Five Generations Are Now Working Side-by-Side in NZ Workplaces – What That Means for Your Career Growth

There’s a moment that happens in a lot of New Zealand workplaces right now that would have been genuinely unusual even fifteen years ago. Someone in their early twenties is running a morning standup. Sitting around the table – or on the Zoom call, because it’s usually a hybrid situation – is a Gen X manager in their late forties, a Baby Boomer senior advisor in their early sixties, a Millennial team lead who’s been in the industry for fifteen years, and a teenager on a school-to-work programme who’s never known a world without a smartphone and is quietly appalled by how many emails everyone sends.

Five generations. One team meeting. Roughly sixty years of generational experience, shaped by completely different economic realities, technological landscapes, and cultural expectations about what work is even for.

This is not a hypothetical. It’s the actual composition of a growing number of New Zealand workplaces right now – and it represents something genuinely without precedent in the history of modern work. We’ve never had this many generations in the workforce simultaneously, and we’re still very much figuring out what it means.

Here’s the thing that makes New Zealand particularly interesting in this conversation: Kiwis are actually handling it better than most. Around 82% of New Zealand workers report a strong relationship with their direct manager – significantly higher than the global average of 72%. There’s something about the way New Zealand workplaces tend to operate – flatter structures, a cultural directness balanced with genuine warmth, a general preference for getting on with it over status performance – that seems to be helping multigenerational teams function better than average.

But “better than average” doesn’t mean “without friction.” And for your individual career growth, understanding how to navigate a multigenerational team isn’t just nice social skills. It’s a genuine professional differentiator – and it looks very different depending on your DOPE type.

Why This Matters for Your Career (Not Just Your Team)

Before we get into the DOPE breakdown, let’s be clear about why this is a career growth conversation and not just a workplace harmony one.

The people who get promoted, who get trusted with high-visibility projects, who get recommended for opportunities that aren’t advertised – are almost never the ones who are only effective with people exactly like them. In a multigenerational workplace, the person who can build genuine rapport with a 23-year-old graduate and a 58-year-old senior leader, who can translate between different working styles and communication preferences, who can extract the best from a team that doesn’t all think the same way – that person is extraordinarily valuable. And in most New Zealand organisations right now, they’re not that common.

The ability to work well across generations is one of those skills that gets described vaguely as “people skills” or “maturity” when what it actually requires is genuine self-awareness and a deliberate approach to how you show up differently in different contexts. Your DOPE type shapes both your natural strengths and your natural blind spots in this area.

Eagles: Lead Across the Gap, Don’t Just Lead Down

Eagles tend to have a clear idea of how things should be done, and a natural inclination to get on with it rather than spending a lot of time accommodating different preferences and working styles. In a single-generation team, this can work just fine. In a multigenerational one, it can quietly create friction that the Eagle doesn’t notice until it’s become a real problem.

The specific tension for Eagles in multigenerational teams usually shows up in one of two directions. With younger colleagues – particularly Gen Z workers who’ve entered the workforce with very different expectations about hierarchy, feedback frequency, and psychological safety – an Eagle’s directness can land as harshness, and their preference for autonomy can look like unavailability to someone who’s used to more check-ins and collaborative decision-making. With older colleagues, the Eagle’s confidence and pace can sometimes read as arrogance or impatience, particularly with Baby Boomers who’ve earned their expertise over decades and don’t love being steamrolled past their experience.

The career growth move for Eagles in multigenerational environments is to get genuinely curious about what each generation brings, rather than defaulting to the assumption that their own way is the efficient way. A Boomer’s institutional knowledge and long-view perspective is genuinely valuable to an Eagle who’s trying to move fast – if the Eagle slows down long enough to access it. A Gen Z colleague’s comfort with new tools and platforms and their instinct for what’s culturally resonant right now is also valuable – if the Eagle doesn’t dismiss it because it came from someone with three years of experience.

The Eagles who build the strongest multigenerational reputations are the ones who are known for getting the best out of people who are nothing like them. That’s a leadership quality that organisations notice and reward.

Owls: Your Expertise Spans Generations – Share It Both Ways

For Owls, the multigenerational workplace is in many ways a natural fit – because Owls tend to respect expertise and experience regardless of where it comes from, and tend to be less preoccupied with generational identity than some other types. An Owl doesn’t particularly care whether a good idea came from a 25-year-old or a 60-year-old. They care whether it’s a good idea.

This is a genuine strength, and it means Owls can often build credibility across a wide age range more naturally than some other types.

The specific opportunity for Owls in multigenerational teams is what’s sometimes called reciprocal mentorship – the increasingly recognised practice of learning flowing in both directions across experience levels. Owls have usually accumulated deep expertise that younger colleagues genuinely benefit from: technical knowledge, process rigour, institutional understanding of why things are done the way they are. But Owls can also genuinely benefit from the digital fluency, fresh perspectives, and different-shaped thinking that younger colleagues bring – and the Owls who are honest enough to acknowledge that tend to be the ones who keep growing long past the point where others plateau.

