that have a big sense of what it is to talk about generations. Give us some kind of ground rules in terms of when we talk about generations, what are they, what defines a generation? What are the generations that are kind of in place right now in terms of the workforce?
[00:06:39] You got it. And I'm totally I totally understand that some people don't like this theory. Right. I think we're all human beings. What does it matter when you're born? The reason I find it interesting and helpful is that the times in which you're born and come of age and enter the workforce really affect your expectations. So if you come into the workforce at a time when email doesn't exist, you're going to have a different skill set, different expectations than somebody who comes in, you know, in the workforce today. So I'm not saying that we're all fundamentally different. What I'm saying is our experiences or skill sets, our expectations are different based on the times in which we're born and the numbers that I go with or the Pew Research Center, I think they're the most reputable. And we really start with the traditional the World War 2 Greatest Generation. They were born before 1945 and that era is still in the workforce, a couple million, but those are people in their 70s and 80s. So primarily out of the workforce, but often retired with a pension. Right. And worked at one company their whole career. Then you have the baby boomers for nineteen forty six to 1964 and that generation is the largest ever born into America. Seventy six million people were born in that time, and the boomers really dominated the workplace and all of culture in the United States for about 50 years because they were just so big, you know, just massive, massive, massive, massive.
[00:07:57] And even today. Seventy five percent of governors and Congress people are still baby boomers. I mean, this is sort of like the unending generation. And they are continuing to work because they're living longer, healthier lives. So the boomers are still actively engaged. Then you have my generation. And I think yours, generation X, we were born sixty five to 80 and we were a very small generation following after the boomers, they called us the baby bust. So we were just never large enough to kind of take over all those leadership roles. We were always kind of second class compared to the boomers. So there are about 76 million boomers born only about fifty five million Gen Xers, so significantly smaller generation than after the US. You have the children of the boomers. So another big generation in the millennials, also known as Generation Y. But there's still a little bit smaller than the boomers. So big, but not quite as big as their boomer parents. Millennials are born about nineteen eighty one to nineteen ninety six, and now Gen Zee is the last one to enter, born nineteen ninety seven and later suggest graduating from high school and college. We're now out of letters so kind of a bummer.
[00:09:01] I feel that we started X but there was an alpha. So you heard it here first.
[00:09:09] But Gen Zee are the children of Xers like us, so they're going to track very small. So what you have is this very dominant boomer generation and it's very dominant millennial generation. And that's why when you hear people talk about this topic, I've heard people say like, wait, Gen X Y, you never heard of them because the boomers and millennials often dominate the conversation.
[00:09:27] Yeah, I'm sure just because of their size. And so we talk about these dates and we talk about kind of the time frames. But, you know, tell us more about what it really means to be part of that generation. I mean, what are the to be part of a generation? You know, it's more than just being born at a certain time. It's really being influenced by the key things that happened during those periods.
[00:09:47] I mean, what what are some of the events and some of the things that that define kind of the values or the expectations as you talk about, you know, whether it's technology, things like email or world events or what are the things that go into kind of impacting how a generation thinks or their values or they're kind of the expectations they have when it comes to work?
[00:10:08] Yeah, I like the way you're describing it. And not everybody feels exactly the same way as some people were born in different country or they feel like an old soul. Not everybody fits into these categorizations, but they're a couple of major factors. Each for the traditionalists, it's absolutely World War Two, right? Fifty percent of men served in the military. So that military command and control, loyalty, integrity, you know, all of that is really the mindset of that generation. Even if you were a woman, you were probably married to or had a son or brother cousin who was in the military. So that era is very much about loyalty and structure. The baby boomers kind of rebelled against that a little. But I think what's most notable about the boomers is just the sheer size of the boomers wanted to march against the Vietnam War that had an impact. Civil rights, women's rights, all of those major movements have an impact on that generation. They're also the first television generation. So conspicuous consumption, consumer debt. All that starts with the baby boomers. And I think what's really interesting, I was think of the quintessential boomer, Steve Jobs, because he was like meditating and barefoot. You know, it's sort of a hippie, but he was also fiercely competitive and a billionaire. So it's that combination of wanting to change the world, but also wanting to acquire and wanting to be successful and beat the competition. So your collective is a big group, but you're also competitive as a big group. You know, a lot of people in your world and I think we still see that with the boomers today.
