Client Snapshot
The client is a large nonprofit cultural institution with a workforce that spans salaried back-office leaders, mid-career managers, and a steady flow of recent graduates entering their first professional setting. Many frontline staff work the floor on tightly scheduled rotations and rarely see their email during the day; many back-office leaders live in their inboxes. The institution's Training Director runs an internal manager-development program serving leaders from vice presidents to frontline supervisors across every department, and curates a small bench of external facilitators to bring in capabilities the internal curriculum doesn't yet cover.
The Challenge
The Training Director had been hearing the same pattern across the institution: older middle managers were running into recent-graduate frontline hires whose work histories had been fast-food, retail, or graduate school — not a professional office. Managers were silently frustrated that newer staff "should just know" how to send a professional email, run a meeting, or read the unwritten rules of the workplace. Newer staff were trying to do good work in an environment where the rules they were being held to had never been written down.
The friction wasn't only generational. It was also structural: a workforce divided between floor-based staff who couldn't check email during the day and back-office staff who treated email as the workplace's central nervous system. A matrix-managed middle layer — project leads responsible for outcomes without direct reports — sat between an older supervisor above and younger contributors below, navigating their own generational expectations on both sides at once. The client's Training Director needed a program that would help a single room of leaders from across the institution name what was happening, build a shared vocabulary, and walk out with tools they could actually use on Monday.
Our Approach
Amy C. Waninger designed and delivered Growing Together: Teamwork across Generationsas a custom, in-person half-day workshop scoped to the client's Training Director and her cross-departmental cohort.
The session was built around a deliberate sequence:
- A grounding frame on what defines a generation — birth years, yes, but also significant life events, shared experiences, geography, and cultural lens — followed by a "Close your eyes and picture Batman" exercise that gave the room a shared, low-stakes way to feel how the same word can mean different things depending on when you grew up
- A generational breakout where each generation in the room named the myths, the truths, the strengths, and the growth edges of being part of their cohort — then taught the rest of the room a dance everyone their age knows
- A count-off into four mixed-generation small groups, each working a different domain: Work Values & Ethics, Communication & Technology, Leadership & Authority, and Organizational Culture — each group structured around discussion prompts the participants took back to their teams
- A reframing block built around the workshop's central premise — you can't "not communicate" — that surfaced the unwritten rules every workplace runs on and made the case that clarity is kindness
- A practical close on email and meetings — including a 1-2-3 Rule for email composition, a checklist for before, during, and after meetings, and a "My Preferred Communication Methods" matrix that mapped specific message types (policy change, personnel change, status update, "I'm running late") against the medium each participant actually wants for that message
- A Build Your Plan commit moment in which every participant named one insight they didn't want to forget, one action they'd try in the next seven days, and one way they'd apply the learning with someone else
The Training Director and Amy co-scoped the content across four planning conversations before delivery. The Training Director was clear that participants didn't need the content to be wrapped in institution-specific examples — they needed the content to be strong and the delivery to be engaging, and trusted the room to make the translation back to their own departments.
Our Results
Post-session feedback came in strong on every dimension the Training Director tracks. She rated the engagement 10/10 on the wrap call — "For me, it's a 10. I have no qualms or concerns about working with you again in the future" — and the participant feedback she shared with Amy mapped directly onto the culture she's working to build.
The strongest signal came from the participants' own commitments. Across the Build Your Plan cards collected at session close, the single insight that recurred most often was the same three words: "Clarity is kindness." The phrase had been a structural pillar of the workshop, but the room had absorbed it as a personal operating principle and turned it into action items:
- Multiple participants committed to documenting the unwritten rules they had been carrying in their heads and sharing them with their teams
- Several committed to asking each member of their team how they prefer to be communicated with — and to sharing their own preferences in return, using the Preferred Communication Methods matrix as the tool
- One committed to applying the framework directly in their coaching sessions with the leaders they support
- Several committed to conversations with their fellow directors about generational dynamics they had been navigating quietly
- Multiple cards surfaced a recurring insight in their own words: if you think "I shouldn't have to tell them that," you probably need to have a conversation
The Training Director's own takeaway from the room — the constructive feedback she provided to Amy in the wrap — was that participants wanted even more role-play time working their own situations. In a room she described as a notoriously "tough crowd" trained to give open, honest feedback, the constructive note was a request for more of the program, not less of it.
"For me, it's a 10. You've been great, you've been responsive, you did ask me about the content, we talked through it. The session was great the way you presented it, your energy level, you were engaging. I have no qualms or concerns about working with you again in the future."
— Training Director,
Nonprofit Cultural Institution
Nonprofit Cultural Institution
Ready to Help Your Managers Lead Across Every Generation in the Room?
Whether your managers are inheriting first-job hires, navigating a workforce split between the floor and the office, or carrying the unwritten rules in their heads, Lead at Any Level® can help. Our practical, custom-scoped programs give leaders a shared frame for generational difference — and tools they can use in the next conversation.