The watch-out for Owls is a tendency to get frustrated with what can look like sloppiness or impatience in younger colleagues – the Gen Z worker who wants to try a new approach before fully understanding the existing one, or the Millennial team member who’s more interested in the outcome than the process. This frustration is understandable, but it can make Owls seem rigid or dismissive to the people who are, actually, going to be their colleagues for a long time. The investment in understanding why someone thinks differently – rather than just cataloguing that they do – pays off.

Peacocks: You Connect Easily – Now Go Deeper

Peacocks are natural multigenerational operators in a lot of ways, because Peacocks connect through enthusiasm and genuine interest in people – and those things transcend age. A Peacock who’s genuinely fascinated by a senior leader’s career story, or who gets genuinely excited about a junior colleague’s creative idea, communicates that interest in a way that lands across generational lines.

Peacocks also tend to be culturally fluent in a way that helps them adapt their communication style relatively intuitively. They pick up on what a room needs and adjust without a lot of conscious effort – which is exactly the kind of social agility that multigenerational teams require.

The development area for Peacocks in this context is follow-through and consistency. Peacocks can make a wonderful impression across all five generations in the room and then undermine it by not delivering on what they said they would, or by being inconsistent in their attention – all warmth and engagement one week, distracted and hard to reach the next. Older colleagues in particular, who’ve often developed a finely tuned radar for who’s genuinely reliable and who’s performing reliability, will notice this quickly.

The career growth move for Peacocks is to identify two or three people in their multigenerational workplace who they want to genuinely invest in – ideally spanning different generations – and build those relationships with real consistency over time. Not just the exciting conversations, but the reliable check-ins, the follow-ups, the remembering what someone mentioned three months ago and asking how it went. That level of sustained attention is what turns Peacock charm into Peacock trust – and trust is what actually opens doors.

Doves: Your Relational Instincts Are a Multigenerational Superpower

Of all the DOPE types, Doves are perhaps naturally best positioned to thrive in multigenerational teams – because the core Dove skills of genuine empathy, active listening, and attending carefully to what each individual person needs are exactly the skills that multigenerational team navigation requires.

Doves tend to be good at meeting people where they are. They don’t need everyone to communicate the same way or have the same working style preferences. They’re usually patient enough to find the approach that works for a specific person, rather than expecting everyone to adapt to them. In a team that spans sixty years of lived experience, that adaptability is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable.

New Zealand’s unusually high workplace trust figures – that 82% who report a strong relationship with their direct manager – are, I’d argue, partly a reflection of the Dove qualities that tend to be valued in Kiwi workplace culture more broadly. There’s a warmth and a genuine interest in people that runs through a lot of NZ professional environments, and Doves are often the people quietly generating that culture from the inside.

The specific career growth opportunity for Doves in multigenerational settings is to step into more visible roles as connectors and culture-builders – and to learn to name that contribution explicitly, rather than just doing it invisibly. If you’re the person who noticed that the new graduate was struggling to find their feet and quietly helped them integrate, that’s leadership behaviour. If you’re the one who bridged a communication breakdown between the Boomer department head and the Gen Z project team, that’s a skill with genuine organisational value. Doves need to get more comfortable articulating these contributions in performance conversations and in the way they present themselves professionally – because if they don’t name it, it often goes unrecognised.

The watch-out for Doves is absorbing too much of the generational friction that exists in any diverse team. Doves can end up as the unofficial emotional mediators of a multigenerational workplace – the person everyone comes to when there’s a conflict or a misunderstanding or a bruised ego – and while this role is valuable, it’s also exhausting if it’s not recognised and bounded. Know what you’re contributing. And know when you need to let other people work through their own generational adjustments.

The New Zealand Advantage Worth Using

Here’s what I’d leave you with on the NZ context specifically.

The combination of five generations in the workforce, unusually high workplace trust, and the relatively flat and relationship-oriented culture of most New Zealand organisations creates a genuinely rare environment for career development. In a larger, more hierarchical market, the knowledge and perspective that different generations hold tends to stay siloed by level and seniority. In New Zealand, there’s a real opportunity for it to flow more freely – if you’re intentional about tapping into it.

Whatever your DOPE type, the people in your multigenerational workplace who are most different from you in age and experience are probably the ones you’ll learn the most from – if you approach them with genuine curiosity rather than polite tolerance.

That’s not just good workplace advice. In a market where adaptability is the most valued skill going, it’s career strategy.

Know Your Starting Point

Understanding how your personality type shapes the way you show up in multigenerational teams is a genuinely useful piece of self-knowledge – and it starts with knowing your type clearly. The free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment at richardstep.com takes about five to ten minutes and gives you a framework that applies directly to how you navigate the kind of complex, human, multigenerational environments that characterise most NZ workplaces right now.

If you want to explore further, richardstep.com’s full range of self-tests is worth a browse too.

So here’s the question I’d leave you thinking about: in your current workplace, which generation do you find it hardest to connect with – and what do you think that’s actually telling you?

Understand how your personality type shapes the way you work and grow: take the free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment here.