How OLD Are You? Generational Strengths & Weaknesses.

There are many positives and negatives with age during your career. Sometimes you have more energy and sometimes you have more experience. Other times, a new perspective or more gravitas. Even when managing your team, you need to take into account what their strengths and weaknesses are — and capitalize or anticipate them. In today's post, I'd like to highly generalize my experience, interpretations, and understanding of each generation. They might not (and probably not) fully compare to you — but they are a broad interpretation of the workforce in general.

In any event, different age groups act differently . . . so where are you?

Your 20's

Just starting out - getting your feet wet - absorbing, learning, winning, losing.

Strengths: Young, lots of energy, new ideas, enthusiasm, fresh perspectives. Technology: You easily adopt any new tool or product and start using it immediately.

Weaknesses: Little or no experience, frustrates easily, limited knowledge, lacking in sophisticated interpersonal skill applications. Doesn't fully understand impacts and implications of behavior or decisions. Personal issues: likes to party, meeting partners, stays out late/comes in late.

Your 30's

Getting better, knowing more, developing relationships, slowing understanding how the game is played.

Strengths: More stable, able to take on more responsibility, better knowledge & experience, lots of energy, ready to move up - starting management positions. This is where they start to define their business personality. Technology: On the burning edge of technology - the ability to adopt it and use it with good business sense.

Weaknesses: Ready to move up - but not there yet, sometimes pushes the wrong way, personal issues: getting married/kids.

Your 40's

On the glide path - the right mix of experience, knowledge and energy.

Strengths: Number of years of critical business experience, deep knowledge of industry, great presenter, building gravitas, understands the complexities of the business and interpersonal relationships, growing manager. Know when to hold their tongue - there's a bit more at stake. Technology: Leveraging many new and old tools - but the newer ones are perplexing you a bit.

Weaknesses: Knows how everything works in business and gets disgruntled. Challenges authority, Personal issues: kids growing/school AND mid-life crises.

Your 50's

At the height of your ability - leadership and management talents abound. You are a linchpin!

Strengths: Gravitas - you can enter almost any room or situation and handle it easily, you've seen it all - so your reaction time is shorter, nothing really fazes you, your contact sphere is phenomenal - you can connect with virtually anyone and get things done.

Weaknesses: Your energy level is starting to wane a bit, you're not as energetic and enthusiastic as you were in your 20's/30's. Highly critical of stupid decisions and can easily see solutions on the horizon. HR & corporate tend to devalue you - watch out for personel cuts. Personal issues: kids in college/possible issues with marriage/death of parents. Technology: Starting to let it go - missing out on new innovations that streamline and integrate work.

Your 60's

Coming down for a smooth landing.

Strengths: Everyone approaches to you for advice - you are THE sensei. Great management, leadership, and direction are like breathing. Companies should show you off to clients and give advice to prospects. Personal: Kids are out of the house and grown - you have the time to work late and travel.

Weaknesses: Your energy level is slowing way down - no more 10-12 hour days. You might miss faster moving objects - people, projects, technology. Especially technology: we tend to become luddites - we disregard new advances and stay with the old (comfort zone issues). Watch out for HR & Corporate - they love to eliminate your position instantly.

Your 70's, 80's, 90's

Enough already - unless you've perfected the perfect platform and formula for continuing work - time to take it easy.

The Future of Work: When Gen X Runs the Show.

Presenting Part Eight of a Ten-Part Series on The Future of Work from Time Magazine. By Anne Fisher at Time.

By 2019, Generation X — that relatively small cohort born from 1965 to 1978 — will have spent nearly two decades bumping up against a gray ceiling of boomers in senior decision-making jobs. But that will end. Janet Reid, managing partner at Global Lead, a consulting firm that advises companies like PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, says, "In 2019, Gen X will finally be in charge. And they will make some big changes."

They'll have to, because the workforce Gen Xers will be leading will have altered almost beyond recognition. For one thing, Generation Y — the tattooed, techno-raised bunch born from 1979 to 2000 — is unlikely to follow in their parents' footsteps. They think putting in long years of effort at any one company in exchange for a series of raises and promotions is pointless — not that they'll get the chance. "Paying your dues, moving up slowly and getting the corner office — that's going away. In 10 years, it will be gone," says Bruce Tulgan, head of the consulting firm Rainmaker Thinking, based in New Haven, Conn., and author of a new book about managing Gen Y called Not Everyone Gets a Trophy. "Instead, success will be defined not by rank or seniority but by getting what matters to you personally," whether that's the chance to lead a new-product launch or being able to take winters off for snowboarding. Tulgan adds, "Companies already want more short-term independent contractors and consultants and fewer traditional employees because contractors are cheaper. And seniority matters less and less as time goes on, because it's about the past, not the future."

Superannuated boomers won't vanish from the workplace altogether: people in their 60s and 70s — because of either need or desire — will be among the 40% of the U.S. workforce that will rent out its skills. "Boomers will be working part-time as coaches, strategists and consultants," predicts Joanne Sujansky, a co-author of a book due out in June called Keeping the Millennials. "By 2019, there will be many more of those opportunities than there are now because boomers will need the income and companies will need their expertise." Says Reid: "We'll see an increase in job-sharing at very senior levels.

You might have two boomers who share the job of chief financial officer, for instance, which lets them keep working and also have some leisure time."

The Gen X managers who will be holding all this together will need to be adept at a few things that earlier generations, with their more hierarchical management styles and relative geographical insularity, never really had to learn. One of those is collaborative decision-making that might involve team members scattered around the world, from Beijing to Barcelona to Boston, whom the nominal leader of a given project may never have met in person. "By 2019, every leader will have to be culturally dexterous on a global scale," says Reid. "A big part of that is knowing how to motivate and reward people who are very different from yourself."

They don't teach that in B school — at least not yet. In fact, Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. "It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects," says Carter. "The kids are already doing it."