Keep Generational Labels Out of Army Talent Management - Modern War Institute

Allison Abbe

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Use of generational labels is spreading, as the temptation to lump vast numbers of individuals into categories based purely on birth year apparently proves too difficult to resist. The Army is unfortunately not immune. For all its recent progress toward more evidence-based approaches to talent management, defense leaders seem to accept and repeat myths about generations in the workforce. Baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Generation Z, and now Generation Alpha—all of these allegedly have distinct characteristics associated with a window of birth years, known in scientific literature as cohort effects. Despite having captured the popular imagination since at least the 1960s, generations can be a misleading concept and do not provide a sound basis for shaping military personnel policy. Mismanaging age diversity puts the military services at risk of falling behind in the competition for talent, with recruiting shortfalls consequently creating secondary pressures to promote some young leaders too early. Defense leaders should avoid using generations as a shortcut for thinking about age and instead rely on more data-informed approaches to recruiting and talent management.

Shortfalls in recruiting understandably prompt leaders to look to social science to inform solutions to organizational problems, and generational concepts find a receptive outlet in the limits of human cognition. Although humans’ long-term memory capacity is expansive, working memory capacity is limited. Since cognition can only actively retrieve and operate with a limited set of information at any one time, grouping into categories is helpful. People routinely rely on categories and groupings to process more information, but this is beneficial only if the categories reflect meaningful commonalities in the real world. When the categories do not correspond to real shared characteristics, relying on them for management and decision-making can lead to systematic bias and predictable errors. Generations are one such grouping that serve as a shortcut in communication, even while they mislead and conceal.