[00:11:32] Gen Xers, I think are kind of the odd men and women out. We're very independent. I think we kind of saw that the boomers were always going to be dominant. So we had technology, we had personal computers, we had video games. We were sort of the era of the home computing revolution. We also were the children of the absolute spike in the divorce rate, which was something that the baby boomers led, which led to that phenomenon of latchkey kids, which is that we had fewer siblings, we had fewer kids in our classes and many of our parents were divorced. So we'd come home to an empty house. And the story was kind of let yourself in with a key. But I think what's more important about that is the independence of microwaving yourself a snack. Right, or playing a video game alone against the computer. Because in the workplace, what that means is Gen Xers are actually the most entrepreneurial. We kind of came in and said, well, there's not really a place for me in this hierarchical baby boomer dominated world. So if you look at Silicon Valley, the Google guys, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, you know, certainly there's the earlier days of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but a lot of that kind of Web based Google era Silicon Valley is really led by Gen Xers who said, I want to create a whole different culture of what work means. So that model, I think, was really influential for Gen Xers to see that work life balance was perhaps possible. Right. That getting out of the corporate structure was possible.
[00:12:56] We're somewhat the outsiders. And then millennials as children of the boomers were again another large generation. And they're kind of born into, of course, the Internet as digital natives. But they're very much part of these huge networks like Facebook. Right. And YouTube. And so they bought into this collectivism while still being very competitive. I think in a lot of ways that they were part of these very, very big movements like social media. And a lot of people call millennials the first global generation, because while a Gen X or in the US and a Gen X or France might not really feel like they have that much in common because millennials all around the world had Facebook, they really feel like they were part of something similar to people in hundreds of countries. So the impact that has is is really, really interesting. I think the other piece you have to talk about with millennials is student loan debt, that the price of getting an education became so high that so many of the decisions that they need to make in their careers are really driven by that massive debt. They also came of age at a time when it was almost impossible to make a career at one company. They were the kids of all the parents who got laid off in the outsourcing eighties. So their expectation of what work is is very different. They've always had emails, so they expect that you can work remotely because you don't have to be in an office. You know, a Gen X or boomer might not have that expectation.
[00:14:16] And now to a really quick story about Gen 3. Have a 7 year old daughter, and I'm thinking, well, what's she going to be like? The millennials are gonna have to manage her generation. You know what's different? And I mean, I'm raising her. I see her every day. And I was kind of figuring it out. We were on vacation in Maine and we walked into our hotel room and my 7 year old says into the air of our hotel room. Alexa, what's the weather? And I thought, she's going to walk into a workplace and say, like, where's my orientation meeting? You know, what time is my is my meeting with my boss? She will never know a workplace without voice recognition and artificial intelligence. So we're kind of seeing evolve and each generation, not just your experience culturally and economically, but also the technologies that you just assume will be available to you. So to my daughter and I, device is kind of like a boomer expecting that the workplace will have an outlet to plug things in. You know, there's an expectation. So a lot of factors go in. I don't really talk too much about all that. You know, all the nitty gritty details of what make the generations different. I like to. People decide on their own. But the fact is that the times in which you're born affect what you expect your employer to provide to you and what you expect your career to be. So if you're running a workplace or a company or an organization with multiple generations, your definition of a career might be very different from somebody else's. Your definition of communicating might be very different from somebody else's generationally. And then you add on the layer that we're all just different human beings of different personalities and expects to get really complicated.
[00:15:53] Now I can see and I could certainly see I mean, I like this idea that it's really it's just kind of the assumptions people have about the world or how the world works.
[00:16:00] And as you know, generations kind of evolve and in different kind of early contexts, those assumptions are different. And then obviously right or wrong or good or bad, they're just they're different.
[00:16:09] And so failure to understand that, you know, different generation is going to have a different set of kind of working assumptions about how, you know, how business works, how you know that the context that they're going to be working in, the norms, things like that. You can quickly see where we're a lot of the kind of the friction or the challenges come when you have different generations having to work together, especially in very kind of tight knit collaborative teams where, you know, a lot of the stuff is happening quickly and in real time.
[00:16:38] So I like that I always have this this phrase of all models are wrong. Some of them are useful.
