Karen Edge, the inaugural recipient of the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship, reflects on her ongoing intergenerational leadership research during her stay at Schloss Leopoldskron
In January 2023, Karen Edge became the inaugural recipient of the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship. During her stay at Schloss Leopoldskron that month, Valeriia Chernysh spoke to Karen about her ongoing intergenerational leadership research.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Valeriia: You have been Salzburg Global Fellow for almost a year. How have you changed within that time?
Karen: The first time I came was in May 2022, and I came for Education Futures: Shaping a New Education Story. It was the first time I had traveled since the pandemic. So, it took something quite extraordinary for me to travel and leave home. I had some connections with some members of the Fellowship community, but when I was invited, I was thrilled.
I've made some incredible professional connections who are also now really good friends. I think Salzburg Global Seminar has changed my work. I'm willing to be a bit more creative and push back when, at the university, people may not necessarily see the value of generalist working. So, at the university, often you're an expert in one area, and I am an expert in many different areas, maybe not as deeply. Coming to Salzburg validated the choice I've made, the choice to work in education, but across lots of different topics, to be able to bring people together and have different conversations.
Salzburg Global has changed my professional network. It might have even changed my ambition a bit. My career has often oscillated between working internationally, across 30 countries, conducting research, and then working domestically on a particular project. I've been working quite domestically for a while, in England. Coming to Salzburg and having the conversations we had, made me really excited about working internationally again.
Valeriia: You came to Salzburg Global as the inaugural recipient of the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship to work on your paper. What is its main focus?
Karen: The links of what we're going to work on at Salzburg are very closely tied to what I've worked on at the university and around the world. My research work, more generally, is a combination of education policy, systems change, looking at generational theory and how different generations of leaders have access to opportunities. The work that I'm doing at Salzburg through the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship is to pause for a second and think about, 'What do we actually know about intergenerational working?'
"The work that I'm doing at Salzburg through the Reckmeyer Family Fellowship is to pause for a second and think about, 'What do we actually know about intergenerational working?'"
Within the climate discussions, within businesses, there's a growing conversation about the fact that we have to work intergenerationally to make change happen. But it's occurred to me, in reading the academic research and looking at how the business community talks about intergenerational leadership and how we talk about it in development and social change, that the concept is often tossed around as the ideal way of working. But there isn't really a lot of discussion about, 'How do you make that work?'
What we thought would be a good focus for my time within the Fellowship and then extending it beyond is 'What can we do between myself in the education team and the Center for Education Transformation about helping people?' Giving them access to a different way of thinking about intergenerational working. […]
The first thing we're doing is a scoping exercise by looking at the academic research. We're going to look at 'How does the business community talk about it?' We were looking today at how different social agencies are talking about intergenerational working, and we are going to pull out what are the definitions. Is there actually a definition that stands across all of those disciplines, and then what resources exist already to help people?
What we're going to try and do is get underneath how best to support intergenerational leaders. 'What are the things that would really make a difference?' and 'How could we create some tools or access to information that would actually help the short-term project work?' For example, resources for when you come together as an intergenerational project team. But also, 'How do you help systems and organizations really consider what it means to recognize and allocate power across different generations?'
Valeriia: The concept of leadership is different for every culture. How do we shift the power or balance it in such a global and diverse context?
Karen: There's been some amazing work done by an academic named Erin Meyer, who's written a book called The Culture Map. It is one of the books that I have multiple copies of and I give to people on a regular basis. She gives people tools to think about: How leadership is designed or functions in your country. What do we expect from our leaders? What does it take in terms of the social relationships that you need in different countries before you can have a conversation about how work is going or how you want to negotiate?
I've done a decent amount of work within the university trying to have conversations about the evidence base that exists on intercultural working. Basically saying, these are the things you need to be able to know in order not to be a jerk when you're working with people across borders and across boundaries.
"These are the things you need to be able to know in order not to be a jerk when you're working with people across borders and across boundaries."
From an academic perspective, there are lots of things that are known about that way of working that, as often is the case, aren't necessarily translated into what's helpful for you if you're going to start working - let’s say - with a Canadian. In the past, we had a delegation of people from England going to work with Canadians, and I was the person organizing the visit. I sat them down at the beginning and said, 'Canadians are very non-hierarchical. They will often treat everybody the same way.’ I came from a family where we had to treat everybody the same way, regardless of job and background. But, what I had to explain to my colleagues was that ‘People are just going to call you by your first name because they don't either accept or understand the hierarchy and titles that you're used to in England. […]’
Here at Salzburg, it's amazing because you have so many different people from so many different countries. But do we do enough to make the most of our shared insight? Being able to then say, 'Look, we have people going to Ukraine: what do you think people need to know about living and working in your country that will help them be successful and care for the people where they're going?' It's a combined answer of 'Yes, there are differences.'
