Aria Ma: Your Intergenerational People Pipeline
Aria Ma wants you to create a culture that welcomes and empowers team members across the generations. She shares her wisdom on knowledge transfer; pathways for growth, regardless of seniority; using tech to build your talent pipeline; mentorship; fun cross-generational training; inclusive professional development; and more. Aria is founder of LUNEAERA. (This is part of our coverage of the 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference.)
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. We are 1 week away from show number 750. The big anniversary is next week. I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with heteromatropia if I saw that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate to introduce it. Hey Tony, our 25 NTC coverage continues with. Your intergenerational people pipeline. Aema wants you to create a culture that welcomes and empowers team members across the generations. She shares her wisdom on knowledge transfer, pathways for growth regardless of seniority, using tech to build your talent pipeline, mentorship, fun cross-generational training, inclusive professional development, and more. Arya is founder of Lunara. On Tony’s take 2. The mostly bad budget bill. Here is your intergenerational people pipeline. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference. We are together in community at the Baltimore Convention Center. Our coverage is sponsored by Heller Consulting software and technology for nonprofits. With me now is Aia Ma. Aria is founder and principal consultant at Lunara, and, uh, welcome. Thank you. It was really nice to be here, Tony. Pleasure. I’m glad to have you with us and your topic is design and intergenerational pipeline for sustainable long-term growth. Uh, we have plenty of time together, but just give me uh like a high level view of of the topic. Sure, so I am a Gen Z and I do people fundraising consulting for nonprofits and one of the biggest things, challenges that we’re seeing right now with more than 4 generations in the workforce is lack of communication, miscommunication within workforces because there are different value systems that are um being held by different people from different generations. And this is impacting productivity and progress in a lot of these nonprofits objectives, so I go over value systems, frameworks and tools that people can use in their organizations to help bring everyone onto the same page no matter their generation and no matter the value system. Awesome, perfect, perfect overview. Uh, well, you and I are representing two of the generations. I’m sure it’s, I’m sure it’s very difficult for you to guess which I might be a part of you have no idea that I’m the baby. Boomer, uh, but young, young, young baby boomer, yes, 1962. So young baby boomer, I almost qualify millennial, but, uh, not, not quite, not quite. No, no, you’re being kind. Thank you very much. No, I, I own it. I’m a baby boomer, but a young baby boomer. I don’t know if I mentioned that, young, young. So we’re representing half the, half the generations in the workforce right now. All right, so we’re seeing, uh, let’s start with. Um, I kind of consider this a threshold like the purpose. What, what different generations come to work for different purposes, I think. What, what do you see across, uh, do you see that first of all, just like why, why, why we work, what we want to get out of work across different differing across generations, share your thinking there I think. Big thing right now is coming into the workforce and the financial plane that we’re on right now why Gen Z are working and how hard it is to find a job, especially in the nonprofit sector and I think as we’re going into work there are different value systems from different generations about how hard you should be working, how long you should be working and the responsibilities um that you should be holding uh. is very big on work life balance um and still being productive and there are, you know, the technology barriers and differences on like how specific tasks should be done, whereas the older generations, um, you know, pulling up by the bootstraps, uh, working really hard past the 9 to 5 doing what you have to do to climb that ladder, so they are very different ideas on what people should be doing and how much energy. They should be putting into the work that they are um doing for example Gen Zs they see their work as solely their work and then once you know 5 o’clock hits, they’re doing something else they’re turning the computer off whereas for other generations that might be a different um idea right now. Can you, can you break it down into that’s Gen Z Gen X. You’re welcome to represent baby boomers. I’ll tell you if it resonates with me or not you get that? Yeah, so for millennials, it’s kind of the same thing, but also right now by 2030, about 75% of the workforce will be mainly millennials, so right now. We’re seeing a lot more of this communication problem impact them by 2030, 75% will be millennials. Wow, OK, that’s only a few, well, several years away, but not that many. OK, OK. And what’s really hard is For those who are on the cusp of Gen Z as millennials, we call them llennials, and they, they are the ones that still value that work life balance but are struggling to find a job that will that will keep them. Stable financially that will give them financial stability. They’re looking to buy houses they’re looking to advance their careers, but they can’t find that right now in the job market with how competitive it is and how hard it is and how inflation is increasing but wages are not increasing. And then how about uh strict millennials what’s what’s millennials, I would say kind of the same. Work life balance um sentiments but they are also looking to climb the ladder uh maybe a little bit differently than Gen Z’s they’re looking for more mentorship of millennials right now they’re we’re not seeing a lot of midcareer stage people in the workforce. We’re seeing a lot of older folks and a lot of younger folks, but in the nonprofit world there’s this gap that’s missing of mid career people who um are looking to do more professional development, go to conferences, uh, that can. nonprofit. Mils frustration with baby boomers, right? Isn’t there, you know, OK, move over. OK, boomer, you know, you’ve had your time you fucked it up. You know, it’s now it’s for uh it’s the next generation. What’s rough is that a lot of baby boomers slash like Gen Z Gen Xers are having a hard time