[00:16:43] It feels like what it is, is like, you know, if you try to if you try to use this to say, oh, well, but I don't feel like that or I didn't have that experience when I was younger. Yes. Any individual person may, may or may not have, you know, a particular kind of experience as as someone in a generation. But, you know, knowing or understanding that as a broad level, these are the things that affect that generation's norms and kind of values. This is important again. So we've got these different generations that are coming into the workforce, the workforce or know the work environment. You know, it's kind of these new changes of fast moving collaborative environments. What are some of the things that I guess what? What are some of the typical challenges start start to come up when you look at workplace kind of productivity or coping in a workplace culture when it comes to the generation, are there typical kind of situations or challenges that come up between particular generations that that you've seen or that you hear clients kind of talking about or, you know, kind of bemoaning about in terms of the challenges that they're having with with their teams?
[00:17:39] There absolutely are. And, you know, I'd have to say that there probably the challenges that you hear just in general between human beings are all different.
[00:17:48] But the two that I would really point to that are most frequent in my work are how people want or expect to be managed by their boss. And number two, communication and communication is kind of relates to everything that that specific relationship with your manager, particularly your different generations, can be such a friction point. But it can also be a tremendous opportunity to build across generational relationship. And I would I would focus on those two.
[00:18:12] Well, actually, it's interesting how you started that, because I think that's a good point is and I see this a lot as people kind of use the generation kind of excuse. And, you know, sometimes they're just, you know, sometimes just as bad managers or even people who are fearful or not are not easy to manage. And so I think it's maybe one point for all audiences is be careful.
[00:18:34] I would say, you know, it's easy to kind of chalk it up to generational differences, but being a good manager is something you need to figure out how to do and being easy to manage or something that is going to serve you well, you know, as early in your career to get ahead and work with the team and work for a boss. So I guess how often do you see kind of managers or for people complaining about about challenges in the workplace and kind of chalked it up to generational differences when it's really not? Is that. Is that something comes up a lot for you?
[00:19:00] It's remarkably common. And I think really we are more alike than we are different. And I think that all people want pretty much the same things in their relationship with their manager. They're just going to want them in different ways. So the what is the same? How might be different? So I'll give you a couple of examples. And you probably know Google did a study called Project Oxygen where they studied what made people good managers. And it was stuff like spends time with me, cares about my career or, you know, helps me overcome challenges. I mean, these are not like new concepts.
[00:19:30] The problem is, I think in the past and I absolutely feel like this is a Gen Xers who is often managed by baby boomers. I wanted those things, but I just sort of gotten used to not getting them because it was like, well, my boss is doing her job or his job and they don't have time for me. And I didn't really speak up or I didn't know that was possible. I think what's happening with millennials is that they read about Silicon Valley. Right. They're much more savvy with Glassdoor and rate my professor dot com and social media in general at LinkedIn as another example to know what good management is, you know, the companies that offer it. It's just more commonly known. And they have tools like Glass Door and Yelp and and social media to say, well, my boss is terrible, you know, or I'm going to get my boss low ratings in her 360 or I'm going to put bad reviews on Glassdoor. So I think the desires are the same. But the. Creation and the fact that millennials have a voice to speak up when they don't get managed well and there's less of a stigma for them to quit a job if they don't like a boss. You know, I'd never have quit a job, you know, in less than a year or two years. So I think that the desires are very much the same. And I'll give you a great example of a manager who I think handled this really well. It was actually millennial guy who is an I.T.. He managed a multi generational team. I think he had people like up to 40 years apart, some boomers, Xers and his fellow millennials. And he was sort of overwhelmed by their need for his attention and his time. And he was relatively recent out of college. And he remembered that his professors would have office hours. So he said, here's what I'm going to do from 8 to 9 a.m. every day.
[00:21:00] I'm going to have office hours. If you want to talk about your career, if you wanna talk about promotion, if you have a problem. If you have anything you want to talk to me about. It's not related to our work, but it's like a personal issue. That's the time to find me now. That was the what? Right. What he said was you can come in and talk to me face to face. You can Skype me. You can call me. You can instant message me. You can text me. However you want to communicate. You can. But that timeframe is when I'm available. So I thought that was a really cool way of accounting for possible generational differences of how people want to spend that time, but also just personal preference or what your day look like of how you were gonna use that time.
[00:21:36] So he made himself available, but he did it in a way that I thought was very inclusive of different kinds of personalities and different generations.