Leadership, wherever you are, is about relationships and your ability to work with people and to be able to help them do their job better. But, how people want to be led can differ from country to country. You can use the research, but it's also using the human knowledge that we have and the people that we have to try and find ways to make sure that we're working kindly and carefully across those different spaces.
"Leadership, wherever you are, is about relationships and about your ability to work with people and to be able to help them do their job better. But, how people want to be led can differ from country to country."
Valeriia: Are there any examples of intercultural leadership approaches you used or maybe you've seen people use?
Karen: I think so. When we were talking about the project at the university on how we help people understand and develop the skills to be able to work across cultures, the one thing that I think was probably the most helpful was a tagline that I tried to create for the project. Basically, our task was, 'How can we support people working across countries and cultures without being a jerk?'
And it sounds really simple, but it was actually really helpful at helping us understand the basic principle is 'What do you have to do to be able to go to another country and to be respectful of the norms and the cultures that are there, to be self-aware enough, to be able to understand what you know and what you don't know, and to be confident enough, but also sensitive enough to be able to go into a space that's not one that you've historically belonged in?
Valeriia: It is not just about the culture but generation and its values. How can we build bridges across both different generations and cultures? What narrative is needed, so we start listening to each other and ultimately act together?
Karen: For me, there are issues about how different generations experience the world, how they behave. We know that every generation, as we watch younger and younger generations, wants to have a better work-life balance. They don't want to work 80 hours a week. They don't want to work in one place. They want to be able to have sabbaticals, and they want to be able to have internships. They want to be able to keep learning in a way that their schools have hopefully taught them to seek learning. So for me, the way we position the work that we do is to say, 'Okay, different generations are going to be different, right? How they work and how they experience work.' If you're of an older generation and you have a house, and you have a family, and you need to keep those going, your approach to freedom of movement and work and other things will be different.
What we need to do is find a way for individuals, when they meet somebody who's not like them for whatever reason, […] to be able to say, 'Ooh, they're not like me,' and to be able to lean into it. Why is it that they're not like me? Is it that we come from a different background? Is it because we speak a different language? Is it because we come from a different place? And within those sorts of points of analysis, you're going to find things that you have in common. That is the foundation for moving forward.
"I think for me, it's about looking at generations as a way of understanding how different groups of people might have grown up, but then also understanding within that, there's going to be different nationalities, there's going to be different ways that your country functioned as you were growing up, different languages, different gender, and that all of those things make us stronger when we work together."
I think for me, it's about looking at generations as a way of understanding how different groups of people might have grown up, but then also understanding within that, there's going to be different nationalities, there's going to be different ways that your country functioned as you were growing up, different languages, different gender, and that all of those things make us stronger when we work together. But each of us individually has a responsibility to get better at being able to work with people who are not like us.
Valeriia: What approaches do you use in your work? Could you share your best practices?
Karen: One of my nerd superpowers is to be able to take complicated theory and turn it into something that isn't a lecture but allows people to understand the area of work and to be able to see how it affects their everyday life.
"Because if you get angry, you're not going to change. But if you're uncomfortable, it gives you the space to think about something new."
In terms of talking about different generations, we conducted a study funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council in England. We were looking at Generation X leaders in London, New York, and Toronto. We learned so many different things about how the country you work in and the system you work in shape your life, even if you're the same generation. […] We learned something about work-life balance and that Generation X leaders wanted to have a better work-life balance than their predecessors, but they also had a different way of looking at it. We needed to find a way to take that evidence and help people think about their work life and being role models and turn that into learning opportunities that would make people uncomfortable but not angry. Because if you get angry, you're not going to change. But if you're uncomfortable, it gives you the space to think about something new.
We have a set of questions for leaders: Do you consider yourself to be a good leader? Do you nurture talent who comes after you? Are you good at role modeling? Are you a good role model for work-life balance? And you could watch groups of powerful leaders say 'Yes, yes, yes.' And when you get to the 'Are you a good role model for work-life balance?' question, you can watch a group of people, who had great posture, physically shrink down and look at their feet, hoping, 'Oh, gosh, I hope she doesn't ask me.'
What we realized was that leaders can celebrate all the things you're amazing at, but the next generation of leaders is watching every move you make. If you stay at the office till midnight, if you don't have a good relationship with your family and friends because you're working all the time, the generations coming after you won't want your job because you're not making it look like it's a good job to have. Unless you start sorting out having a life and taking care of yourself, it's not just you that you're doing damage to; it's the system.