letting go. They have very um traditional traditional ideas of how their program should be run. Or how the company should be run and you know Gen Z’s millennials they want to you know use all this new technology they want to improve you know systems they want to uh use notion and like do a synchronous zoom meetings and um whereas you know the older folks have this idea of more meetings it’s fine if meetings go over a little bit they value like in person so there’s this communication value difference um and how work should be done and so. Baby boomers are reluctant to pass that torch on because those value systems are different, how work should be done right now. Am I, am I misspeaking? Am I, so from the oldest it’s, it’s baby boomer then millennial, no? Oh, I’ve been saying, OK, you’re educating me, yeah, OK, Boomer, you know, you know, you don’t even know what the generations are you’re uh I’m, I’m I’m surprised you even know which one you’re in. At least you identified that correctly, but you didn’t get much further than that. OK, so. So, so it goes baby boomer, uh, Gen X millennial. All right, thank you. Oh, you did say zen too. So that’s like yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s like the people who are on the cusp, like the millennials who don’t want to be called millennials but don’t want to be called zoo. Yeah, yeah, well, zoomers are Gen Z, yeah. There’s a lot of names. There’s a lot of names. Gen Z would not blend with Boomer. OK. All right. Um, all right, so yeah, different purposes for work, different, different expectations too around like hours, boundaries, right? Yes, that, that does resonate with me um in terms of I’m not gonna speak for any other generations because I don’t have co-workers. I’m in my business by myself. All the relationships I have. Our client relationships. So I don’t really, you know, I, I see them as a client relationship. I don’t see them day in and day out, so I’m only gonna speak from my own perspective. Yeah, um, I have, I have fewer boundaries, you know, I, I would say life and work are intertwined inextricably, you know, sometimes I don’t start work till 10:30 because I’ve been to the gym, but other mornings I may start early and and. And I might even still if I start early, I might work till 6:30 or 7 or 7:30 or something and have a late dinner and I might even pick up something afterwards, sit down at my desk for an hour later or or I mean I’m not trying to make it sound like I work 18 hours a day either. There might be a day where I only work like 3 or 4 hours for sure, for sure, and I think also that’s another thing that comes into the differences is the younger generations they value more flexibility. They’re looking at more remote work and the older folks, um. They’re kind of used to being in the office. They like being in the office and they like that, uh, they, they like that structure a little bit more, um, and so we’re seeing differences in how people like to work. So there are, you know, you have companies that say the remote the remote model doesn’t work, the hybrid model works better, but a lot of people are trying to go back to office to really. Keep that company culture cohesive because right now one of the biggest issues in remote teams, you know, whether or not you have an intergenerational people team or not is company culture and that can really affect productivity. Yeah, but also remote work improves productivity don’t we don’t we we have we have research. I’ve had guests citing it, um, the remote work does did make people more productive after the early stages of the very stages of the. For sure, yes, um, I think also people are looking towards finding more community and that can be a little bit harder in remote work cultures because hosting, you know, virtual events, that kind of thing, it doesn’t have the same like pizza as being in person, you know, so I think we’re seeing also more people craving that in-person connection out in in the work in the workplace or out of the workplace for being face to face real life but companies can do it if their intentions for sure. company or hybrid company and and just be intentional about bringing people back together and not just once a year, 34 times a year. A lot of companies um that are remote, they’ll do in-person retreats once a year that do substitute, you know, that in person um need where they are paying for, you know, this weekend where everyone in the company is getting together, um, and getting to know each other face to face and then throughout the rest of the year they feel more comfortable. The psychological safety is. Built to where they’re more comfortable than working online when you’ve met somebody in person you get to know for sure it’s just not the same. It’s not as good as good or valuable as Zoom is, it’s not the same as being in person opening up the conversation, getting to know someone’s background, family, you know, yeah, there’s just no substitute. I’m glad we agree yeah there we go.s coming together. All right, uh, let’s bring us together again, uh, another way. Your, your session description talks about the information transfer, knowledge transfer. Yes, uh, boomers, and boomers have a lot. Uh, Gen X has a fair amount in the workplace decades as well. Uh, what, what are your, what, what are your issues and what you’re thinking, what you’re thinking around? This uh knowledge transfer. Yeah, so in the session I go over a couple of different frameworks. One of the biggest ones is Simon Sinek’s um theory of why so. One really big problem right now in communicating with each other across departments one big question in the group was how can we bridge these teams together marketing and events and fundraising how do we bring them together and there’s a big issue there where they’re kind of siloed they don’t really talk to each other that much they don’t really know what each other is doing because talking about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it is really boring so we have to come back to the why are you doing it? That is like the main thing. Everyone in the organization has in common. Why are you here in this organization, um, helping increase accessibility to housing, increasing accessibility to food? Why are you here? Not, you know, because you want to do it, but like what is your personal story and your background? It always comes back to why because when we all have different values, for example, baby boomers might, uh, think about legacy and Gen Xers might think about impact if we can bring those values