Generation Cuspers are the Workplace’s Most Valuable Asset
When you’re born between generations, you act as a cultural bridge.
At 24, Melissa felt too old to be Gen-Z and too young to be Millennial. She wasn’t “trendy,” but she also didn’t fit in with her Millennial colleagues. Gen Z labeled her as Millennial, but Millennials label her as Gen-Z. She was caught in the middle: Where did she belong?
If you were born at the tail end of a generation, like Melissa, you’re neither. You’re part of a more exclusive club: a microgeneration.
What’s a microgeneration?
Since generations don’t have hard cutoffs, they blend into each other. This blending period is a microgeneration, and people born during this period are generation cuspers. They’ve faced the aftermath or precursor to the large events that define generations, such as war/peace, huge economic shifts, or large changes in technology. Since cuspers share traits from adjacent generations, they don’t fit a typical generational profile.
The most recent microgenerations include:
- Xennials (or Geriatric Millennials): between Gen X and Millennials
We landed in a fleeting sweet spot before the Recession that plagued Millennials’ launch. Yet we were still young enough that when the market crashed, we hadn’t yet invested much and didn’t lose as many homes or as much in retirement savings, unlike many Gen Xers, We at least had a chance to either get jobs or go to college as young adults, then attain more serious jobs, quit them, get other jobs, and find ourselves just a little before the economy truly tanked.
Sarah Stankorb: “Glad to be a Xennial”
- Zillennials/Zennialls: between Millennials and Gen Z
In a world where millennial childhoods are defined by their Discmans and Gen Z by their iPhones, zillennials are the humble and quickly forgotten MP3 player, an invention conceived in the transitional space between the old world and the new.
Alician Lansom: “Too Old For Gen Z, Too Young For Millennials: Life As A Confused Zillennial”
The generation you belong to influences your personality and outlook on life. Significant things define a generation, like the economy, war, and technological advancements.
Cuspers like Melissa don’t belong to one group, and this can feel not very clear. People who grew up between generations can offer different skills and perspectives. This interdisciplinary living makes them a valuable asset in the workplace.
Cuspers are Essential in the Multigenerational Workplace
Think about all the skills that a team must share to function at its highest level: communication styles, philosophies on collaboration, risk-taking behavior, and deference to authority.
A person’s generation affects these philosophies at work, gelling and clashing with others. Most organizations aren’t designed to have a workforce of different generations, much less 5.
Generational groups are another way we categorize people into in-groups and out-groups. Since generation cuspers don’t fall neatly into one generation, they act as cultural bridges.
They encourage cross-collaboration and teamwork.
If you’re surrounded by people not in your typical “in-group,” you might feel very out of place or even uncomfortable. Staunch identification with your in-group might leave you thinking you don’t have much in common with others.
“Cuspers don’t feel the discomfort of interacting with other generations as much as people born in the middle of their generation feel.”— Graeme Codrington
Cuspers might pick and choose different identifying characteristics from either generation, making them more “in-between” groups instead. Not fully identifying with one group could translate to better mediation and teamwork skills. Not being tied to one specific group might allow them to be naturally gifted at seeing objectively.
Acting as cultural bridges of their adjacent generations could foster a more team centered dynamic, meshing together different ideologies from different generations.
They can help dispel generational stereotypes
When you pinpoint someone as belonging to a specific generation, you also risk alienating and pigeonholing them. Many generation cuspers’ feelings on this might be magnified: they’re so used to people assigning them with one generation or the other when either does not really define them. Because of this first-hand experience of consistently being mislabeled, generation cuspers could have higher empathy regarding this specific situation.
Just because you fit in the timeline of a generation doesn’t mean that the experiences and stereotypes apply to you. Each person still has individual differences, even if they belong to the same generation.
The Differences in Generations are Sometimes Overrated
Even though people throughout generations have much in common, we tend to engage in ethnographic dazzle: we’re so dazzled by surface-level differences that we blind ourselves to our underlying similarities.
Our ancestors loved to categorize, and we’re not above doing it either. From enneagrams to Hogwarts Houses, we love it when things fit neatly into a box, so we know how to treat it. People included.
We often hitch our identities to our memberships to certain groups, including generations. Categorizing others' identities and identifying relationships between these different group memberships is largely how we interact with each other. It’s called Social Identity Theory.
We’re encouraged to interact with the world through identity groups — and the less messy you make it, the easier it is for our brain to comprehend if one group is better or worse than the other.
It’s quick and easy to reduce an individual’s complexity into a digestible pamphlet of information, making it harder to understand the value and nuance of an individual.
Identities Aren’t Always Clear-Cut
I was born in 1997, a super young Millenial and a super old Gen Z's. I related to going to college in an unstable job market in the US before I even got to college and worried about how difficult it could be to buy a house. I’m also worried about climate change, accessible healthcare, and social justice issues.
I think the “forgetting” of these in-betweeners says a lot about how we really want to believe clear lines that we can sort people into. This doesn’t just go for people in different generations, but also political parties, cultural groups.
The tricky thing with this is that if we rely on these classifications too much, we can miss out on amazing conversations and interactions and make harmful assumptions about other people and the world around us. It doesn’t provide the necessary nuance that life requires. Generation cuspers may be the key to getting rid of these pigeon-holing philosophies in the future.