[00:21:44] I like that. And I like. I mean, I think this is sort of good management practice in general, which is kind of at some level kind of asked people how they want to be clear on what your expectations are, but then ask them, like, where where do you want support? How do you want that support? When do you want it? And what format you know, and what medium do you want to be? You want to meet face to face. Do you want to do it through email? All those things. But I think that that taking that kind of, you know, being curious about the people that you're managing in terms of what how do they want to receive the support and the management that you want to give them. And then there's that kind of added layer of understanding that the generational kind of background for each one of these folks might lead them to different paths and give you some some guesses in terms of what might work best for them and what what might not work so well for them is a great kind of management lesson. Where else do you see if you're kind of planning, if you're figuring out how to put together teams or particular departments or put together working relationships? Is there any kind of strategy or anything that you suggest people take into consideration when you're dealing with different generations and things that tend to work so well or not worked so well? I mean, I can see kind of pros and cons in terms of having lots of diversity of background, but also having challenges with, you know, common kind of experiences, common frameworks, common values. What are your thoughts on from a planning point of view, not just kind of a post post management point of view?
[00:23:01] Well, I don't think that there is a perfect mix, right. I don't think you have to be exactly reflective of the U.S. population overall. You know, I always tend toward diversity. Right. So the more diverse, the better. What I think is important to connect people is really the purpose of the mission of the team, whether that's a greater purpose in life or just the fact that people have bought in to what the goals are of the team. So one of the areas that I think is often a multigenerational environment that is very successful is something like political campaigns. So when you have volunteers working or even staff, you often see kids coming in out of college. And then people have worked on campaigns for decades, you know, and then the AARP is always very involved in a lot of campaigns, but they all believe in a candidate or they believe in the causes that the candidate stands for. So that's just one area where I think if you can get clear on the mission on the North Star and I know this is something you talk about a lot, no matter how big or small or diverse your team is, that is going to serve you well. If everybody buys into that, then a lot of the other differences tend to melt away. The second thing I would say is all of that said, you still have to have really open conversations about how people want to communicate. I think that's where this stuff falls down so much. So Mike Wilkins in his book The First 90 Days, which is like one of my favorite management books, he says just literally ask people groups.
[00:24:18] We're gonna be working together like, do you want me to call you? Do you want me to e-mail you or are you a morning person? Like you could have some very direct conversations. And as a manager, there's nothing more generous than telling people what your preferences are. It's such a simple thing to do that we almost never actually had the conversation. So I think as a leader of a team, to encourage that is a really powerful thing to do, whether it's multigenerational or just people with any kinds of difference.
[00:24:43] Yeah, I completely agree. And actually the interesting one, I find a lot of people when you do that, people actually pause because they haven't actually thought about it. And one of the benefits that gets them to think about. Yeah, well, how do I want to be managed? And now you've enrolled them in the process and you've gotten them to think about some of these issues. And it's no longer are you just trying to adapt to them. But they're actually thinking and sometimes I think about, well, yeah, kind of like to be managed this way, but that might not be super, super reasonable tax revenue and so on.
[00:25:07] So I just did a whole bunch of work with some summer camps. Right. Who were really struggling to hire young people to come to sleep away camps. And there's this young woman who is probably in her early 20s and she's leading all these camp counselors. And I said, you know, what's the best way to get in touch with. Because we were gonna be communicating a lot and I kid you not. She said, well, you know, I spend all my time in social media because I'm, you know, marketing to the campers and all this stuff with high school kids all the time. She said, So really, if you want to reach me, just slide into my arms.
[00:25:34] And I was like, when I do that, if I just think I've no idea what you're talking about a little bit.
[00:25:42] And what she meant for those who like me didn't know is she's on Instagram all the time. And sliding into MS is specific terminology to Instagram to direct message her on Instagram. And you know what? I had emailed her day after day. No response. I slid into her dad's and she got back to me in a second. So it actually was more productive and effective for me to understand where she was available. Now, if I'm the boss. I don't have to, you know, adapt to every single person. But she was my client. And so that was really beneficial to me as the service provider to learn how she wanted to communicate.
[00:26:13] Yeah, it's a great example. And it actually sets me up for my next question, which is, you know, I think a lot of people listening to this, you know, they're in these high growth companies.