together to something. Like lasting change, then that is the why of these two generations that um are had different values but you bring together a shared why and when you bring together a shared why that puts all the other frameworks into place. You look at communication um you looked at uh uh more recognition profiling, um, how can you increase each other’s understanding of each other so that communication is much better so that you are more open to each other having different. Ways of doing things that you’re giving each other the benefit of the doubt. So that’s one of the big things that I’m uh I was talking about in the session yesterday is how can you introduce the why for your employees and have them work together to create a shared mission so then you may you guys might have different ways of doing things, but at least you know you’re on the same page you’re all here for one purpose and once you are on the same page about that, then you’re much more open. To each other’s brilliant. All right, so let’s answer that question because for nonprofit radio listeners who were not in your session, how can you start to build this. So one of the things I talked about is having, you know, a session, a quick session where everyone’s writing, you know, their top five values on like a sticky note and then you put that sticky note, it can be a virtual, um, like board like on iro where it’s a shared canvas or you could do it in person and you find. Find out what uh values people have in common so again like I was saying uh boomers might be uh they might care more about legacy and zoomers might care more about impact so that comes together as lasting change, right? So we find what overlaps, um, and then we figure out OK who is good at doing what is this person better at managing people and this person is better at managing operations or like documents? OK, so then we bring together. One person from each generation that help each other with these different different ways of doing things so that people are first doing what they are good at but they’re also there’s a shared ownership of the project um one big thing right now I think we’re seeing for the knowledge transfer issue is that zoomers want a lot of more more responsibility they want to do more, but boomers are a little bit reluctant to pass that torch, you know, because sometimes the project is their baby. The business is their baby they spent a lot of time building it up and sometimes there’s a little bit of reluctancy to pass that over um and sometimes there’s this reluctancy of changing the status quo but when we give shared ownership for everybody for everyone to do what they’re good at and open that door for different generations to work on a specific project together, then there is that shared why again um again we build that psychological safety where. It’s not a personal thing against how you do things. It’s not like, oh you use a sauna and I prefer, I don’t know, slack canvas, you know, it’s not a personal thing about differences in methodology, but rather we’re looking at how can we best achieve the same shared goal and the shared why that we have. So there are things like. Non-compensation or reward systems, the mirrored mentoring where you non reward systems so um we are we are we? We’re we’re looking at nonprofits that have a lot of volunteers. There might be high turnover. There might be, um, high turnover because they don’t feel like their work is being valued. They don’t feel like they’re being productive. So instead of rewarding them monetarily. You can reward them either you know Gen Zs who are looking for mentorship um with growth opportunities, professional development opportunities one thing I’ve seen that works very well in nonprofits um is giving a ladder when uh uh a young person comes to volunteer you know there’s really high turnover for, uh, volunteers because they don’t feel like they’re being taken care of so they’ll go somewhere else and they’ll find out how they can do more productive things somewhere else so. When you introduce a ladder of growth, let’s say you stay on for 6 months and then you’re put into like the professional development fund, you get like a set amount of money that you could, you know, take this course on the certification, and that is a non, um, compensational, uh, reward system, so like non-monetary for older folks who are looking to pass the torch or who are not looking to like immediately retire or are looking to um climb higher um. You can add mentorship stipends so they are more likely to be open to uh mentoring the next generation who’s coming in so those are some frameworks for just um increasing that innate desire to help each other um not with money but by knowledge transfer. Is Gen X any more willing to share and relinquish uh uh authority than uh baby boomers? I think right now what we’re seeing is millennials and Gen X is still trying to climb up the ladder um but they have more experience and they have more knowledge and so they’re finding they’re they’re still in the same boat as um Gen Zs but they’re. They need more right because Gen Zs they will work long hours for lower pay and that’s an issue that we’re seeing is like students who are coming right out of college, they will be paid, you know, peanuts and they’re fine with it because they don’t have that experience in like quotations but millennials. And Gen Xers, they have a lot of experience, but they expect to be paid for their experience, which they should be, but a lot of like these big corporations, they’re hiring students right out of college to do very menial tasks that Gen Xers and millennials can do, but they will do for lower pay. And and that um translates to the nonprofit community as well. It does it does and a really big issue right now for people um in the session was talking about how there’s not a lot of mid career professionals like um because Gen Xers and millennials are looking outside of the nonprofit industry to find out where they can put their experiences and get their the compensation that they deserve. