Imagine this scenario: The group you lead is facing a conflict that threatens to undermine an important project for your company. You thought you had put together a team that was well balanced with talent and experience. But some staff members, mostly younger ones, are complaining that the company's advancement policy isn't fair because it's not based on merit. People are promoted in steps based on experience. The complainers argue that experience is not necessarily correlated with contribution. Technology is constantly changing; experience developing older products can impede innovative thinking. Younger staff members say they know more about the latest technology than older staff members, including you. Yet their views are discounted. They say that if you want to keep them motivated, you should give them roles that match their knowledge and ability, where they have the opportunity to continue learning and developing their skills. Other staff members, mostly older, say the complainers have an entitlement mentality, that the complainers want rewards and responsibilities without having worked for them. Although some of the younger staff members know more about the latest technology, they know less about the company's products and customers. Also, to succeed in the company, you need good relationships with key people in other departments. And you won't develop those relationships without loyalty and trust, qualities in short supply among the complainers. Before reading further, ask yourself: How would you keep this conflict from heating up? In leadership workshops, Tim Scudder and I (Maccoby and Scudder 2010, 2011) have given technology managers this challenge. But first, we've separated them into three groups on the basis of their answers to a questionnaire that elicits attitudes and values about work and leadership. The questionnaire is based on the theory that younger managers share a constellation of attitudes and values, a social character, different from that of the older group. Some observers, such as William Strauss and Neil Howe (2000), refer to the generation born between 1982 and the turn of the century as Millennials, and argue that these young people, some of whom are just entering the workforce, have attitudes to work shaped by their increased use of and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies. The results of my research (Maccoby 2007) suggest that this is insufficient: instead of categorizing people according to when they were born, we understand them better by viewing them in terms of a social character that is shaped by a particular socialization experience. That experience has been changing rapidly during the past fifty years. In any culture, parents, teachers, and work organizations try to shape in young people a social character that equips them to succeed in that culture. However, in a time of rapid change, even people born in the same year can develop different social characters. And the last half of the twentieth century saw some of the most rapid and radical social and technological change in human history. Most of the older technical staff members were raised to adapt to and succeed in the industrial bureaucracies that dominated the economy of the twentieth century. Most grew up in families with a single male wage earner who became a model for paternal authority at work. Children in these families were brought up to idealize and please paternal authorities that could move them up bureaucratic hierarchies; they developed a bureaucratic social character. In 1950, over 70 percent of families fit this model; in 1980, only 34 percent did, and the percentage was falling. Younger technical staff members were more likely raised in a family with two wage earners or even with a single female wage earner. (There are now as many families with a single female wage earner as there are traditional families.) Children in these families experience the shared authority of parents and other caregivers. …