[00:26:20] They're looking to grow scale the business, you know, and finding talent is always a huge challenge. Like they've got business opportunities. They're developing, you know, they've got revenue. They've got market opportunity, but they don't have the people to actually execute on the work.
[00:26:31] When you're looking at this question of kind of talent acquisition, you're finding talent acquiring, talent onboarding. What are some of the differences in terms of things we need to think about when we're trying to recruit folks from these different generations? What are the factors or what are the differences that come up in terms of how you approach these?
[00:26:48] So what are the things they really want to encourage, particularly small business owners to do, is to really rethink their vision of who the right fit is for a particular job. So if you really look at the skills that you need, it might be from someone who's a very different age and what you had in mind. One of the stories I came across in researching the book is of lifeguarding. So there's been this huge drop in teenagers working in the summer because they want to do things to enrich their college applications, but to volunteer them to travel. They want to get unpaid internships. So this is a huge problem for pools, right? Because kids didn't want to be lifeguards. I think it's also that they didn't want to be away from their phones while they're in the pool.
[00:27:24] So anyway, they're not getting kids to apply and they don't have enough talent. So they sort of get together. And there is this one pool in Galveston, Texas, that kind of led the charge and said, why does a teenager have to be a lifeguard? All we need is someone who's a really strong swimmer and cares about people. Right. And wanting them to be safe. So they started listing in the local AARP and retirement publication and they started recruiting people over 55 to be lifeguards. And they said they were phenomenal. They were in great shape. They love being outside. They could drive themselves to work.
[00:27:51] You know, they feel like side benefit. Like it sort of reminds me of when we realized that men could be nurses. You know, can now open up.
[00:27:59] So if you're a small, millennial driven tech company, why not recruit someone who is a retiree who probably could, you know, do your spreadsheets and, you know, do your business plan with his eyes closed? You know, why do we always think of people were our peers? And they're all these research numbers showing that the vast majority of it's outside of our families or people we're sort of forced to work with. We don't really socialize with people more than 10 years older or younger than we are. So they don't often get perks to look for those people. So another woman I know said, you know, she's in a poker game and people used to say like, hey, can you get my kid an internship? You know, is anybody hiring? My kid needs a job. And she said, you know, 15 years later, it's like, hey, can your kid get me a job? You know? So my wife is looking for work. I just would encourage people to not just think of their peers and their relative age peer group, because sometimes, you know, and you see this a lot with, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg hiring Sheryl Sandberg and, you know, that idea of bringing or the Google guys bringing in, you know, an older executive, but in all directions. And even there's an organization called on Quora that works with retirees who want to get back in the workforce. And they realized, well, we don't have anybody under 50 in our organization. We need millennials on our team. So I would just think the skill set, the fundamentals should never change. You know what you need in seven to do a job, but really think creatively how that person could be a different age than I had imagined. And sometimes that's a little bit of a aha moment for people.
[00:29:20] Yeah, it's a good. I think we are being kind of a classic trap. I think a lot of people get in. Who's making all these assumptions about what the ideal candidate looks like and not realizing kind of the inherent biases that they have in terms of thinking about that? And as you start to identify those and kind of open those things up, new possibilities are met and actually can be a great competitive kind of strategy or a differentiation strategy is that if you can tap into a labor pool that, you know, other people aren't thinking about and, you know, it can often give you a real edge when it comes to being able to find the right talent at the right time for him.
[00:29:51] And oftentimes there are other attributes that come in that end up being huge advantages, whether it's, you know, the hours they can work or the, you know, the type of work they can do or the conditions they can work on, like the lifeguard.
[00:30:04] One is a great example.
[00:30:06] I can see all these benefits of having lifeguards and actually have some military experience or think about like is the networks that you'll have access to that you might not have a saw. Right. You may not have known anybody in that world or anyone with that perspective. So, yeah, they're. Many benefits.
[00:30:21] It's been a pleasure. Linda, if people want to find out more about you, about the books, about the speaking, the work that you do. What's the best place to get that information?
[00:30:28] Thank you. The new book is called The Remix. It's available wherever books are sold, including Amazon. And I am on all social media and my Web site are by my name and I'll spell it. It's a little tricky. It's lindseypollak.com And I would love to connect anywhere and everywhere.
[00:30:46] Great. I'll make sure that the links are in the Shona so people can click through and get that. Leslie, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time.
[00:30:53] Thank you. It's great to talk to you.
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