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. The budget bill was passed by Congress and it was signed into law on July 4th. Um, it’s mostly bad. This was, of course, the one that, uh, was the one big beautiful bill, uh, which I call big burdensome budget bill. Uh, there, there’s a lot that’s bad in it for our nonprofit community. Like there are drastic reductions in social safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid that provide food and medical assistance and that’s gonna mean increased demand for the services that our folks who do. Uh, who do that kind of work, you know, feeding, housing. Um, Mental health, physical health care is gonna see, uh, increase in, uh, increases, big increases in in demand for for those types of Services. Um, there are funding cuts for specific members of the community, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Harvard University. And that, of course, raises the question, which nonprofit or which sector of the community uh is gonna be the next domino. To fall Which disfavored, you know, you not in, uh, not in the good graces, not, not following the uh regimes. Line on whatever whatever issue you work in, uh, you could be next, or the, or not only your individual nonprofit, but your sector of the community. Maybe ballet falls out of favor. Um, this bill also adds a charitable deduction minimum for your donors who itemize their taxes, and that’s that’s, uh, 1.5% of adjusted gross income, so only charitable gifts above that minimum are gonna be deductible now. So if you give less than 0.5% of your adjusted gross income to charity, it’s not deductible. Um, there are some bright spots. We did get removed the, um, unilateral authority of the secretary of the treasury. Remember there was a provision that that the Secretary could designate nonprofits, individual nonprofits as terrorist supporting organizations that got removed thankfully. There is a $1000 charitable deduction allowance for your donors who don’t itemize and that’s about 90% of taxpayers don’t itemize their taxes each year and so there’s uh a new allowance for them to take a charitable deduction so that’s a bright spot. Um, and they also removed the excise tax provision, uh, which was gonna apply to the most high net worth private foundations that excise tax will not be there, so some bright spots there. You should be reassured that our voice makes a difference. Your voice made a difference. We wouldn’t have gotten these onerous provisions removed, the unilateral authority, the secretary of the treasury, and the excise tax on the, the, uh, the wealthy private foundations would not have been removed if we hadn’t advocated for it. Because Congress wasn’t gonna do it on their own. A lot of them admitted they didn’t even read the bill, know what was in it. So your voice matters and. I’m encouraging you to continue talking up. Let your elected representatives hear from you when there is something that burdens your nonprofit or the nonprofit community at large because we are all in this together. And we are so much stronger when we are united as The American nonprofit community. So please keep speaking up it makes a difference. And that is Tony’s take too. OK That was a really good empowerment speech at the end. I felt like motivated, you know, to say something. All right. Well, good. How’s your chance. What do you want to say? I want to say that we’ve got Beauco butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of your intergenerational people pipeline with REMA. Suppose I don’t let you off the hook. What would you say about what I said? I would say that. I have to work on. Like the congressman. I don’t read into enough of the bills that are being passed. And I have to do better to educate myself and look at the news, look at these bills. Because there’s so much like disappointment in my heart with like what’s going on right now, uh, politically, but that like disappointment and that rage, it’s not backed up. With enough facts. So yeah, I feel like I don’t, I don’t have a lot of like I don’t have the place to stay because I’m not fully educated on it. So I, I felt bad saying anything. Well, so you can get educated. Yeah, you can. There are lots of legitimate news sources that are open to you. I can, I can point you to some. Thank you. I, I like looking at a, is it BBC BBC is a very good one. Yeah, British broadcasting. Yeah. That’s a, that’s a then get an outside perspective. Absolutely. Get a foreign perspective of American news. That’s a very good idea. All right. Anything else about the knowledge transfer? One thing we did in the session was we went over a case study after we um went over frameworks and tools that people could use and really it was a way. Um, to split the group up into like kind of half of the room and we started out with them going over there why, why are they working for the organization, introducing themselves and then going over the case study, but the idea of the of that of that case study session was really to give them an example of what a knowledge sharing session looks like and how they can incorporate it into their own organizations so they talked a lot about the frameworks and tools that I provided. But they also introduced their own expertise of their personal experiences from their respective organizations and what has worked and what hasn’t worked and that’s one big thing I think um it’s a huge problem in nonprofit industry is that there’s a lack of communication between nonprofits of like you know the same industry and a lot of people rebuilding a wheel that doesn’t work. Can you share some of these uh what what didn’t work and what did work or maybe one of each? Yeah, so. Let’s see nonprofit full of your session as we do. For sure, let me think so the um the case study was just about how Gen Z, um have you know, Gen Z and baby boomers, they had different ideas of how to engage the customer base. Gen Zs want to do more social media management, um, baby boomers like. Emails in person events so it was um basically the case that it was like you are tasked with how can we uh um uh change this tension from um tension to uh collaboration between the generations so one person was talking about how what worked well for them um when they were figuring out their people pipeline is. Giving each other the benefit of the doubt and setting that standard in the organization, um, I think it’s really easy for people to think. Um, it’s personal when someone shoots down your idea, um, but when we set that standard of giving each other the benefit of the doubt and giving each other grace, one person was saying that was a huge change to morale. I presume good intention, yes, yes, um, because. I think um especially right now Gen Zs are looking for ways to improve their ability to accept feedback and give feedback um I think our generation is super anxious about that particular thing like we’re very eager to please and very anxious um to please so accepting feedback and receiving feedback is I think a huge part of um how older generations could help Gen Zs. Uh, one thing that wasn’t working, um, for the people pipeline, let me think. How can I put this into words? Was that Um, they found that social media engagement was now working with their audience and I kinda jumped in here because social media is not the. Medium for everything even though social media engagement is a huge part of how people are getting their news and like how they engage with the world right now if you are working with people um who are facing food insecurity or who have a love for environmental conservation and they are not on Instagram but they’re on Facebook, then maybe you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time on Instagram and you should be spending more time on Facebook. It’s uh a lot of these little things. Require knowing who your audience is, which is such a, it’s such a cliche thing to say, but it’s you do have to meet people. I’ve had lots of guests even just here at NTC saying you have to meet people where they are. You do. You’re not gonna convert them to communicate with you somewhere else if you want to talk to them, talk and, you know. Metaphorically, uh, you gotta, you gotta go where they are. And I think in terms of how to do that is you really need to talk to people in your life first, talk to people in your network and I was telling a lot of people that you should be on LinkedIn and see what people are doing on there how other people from different industries, not even the nonprofit sector. I think a really big thing is that philanthropy needs to learn from business and how people network within that world and how people talk to each other and how. Can learn from good things that are um working in the business world because a lot of it transfers over to um the nonprofit industry specially maintaining relationships outside of your sector I think also a big thing for improving people pipelines that I learned a lot from entrepreneurship is talking to people who are not in your sector if you’re in food insecurity, talk to somebody who’s working in housing insecurity. Talk to somebody who’s working in improving. Um, access to health care for women like really talk to people, um, outside of your industry to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and most importantly talk to people who are in organizations that have about the same budget and same number of people on your team because that is really what will improve your systems and your operations, not another nonprofit that’s working in the same industry as you. That’s interesting. Uh, the parallel is, yeah, as you’re advocating within the organization, talk to people in other in the other generation, you know, like baby boomers, my, my older peers, uh, you know, I mean, don’t be afraid of, you know, the folks who just graduated from college or 25 or 26. I mean, when you And what you’re suggesting, Aria has great value too. If you’re if you’re coming together around shared values, around a shared purpose for working together, um, do you have something to talk about and then you can build from there. So there’s an analogous on the micro level you’re suggesting, you know, talking outside your sector. I know I’m just bringing, I’m I’m really just repeating what you said an analogy. Yeah, yeah, I think another really great way to engage um collaboration and just people and just get people talking is mirrored mentoring where you pair a younger mirror. mentoring is that when you, yeah, I, I, I don’t even really know if this is like a real thing, but this is how, yeah, it’s when you pair someone from a younger generation with someone from an older generation and you have them teach each other different things of the older older. Uh, try and mentor, you know, how to run this business because then it just feels one way. It feels like you’re not really getting anything out of it if you’re, you know, baby boomer of your Gen X, you wanna feel, you wanna build that relationship and it’s really about relationships and giving and not just taking. So I think a lot of programs that are asking, you know, baby boomers, Gen Xers to mentor the next generation. It obviously we want them to do it out of their own innate need, but also we can provide something back. We can teach, you know, things about technology, how people are doing. I’ll teach you how to run this nonprofit. You teach me how to share a video. Uh, I know, I, yeah, this is coming from the person who, uh, who I helped share last night. We, we, we’re reaching, uh, we, we have reached a climax though. Well, we’ve reached a bottleneck, let’s say, right, with, uh, so, um, yeah, OK, mirrored mentoring makes very good sense. Yes, we all can, I mean it’s just uh. It goes back to your your fundamental premise that we can all learn from each other. Yeah, and I think that a lot of the things that I was talking about in, you know, the workshop and also here is very intuitive but it’s very hard to do um in practice because it does require a level of cooperation from everyone in the organization to try out something new and so one thing I was saying in the workshop is make this. The premise that we’re trying something new thank you for your patience and we are open to how things are going. If it’s not working, tell us that it’s not if it’s not working, you know, mere mentorship might not be for an organization, maybe non compensation or reward systems doesn’t work if you have a lot of volunteers like you have to try these things out, but being very communicative to your employees or your volunteers is super important and being grateful for their time and energy as well. Excellent. You have really savvy and savvy advice on a higher level, but then you also got a lot of tactics too, valuable. You got more time, right? OK, excellent. Um. You talk a little bit about uh bottlenecks or your session description refers to bottlenecks. How do you identify where what bottlenecks are? Well, first, what kind of bottleneck are we talking about? So I classify bottlenecks as two things. One is operational, so something within the process. that is really um hiccupping people able to pass it on to the next person or their work on to the next person to get it to progress further. The second bottleneck I would say is psychological or emotional, and that’s what I was talking about um in terms of the shared why. When you build a shared why you are tearing down that barrier, that emotional boundary of like protecting yourself and your defenses against, oh, I’m doing this because X, Y and Z. This is why during the session, um, during our case study session I had people introduce not what they do but like why they’re in it. I heard really great stories about how one person’s working in improving education for first generation students because they’re first generation and they did not realize. How lacking their educational system was when they were growing up so when you share your personal stories with a bunch of strangers in the room, you lower that barrier of information you’re more willing to provide information and that increases the value of the knowledge sharing that’s happening. So that is the emotional and psychological bottleneck I would say is. Generations don’t really know how to talk to each other. They don’t know how to joke with each other. They don’t know how where the barrier is for each other because their own values are different. I would, I would say for zoomers they’re like 5 o’clock hits. I’m not expected to answer any emails for older generations they’re used to answer emails past that 5 o’clock timeline, right? So they don’t know how to communicate with each other and like set that boundary or compromise that boundary with each other. So when we lower that bottleneck that that and provide psychological safety within the workplace, people are much more open to communicating with each other. The second bottle. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah we can make fun of myself, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think another thing, um. In the workplace and this has to do with communities like bantering, right? I think bantering is very healthy and it’s part of how you can build um more productive relationships bantering, yeah, so like it’s the same thing as joking around, but being able to poke fun at yourself and poke fun at like your coworkers like I have this one cooker who loves using M dashes and there’s like this new thing going around where. It’s like it’s definitely AI generated if you use an M dash, you know, so it’s like something I poke fun at her, but I know she doesn’t, it’s not she’s not, she’s still not like copy pasting AI generated stuff, but being able to poke fun and being comfortable with poking fun, I had memes in my presentation. I think it’s really important to lower again that psychological barrier because you’re just more open to communicating with someone when you’re laughing together and Can I give a little bit of advice then? The way you could start, uh, is by poking fun at yourself because when you, when you do that, nobody can be offended. So you make fun of yourself one or two times and a jovial, you know, Joe and then the person is a little more open. Oh, like, oh, he’s humble enough to recognize, you know, he’s, he’s got issues and, and then you can broaden it a little bit and. People are a little more receptive. Yeah, yeah, and I think that that is also what’s missing in these intergenerational teams is just, especially if you’re asynchronous or remote, things get lost, you know, in just messages. So I think GIFs, gifs, I don’t know how some people pronounce it. They’re, they’re a great way to just add some spices the conversation and just let people know that like. OK, sometimes really just means OK and it’s not passive aggressive, you know, there’s just these little things in remote culture that um can affect uh those interpersonal relationships. So any way you can lower and and introduce laughter and just curiosity is a great way to help continue improving that those relationships. That kind of leads to something else I wanted to ask you about uh fun you you refer to fun cross-generational training is is that what we’re talking about now or do you have some specific strategies around training? So, um, I talk a little bit about rituals in um my workshop and this refers to things that people can expect once they reach a milestone once the team finishes a project so this. Can look like um a 2 hour Friday uh uh uh lunch where you’re getting paid just to work to just to um hang out and be with each other and celebrate that success um and it could also look like uh guided meditation anything that improves the wellness of everybody in the organization um and. This is how you invest in your employees and in your volunteers when they feel like they’re being taken care of and their well-being is placed first, um, and and now they’re doing something in the community that isn’t work related so we’re already breaking down the the the barriers of strict work relationship and we’re going a little little beyond. we’re doing it it’s still a work group we’re doing something social and wellness related, not not strictly work related. Yes, and you know you can do this in remote teams as well. There are like some integration. and slack where you can do water cooler chats for example and they’re just you know uh an automated question like if you could have a super power but every time you use a superpower it would be there would be like some kind of um a side effect what would it be right? So it’s like these fun things that just introduce a different side of the workplace um but in terms of training I was talking a little bit about retreats. Retreats are so important, I think if you’re if you have a smaller team or if you’re in an asynchronous. Team again to bring those people together and see where communication flat lines and how you can improve that um another thing that I also talked about was a circle up um hierarchy so instead of top down like gens uh uh baby boomers and Gen X is, you know, um, giving orders, it’s rather a collaborative effort in a team meeting. Some people are given, you know, responsibility over talking about this agenda item. Other people are given responsibility of talking to the other agenda items instead of, you know, just, um, the older folks lecturing and going going over agenda items and Gen Z’s just kind of just listening there so being able to again provide shared ownership of a project because you innately will put in more energy when you have more responsibility you give people agency collaborative, more collaborative decision making, maybe even more collaborative agenda building around meetings, OK. Um, yeah, I love how you call it lecturing back in 2 years ago. What happened? And then Gen Zs are, you know, sometimes just rambling on and on and sometimes they can just be told, hey, let’s move on and they’re, you know, when you break down, yeah, we can move on, we can move on. OK, it’s time to move on now. A little different spin on, move on. OK, let’s let’s get to the next item. Let’s move. All right. Anything else on the, on the fun fun topics, training, anything else? If not, you can say no, but I’m just trying to give us the full, um. Yeah, that that was it. OK, OK, um, what else now I’ve peppered you because uh I’m the boomer, so I’m controlling the conversation, but give me, I mean, it’s understood I’m the host. Um my job to keep things, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, what’s on your agenda? What, what, what have we not talked about or maybe questions that arose from the session? What, what, what else do you want to talk about? You want listeners to know around, uh, intergenerational pipeline. Um, I kind of wanna talk about how I ran the meeting because I think the way I do it is what else what else you got? No, go ahead. No, I mean because I made it super interactive. I use this program called Menttimeter where you basically scan a QR code and you can interact with the presenter, um, and in the beginning of every session I always have a Mentam meter up where people. I ask people what are you expecting to get out of this session because I hear a lot about people coming to workshops and not expecting it to be what it was and not expecting to get what they wanted out of it and people’s time is is super important, especially when you’re here at a conference there’s so many topics there’s a lot exactly so you need to be very careful of people’s time and you need to respect it and be grateful that they chose your workshop over everyone else’s and. One M M E N T I meter, how is it different than just polling? Um, you can type questions into it. So like for example you can have an option where let’s say my, my question was what questions or what, what, what do you want to get out of this, um, out of this workshop and then you can scroll through everyone’s questions individually and that’s how I got a sense of OK, this is what everyone is thinking about trying to get out of the session. I’m going to pepper in answers to these specific questions as I go through the presentation so I’m not just lecturing them. I’m being interactive with their time. So now you you. to go through everybody’s answers. How many people were in your session. There are about 20 or 30. It does. So you have to be really good at time management, but I did, it was, it was really quick, right? In the beginning, uh, I believe like 10 there were 10 questions specifically, so not everyone, um, put something in and some of them were reiterative. They were the same thing. And so, but at the same time you have to remember these questions in the back of your head while you’re going through the presentation. So I’m sure I did, I did not get through. Everything during the presentation, but again that introduces a sense of collaboration so they don’t feel like they’re just here listening to a lecture, right? And this is the same thing that you can do in your meetings, um, you know, one person was asking about how can you improve silo teams when events and fundraising don’t talk to each other, marketing, they’re all working on 10 different projects at the same time. Not everyone knows what each other is doing. One great thing you can do is have um sort of like a big team. meetings that are an hour and a half long where no one is really listening to all of it. You have these 15 to 20 minute sessions from one person from each department every week just going through what they’re doing and that’s it. It’s interactive. You just talk about what you’re doing, ask if anyone has any questions related to the work they’re currently doing and how they can support you. Again, being interactive and making it feel like people are not lecturing at you, whether or not you’re Gen Z or your baby boomer or anyone in between when you improve and introduce interactivity, people have. More Leverage they have a higher stake in the conversation so their energy level goes up and they’re more interested in the conversation because they’re waiting to have their question answered. They’re waiting to hear how can this improve my quality of life. So then we do a case study where everyone is then talking to each other. They’re not just taking the frameworks and tools that I provided, but there, there was more than, you know, 50, 60 years of experience of different industries in that room, and people can learn so much by just talking to each other and again having that shared why and introducing your specific why people’s barriers lower down and they tell their own person. story and then they knowledge share at the end of the session we went through um another couple of just like 3 I called it a collective audit. So now that we went through this case study we’ve answered some questions collectively what do we want to achieve in the short term and in the long term? And this is where people answered those questions and we helped each other answer answer those questions. So it wasn’t just me speaking, it was also the people in the session And um helping each other answering each other’s questions so when you introduce a level of collaborivity into your meetings into the workplace, people have a stake in what the work that they’re doing and they’re just more open to communicating with you and they’re much more open to giving you the benefit of the doubt and that innately improves our human to human relationships, um, and it just improves productivity and retention um for the long run. I love it I love it. The the the case study becomes a mere tool for, for uh sharing, sharing authority, collective decision making conversation. Yeah, right, brilliant. One question I did have another question I had was how can you, um, how can you help people who don’t talk that much who’s uh people who are quiet exactly and I said menty meter is a great way to do that because it is completely anonymous um every I, I don’t like the like oh I’m gonna like call on you because you have your hand raised because some people might not feel comfortable speaking. In like large rooms and that’s completely OK. So again, the anonymous feedback makes it more accessible for everyone to provide their ideas and then it, it brings everyone to the same level that their ideas are the same because when you give everyone the same tool that they can use to provide their feedback and it’s synonymous, they feel more comfortable sharing it. Everybody’s equal yeah alright alright um. Offering growth, growth opportunities like maybe succession planning, you know, regardless of seniority, you kind of touched on this a little bit. You’re giving Zumer’s uh agency, but can you say more about Planning growth growth within the organization regardless of where you are, you know, for older folks, some people might be looking at phased retirement, so they might be looking at reduced hours, um, uh, over the course of a couple of years or reduced ownership or responsibility of a specific project and that’s something that you have to be understanding of, um, like immediate. of every year when you’re doing uh whatever audit or self reflection that they’re turning into for their yearly review is knowing what their goals are and again I know I keep saying psychological safety but when people are open and they know your personal story they’re more open to telling you I’m thinking about leaving in a couple of years, you know, and that is really important for planning so improving that culture allows people to be more upfront about what their goals are. Um, one big problem for Jen’s ears and younger folks that they’re jumping job to job, right, because right now, uh, they, they get a pay increase. No, they don’t see any growth. Some will pay me, you know, some, I hope not this little bit somebody will pay me $5000 a year more, it’s not that much, uh, but at least maybe there’s growth. I see some growth potential there. They’re at least talking about it and where I am now, I feel, I feel stuck. So when you give them, I see a lot of job postings and interviews people are saying, oh, there’s a lot of growth here and there’s like nothing. There’s no talk of it afterwards. There’s there’s no follow up. So one big thing that I tell people is that you need to implemented into department leads like they need to know that um these people are looking for growth and retention saves so much. Money and time in the long run you need to make this a business decision right this isn’t just like um investing in the human that’s working for you but it’s also investing in your own business and your nonprofit in your organization you need to think about how can you retain this person for the long run so whether or not it is for younger folks to know that there is a lot of wellness opportunities, reimbursements, um, events that are, uh, investing in their. And their mindfulness and lowering their product probability of burnout is super important and that is innately connected to growth so then they know, OK, if I stay another year, exactly, exactly, yeah, bringing people to these conferences and helping them support them to continue upskilling because they can learn more skills anywhere they can, you know, take on additional projects they can. Side hustle they can whatever and that means less time less energy and less mindfulness onto your organization right? so you want to bring everybody um whatever you can provide for them all the benefits directly to them by you for older folks if they’re looking for less responsibility if they’re looking to pivot laterally to a different project, then you need to be able to support them, um. And provide mentorship guidelines I think a lot of organizations are expecting, you know, the older folks to uh provide mentorship but then provide them no guidance on how to give mentorship maybe maybe these people have never had mentors or have mentored um a person before and they don’t know how to do it so then you build out frameworks for them you provide them the tools so it doesn’t feel like they’re doing all the work. I think a lot of people um always end the meetings with if you need any support, please let me know how I can support you, but a lot of people don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that they need to do X, Y, and Z for their mentorship, so you need to provide them the tools and then you need to ask them, you need to. Give them direction. OK, if you have any questions on how to set up this meeting, um, or how what skills to introduce to this person, please let me know instead of just being general and saying let me know how I can support you because when you just throw out, you know, certain words or phrases, it gives them an idea of what 00 I didn’t even think of that I didn’t even know I had a question about that so then that makes them want to ask that question, um, and again it’s like more communication. Um, that’s a really big thing is like, do you have any questions for me? I always, when I ask that question, then just throw out phrases like, um, do you have any questions about, you know, this program, that program, how to work with people, how to send emails, blah blah blah blah blah, because then that jogs something in that person’s mind. Alright, yeah, another form of support. You’re right, people don’t know what they don’t know. Outstanding. Alright, you got a lot of very good ideas. I’m I’m like I feel like a dump. It’s outstanding. I hope it’s, yeah, yeah, yeah, leave us with some inspiration about uh what what your organization can look like when you’ve got a successful, you know, vibrant intergenerational people pipeline. When you increase communication between everybody, they banter, they joke, they laugh and they work together much more better. There’s less friction when people have different ideas they embrace each other’s diverse methodologies a lot more. They appreciate each other’s stories and where they came from and they appreciate each other as human beings and not. Just as fellow coworkers and when you can introduce that into your organization people are people who are working together for the same mission productivity increases, your team retention increases, and you are accomplishing the objectives that you are setting out to do. Ama, founder and principal consultant at Lunara. It’s spelled L U N E A E R A, and I’m sure you can connect with on LinkedIn. Yes, please connect with me. I love LinkedIn. Don’t turn me down now. Yeah, I will. I’ll, I’ll. Thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciate being here and talking to you. It’s my pleasure. I learned a lot. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC where we’re sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. Next week, it’s our 750th show and 15th anniversary jubilee. 15 years, 750 shows. What, woo, what a milestone. Please be with us. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. And it’s the 750th show. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
If you have folks spanning the generations working or volunteering for your nonprofit, you may have noticed they learn technology differently. Lauren Hopkins shares the strategies for teaching tech across the generations. She’s from 
